Simple Shopping List Shortcut

Hi all,

I am trying to create a very simple shopping list shortcut in IOS shortcuts.

  • I created a basic list of food items
  • split list by new lines
  • repeat with each item in split list
  • create new Apple note with repeat results

Basically this works fine. One thing that would be nice would be to add the list items as checkbox items so I could check them off while shopping.

Question: is there any way to set them up as checkbox items?

BTW: for this simple goal, I imagine I could create a master Apple note template that has all of the items listed as checkbox items. Then I imagine somehow I could copy this template note and duplicate it as needed.

Is there a way to find and duplicate this apple note in shortcuts? I imagine I could add some unique id to the note but how can I search for it and dupe it in shortcuts?

Thanks Dave

Apple Notes does not accept rich text so you cannot write checkbox items to a note from Shortcuts (or anywhere). You can (normally) find and show a note in Shortcuts (I’m on the beta at the moment and it does’t seem to be working currently).

You could search in the Notes app itself – again doesn’t seem to be playing on the beta.

Another option instead of Notes, you could use the free version of Drafts by Agile Tortoise which allows checkbox items and is very good at interacting with Shortcuts. It also has a free action Toggle Shopping List Mode.

Nothing changes, and it has come up a few times before.

You can use the find notes where action in Shortcuts.

Then feed the content into the create note.

A lot of people hold such templates in Shortcuts or Data Jar.


Unless you need to share your shopping list, the suggestion from @Tony is going to offer you a lot of automation options.

If you need to share, consider a dedicated app like Todoist. It works well with Shortcuts, Drafts, even the Amazon Echo. It is a good option for a family shopping list, even on the free plan.

Free users can share any projects with up to 5 people (they can be a different 5 people in each project). Pro users can share projects with up to 25 people, and Business users can share with up to 50 people.

1 Like

Just a quick question: Why notes and not reminders with a dedicated list? There the items automatically have checkboxes and you can search the reminders for duplicates if they’re not checked. And as a bonus it synchronizes with your iCloud account.

Reminders is the way to go…. I’m building one that takes 3 preloaded reminders lists meals/days of week/ groceries and uses sub reminders to chose meals and has their ingredients listed

On Sat eve. I plan next weeks meals - I run a custom shortcut to assign meals to days, flag the selected items in the respective lists and then add the meal into my calendar for gtd reference.

Another shortcut(wip) will then take the meal ingredients selected from above activity and will mark them as “unselected” in the groceries list so they become available when I manually prep the full shopping list. (See below)

I then show all items in my groceries List which has all the food I’ve shopped for todate and unselect items I want to shop for. Then I hide completed items to have my next shopping list available to tick off as I go around on my next shop visit (the list is shared with my wife so we know what we need on our respective journeys)

Btw my groceries list is structured into aisles then the sub reminders are items in that aisle. Eg fruit&veg: apples/oranges etc. frozen: peas/fish/ice cream

Working well. I’ve an rfid sticker on the larder door that runs a shortcut that selects the grocery list and allows me to manually unselect items for Sunday’s food shop :+1:.

1 Like

Like some others who already responded, I use Reminders for this. One of my Reminders lists is called Grocery List. When I say, 'hey Siri, add X to my grocery list, then Siri just does that—no shortcut building required.

Hi all - thanks for the input. I do have a shopping list in reminders - with repeating items (weekly) and it does work ok. I just thought I might try the notes app where all basic shopping items are in just one Apple Note page…