I enjoy grocery shopping and spend more time in Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Shop Rite and my local produce store than is probably necessary. However, I know that lots of folks don't see grocery shopping as pleasurable endeavor in the same way that I do. For those of you, the folks at Unclutterer have put together a series of helpful tips on how to get in and out of the grocery store quickly and effectively.

They start by recommending that you make a weekly meal plan, so that you know what you'll be eating for a series of days. That way you can create a list and shop accordingly. They also suggest that you try to shop during off-peak hours so that you can move through the aisles and check-out stands in a more timely fashion.

I know that there are expert grocery shoppers among you out there. What are you secret tricks to keeping your kitchen stocked with a minimum of time and frustration?

I have always enjoyed going grocery shopping. I've been doing it since I was 13. In those days, my mom would park in front of the store and send me in with a list and some money. It was a break for her and an adventure for me, so we both won. When I was 16 and had gotten my drivers license, I would beg to be sent to the store as it was an excuse to drive and opportunity to feel like an adult.

Even these days, I love buying groceries. I enjoy the opportunities for creativity that the aisles of food offer, as well as the escape and peace of it all. However, one company is looking at intruding on that peace, which makes me sort of sad. Modstream is looking at installing digital displays into the handles of shopping carts that will scroll text messages as you shop. These screens would give food companies another way to promote their products to any consumer who grabbed a cart.

[via Switched]

Aside from the occasional late-night trips down the grocery aisle at the CVS across the street from my apartment building, I am a fairly predictable grocery shopper. I tend to hit Trader Joe's at least once a week and then supplement those groceries with a trip to the farmers market or a local produce stand. On a weekly basis, the top 10 things you will almost always find me buying are yogurt, milk, cheese (I like my dairy products), tofu, quinoa, light coconut milk (a recent obsession), fruit (nectarines, plums and apples these days), grass-fed beef, arugula and tomatoes (not a very titillating list I'm afraid). Of course, there's always loads more coming in and out of my kitchen than that (I'm a person who buys a new variety of salt nearly every month) but those are the basics.

What are the 10 things that you find yourself buying most often? Snack foods? Bread and peanut butter? Kraft singles? Share the dirty details of your grocery bags.

This post inspired by Mary at the WC Dish. Picture by Esther17.

I'm not exactly sure how much time or energy this web technology saves, but apparently, Grocist allows you to scan products to create an electronic grocery list.

You keep a barcode scanner in your kitchen and when you run out of a product, you scan the barcode from the package before you throw it away. The web application searches a UPC database to determine the product and keeps a running grocery list for you.

While the idea of this sounds pretty cool, I can't see how scanning a barcode is any faster or easier than jotting something down on a list that's taped to your refrigerator door. I also can't really see people running out to buy a barcode scanner. Additionally, using Grocist assumes that a lot of your groceries are packaged goods that would be found in the UPC database. I don't know this for sure, but the last time I went to the grocery store, there weren't any barcodes on garlic and lettuce.

However, if the Grocist were to actually send that information at the end of every week via email to the grocery store who could deliver the groceries to my front door, then I'd pay attention!

[via: Lifehacker]

Obesity in Britain, as it is in the US, is often referred to as an epidemic due to the quickly expanding waistlines of so many in the country. The Department of Health puts the number of overweight or obese people in Britain at 24.6 million, or around 40% of the total population, and they expect to see numbers increase over the next decade. People in the US are slightly healthier than they were lest year, in part because of trends towards healthier eating (even though we are still seeing a tremendous amount of very unhealthy food out there), but this same trend is not noticeable in the UK, according to a new study.

This study, which surveyed more than 12 million consumers about their shopping habits over the past four years, found that only 8% of Britons made an effort to buy healthier, more nutritious foods, such as organic products and "food with labels such as fresh, lite or low fat." 44% of British shoppers had made no effort to buy healthier foods, sticking with "value or extra-value lines" of products." Interestingly, there wasn't much difference in price between the baskets of the healthy shoppers and those who opted for cheaper, less nutritious foods. The healthy baskets cost an "average of £71.78compared with £71.18 for an unhealthy one," which means that most shoppers were buying what they perceived as value at a cost to their health and without saving anything in their wallets.

Perhaps they are responding to Wal-Mart's increased offering of organic products. Perhaps they are extending their business philosophy of organic growth into their actual products. Whatever the reason, Minneapolis-based Target will be putting more organic products on their grocery shelves.

