I designed a shopping list for use on EXIT ONLY that could easily be used in any grocery store in any country of the world.  I organized foods and supplies found in a large grocery store into categories.  When I entered a grocery store for the first time, I looked for these different groups or categories of foods and household goods.

HOW DID I CREATE MY SHOPPING LIST?

I folded an A4 (8.5 in./ 21.6 cm X 11 in./ 27.9 cm) sheet of paper in half.  Then I folded the half sheet so it had 4 rows of boxes going down and 6 rows of boxes going across.  Eventually, I made a master sheet with two half-sheet shopping lists on it and Xeroxed that sheet, so I could keep a ready supply of shopping lists on hand. 

There is enough room to write items on your half-sheet shopping list if you are shopping regularly, but you will need more room in each box if you are doing "a big shop".  When I was going to do major provisioning, I enlarged the size of my shopping list paper by taping two A4 sheets of paper together to make one large sheet.  Then, I folded the large sheet into 6 boxes across and 4 boxes down just like my original smaller paper.  I added the 16 category words.  The larger paper gave me bigger boxes for the long lists of items I needed to buy.

HOW DID I KNOW WHAT I NEEDED TO BUY?

When I was making my master shopping list before we left Florida, I kept track of what we ate, what ingredients we cooked with, and what household supplies we used for one month.  I also kept my grocery receipts from the grocery store to cross-check what we were using and how much of these items we bought in a month.

HOW MANY SHOPPING TRIPS?

Once you have made your master shopping list, you have to decide how to approach the actual shopping trip.  Sometimes, I would concentrate on 2 or 3 categories per trip.  Sometimes, I would do 2-3 aisles in the store each trip.  It takes several days to do provisioning doing a few categories or a few aisles of the store at a time, but you can control the chaos if you buy a little, then put it away before you buy more.  After you have bought everything on your list, if you still have empty storage space on board, you can go back and buy more of your favorite things.