A weekly shopping list that never runs out of mascarpone

How to collect what is missing from all your orders, set minimum stock levels and group purchases by supplier so that buying wholesale pays off.

Running out of one ingredient on a Friday evening can ruin the whole weekend. On the other hand, three weeks' worth of mascarpone will end up in the bin, because the cheese has a short shelf life. A good shopping list sits somewhere in the middle: you buy what your orders require, plus a sensible stock of things that do not go off.

Start from the orders, not the fridge

The most common mistake is making the list based on what you "probably need". It is better to turn the order around:

Collect all confirmed orders for the next 7 days.
For each order, scale the recipe to the right number of servings.
Add up the quantities of the same ingredients across all orders.
Subtract what you already have in stock.
Whatever is left goes on the list.

Example: this week you have four cakes with mascarpone cream, each needing 750 g of the cheese. That is 3 kg in total. There is 1 kg in the fridge, so you buy 2 kg, and after rounding up to whole packs and adding a reserve for corrections, 2.5 kg.

Safety stock and minimum levels

For ingredients you use every week, set a minimum stock, the quantity you never go below. For flour it might be one 25 kg sack, for icing sugar 5 kg, for tempering chocolate 3 kg. When stock falls below the minimum, the ingredient goes on the list regardless of the orders.

The minimum is easiest to work out like this: average weekly use times the number of weeks between deliveries, plus a small margin. If you use 4 kg of butter a week and the wholesaler delivers every two weeks, the minimum is about 9 kg.

What to buy wholesale and what as you go

Not everything is worth buying in large packs. A simple split:

wholesale, once a month: flour, sugar, icing sugar, starch, cocoa, chocolate, nuts, sugar paste, packaging and cake boards,
every week: butter, cream, eggs, frozen fruit,
a day or two before production: mascarpone, cream cheeses, fresh fruit, edible flowers.

Buying wholesale only makes sense if you have somewhere to store the goods in good conditions. A sack of flour in a warm, damp room is a ready-made problem, not a saving.

Group by supplier

A list split by supplier saves time and money. You can see straight away whether the wholesale order passes the free delivery threshold, and what is better picked up at a shop on the way.

| Supplier | What you order | When | | --- | --- | --- | | Confectionery wholesaler | chocolate, sugar paste, packaging | once a month | | Food wholesaler | flour, sugar, butter, cream | every week | | Local dairy supplier | mascarpone, eggs | the day before production |

First in, first out

Put new stock at the back of the shelf and move the older stock to the front. Write the opening date on every open pack. It is tedious, but it means you will not find three open cartons of cream from different weeks in the fridge. You also get the kind of order that helps during a sanitary inspection.

> Once a week, ideally on shopping day, take five minutes to check the fridge and the store room. Use up anything close to its date first or write it off as waste.

How Lagom makes it easier

Lagom collects the ingredients from confirmed orders, subtracts the stock and builds a shopping list grouped by supplier. Ingredients below their minimum stock go on the list automatically, and from the list you can create supplier orders straight away.

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