Target already offers orgaic option in their SuperTarget stores around the country. Their produce departments are certified organic, and they offer hundreds of national-brand organic products. However, Target plans to add their own products under a private-label, Archer Farms. The line of foods will include pizzas, pastas, frozen dinners and dairy products.

Now that Amazon.com is selling groceries online, a whole world of opportunities has opened. Obviously, your day opens up since you don't have to spend time driving to the grocery store, pushing a cart around the store, waiting in line at the register, and perhaps even fighting with your kids about what flavor Pop-tart to get.

But an interesting thing has popped up with the Amazon.com grocery store. Customers are rating grocery products,just as customers rate books, CDs, and movies. This gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk has over 350 customer "reviews," also shows what other customers bought when they bought the milk. Hey, if they can tell you that customers who bought the DVD V is for Vendetta also bought Ultraviolet, Amazon can tell you that fellow customers who bought the Tuscan gallon milk also bought bananas, grapes and fresh vine-ripe tomatoes. Good to know.

No gift-wrapping on the milk, though.

I was shopping at an Asian grocery store the other day looking for some slightly unusual ingredients. I could have gone all the way to Koreatown to one of the big mega-markets like Kaju (California Market) or Assi, where they do volume business so the prices are dirt cheap.

Instead, I chose to stay closer to my neighborhood and went to one of the smaller grocery stores. It's about the size of a convenience store, so it doesn't carry volume, but it does have a little bit of almost everything. Plus, it's about twice as expensive.

One of the things I noticed was an ice chest next to the freezer section, where it looked like people were gathered around waiting - for a free sample perhaps? On the weekends, the markets usually set up small tables at the end of aisles giving out samples of new products.

When I walked over, hoping it might be something sweet and cold to battle the heat, I saw the sign. "Free Ice." The chest was full of ice and had small plastic bags next to it. Customers could scoop ice into a bag, tie it off in a knot, and place it on their freezer and refrigerator items to keep them cold until they got home to put their groceries away.

Kind of makes you appreciate the little guy.

Remember back when Webvan and Peapod were totally revolutionary, and then suddenly they just keeled over dead with the rest fo the web? It seemed that online grocers would just never work out.

Apparently, online grocery shopping was just too early for its time back then, because now, checking off your groery list by clicking your mouse is becoming more and more popular. Last year shoppers spent $3.3 billion at online grocers, and that's expected to jump to $4.2 billion this year. It seems that it just makes life easeier for the person who manages the household.

On Friday's the Early Show, Susan Koeppen gave a fairly detailed lowdown on four of the online grocers: Peapod, FreshDirect, NetGrocer, and the new Amazon Groceries, which we saw last month.

A story in yesterday's Washington Post takes a spin through the supermarket and rehashes some of the current moral quandaries faced by the average shopper. Organic? Big organic? Local? Free range? All of these factors are mentioned. The author cites works by Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, and if you've read either of these authors, the WaPo piece will seem like old news. If, however, you're just starting to take an interest in how and where your food is produced, this might be a helpful, albeit brief, overview. In the end, the author consults a bioethics scholar who says that rather than worrying about every single factor involved in every item we eat, we'd be better of picking certain facets-animal cruelty, environmental impact, taste-placing them on a scale of importance, and shopping accordingly.

Wow.

As if it wasn't already the world's largest retailer (aside from Wal-Mart, of course), Amazon.com has added groceries to their ever-expanding list of "stores." I remember back when online groceries and home-delivery was first introduced with PeaPod and WebVan. Both of them subsequently tanked, but perhaps the idea was ahead of its time. Amazon must believe that now is the time. Currently, they are only offering over 10,000 non-perishable items like breakfast cereal, microwave popcorn, and boxed macaroni and cheese.

Has anyone used it? Do you find that it's any cheaper? Faster? I imagine the convenience factor is likely the most attractive feature, but if you have to go to the market anyway to buy perishable items, I can't see that there is much convenience there anyway.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal's Cranky Consumer column went grocery shopping - online. Many grocery stores now offer the option of shopping online, following in the footsteps of companies that sell groceries online, like Freshdirect and Peapod, but have no retail stores. To take full advantage of the retail location and see how the process worked, the WSJ opted to order online and pickup in-store from 2 national and 3 local supermarkets: Albertson's, Pathmark, Sam's Club, ShopRite and Waldbaum's.

The products at each store were generally found to be of good quality, though a few items were closer to their expiration date than the WSJ might ordinarily have selected. All of the stores took care to ensure that frozen and refrigerated goods were kept at appropriate temperatures until the very minute of pickup and some even had dedicated checkout lines for online shoppers.  But none of the stores were entirely without problems.