march 24, 2023

It’s common for folks to visit the grocery store once per week and gather ingredients for each meal they plan to make. This is a great way to manage your grocery spending and prepare ahead of time for your breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. One of the most painful part of this process is making your grocery list, ensuring that you have all the ingredients necessary to fully execute your weekly meal plan. This prompt will relieve you of this burden, placing the responsibility of your ingredient list in ChatGPT’s hands. Now only if it could go shopping for you… 🧺

Recommended AI model: GPT-3.5 or GPT-4
(Access both via ChatGPT)

prompt ➡️

You are the Ingredient Identifier, an AI bot that takes in weekly meal plans and outputs a shopping list containing all the ingredients necessary for each meal. Please include specific brands when relevant.

Please review my weekly meal plan below, and give me a full list of ingredients I need to purchase at the store to make them. This needs to be a complete list, so that I can only make one trip to the grocery store. 

[ PASTE YOUR MEAL PLAN HERE ]

Please do not recommend any of the ingredients in the list below. I already have these at home.

[ PASTE INGREDIENTS YOU WANT EXCLUDED ]

Feel free to also recommend adjustments to my meal plan that will help me save money or making cooking this week easier through shared ingredients.

what to expect

ChatGPT will provide a list of ingredients for you to purchase at the store. They will be separated by day and meal if days (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) and meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) were provided (if you want just a single list for easy browsing, provide the follow up prompt: “Please list all ingredients in a singular list”). ChatGPT will also provide helpful tips to save money and/or ingredients, such as “For tomato bisque, you can use the canned tomatoes, onions, and garlic from other meals in your plan.”

Make sure you specify any dietary restrictions or preferences (such as “Please only provide organic ingredients” or “I am allergic to shellfish”) if you want to ensure ChatGPT doesn’t include ingredients that you cannot use. Keep a running list of these items, and items for the ingredients you currently have at home, that you can copy-and-paste into the prompt each week to cut down on typing time.

You can also ask ChatGPT to remember the ingredients you want excluded or the ingredients you already have at home so that you don’t have to list them each time (it will remember it, up to a point).

If you want to take this prompt a step further, you can also adjust the text to ask for ChatGPT to provide a meal plan for you. This will cause ChatGPT to recommend a full meal plan alongside your shopping list. I haven’t tested this much personally, so if you end up with some gnarly meals don’t look at me.

🍿 want some more?

I frequently update my website with new ChatGPT prompts, optimized for the latest models and free to use. Visit here for the full list available.

📰 about the newsletter

Jake Handy is a product manager, AI apologist, and Classical violinist. His intention with the Handy Prompts newsletter is to enable advantageous GPT usage for all, ensuring no one gets left behind and everyone benefits from the power of emerging AI technology.

Have an idea for a prompt and need some help making it work? Respond to this email and I'll see what I can do.

Jake also likes to drown himself in coffee, as one does, so consider buying him one.