Add A Rolling Grocery List To Your Trello Action Board

Use Trello to keep track of your household grocery list! Once you set it up, it is a convenient way to collaborate, plan your errands, and make sure you don’t run out of any staples or come up short for any of the recipes you are hoping to try. At first when I set up my trello boards I listed Make a Grocery List as one of my weekly kitchen tasks, but we quickly ran into some annoying problems. You don’t always find everything you want, or you put off shopping for a few days, but the automations we set to archive unfinished tasks and replace them with fresh ones were erasing our grocery lists and causing us to have to remember all the items we weren’t able to source the previous week. I decided to re-think this automation, and set us up with a rolling list that retains open items and clears up checked-off purchases each week.

A farmstand with grapes, plums, and berries

This is a farmer’s market picture from later in the season. I am really looking forward to summer fruit!

Installing the Trello app on your phone lets you take your grocery list with you anywhere— into the kitchen to check the pantry and fridge, and into the grocery store to keep you on task. When one person is at the store, they can easily check in with the rest of the household, who can add any last-minute items to the list in real time.

How to Set Up a Rolling List With Trello Butler

First, Create a Card to Hold Your List:

- On your Action Board, create a new card in the Let’s Do It Together! list.

- Call it Grocery List

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Inside the card, add a black Food label, and set the due date for next Sunday evening.

Next, add a Checklist, and call it Grocery List.

Set Up Your Butler Automations:

- Close the card

- Then click on Automations

- Then click Rules.

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Click Due Date, then Create Command, and then +Add Trigger.

Create a Trigger that reads “The Moment a card with a name containing Grocery List is Due” and click +

In the Checklists tab, choose an action that reads “remove all the complete items from checklist Grocery List.”

Finally, choose the action in the Dates tab that moves the due date to the same day next week.

Make it Your Own!

If you want to, you can create multiple lists in your Grocery List card. For example, you may want a Farmers’ Market list as well as your Grocery List. Or, like me, you may have a few different stores that you go to regularly, but not always on the same schedule. I like to have a Farmstand list, a Drugstore list, I have a regular grocery store but I also stock up at Cash and Carry, and I buy my meat in boxes for the chest freezer from a local butcher.

You can create multiple lists within the same trello card, and you can set up that same automation for each of your lists. Trello will automatically clear away any purchased items that you checked off, and leave the rest of the list for next week.

Standing Orders

Let’s say you know that every time you go to the store, there are certain staples that you always buy. If you want, you can tell Trello to add those items to your list each week so you don’t always have to go through and type them in. Here’s how:

Within your same Grocery List due date command, in the Checklist tab, add each item to the correct checklist.

Ready to Go To THe Store!

Once you have this simple automation set up, you and your household can add to the grocery list, access it from your phone, and keep your purchases updated in real time.

If you are using our trello boards to organize your home life, I would love to hear about it! We can all support and learn from each other.

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