In 1916, Clarence Saunders opened a grocery shop in Memphis that did something no shop had done before. There was no counter and no clerk fetching things from the shelves. Customers came in through a turnstile and walked four aisles past every one of the 605 items on sale before they reached the checkout. It was called Piggly Wiggly, and it was the first true self-service grocery store.
Twenty years later came the wheels. In 1936 Sylvan Goldman, who owned the Humpty Dumpty supermarkets in Oklahoma, sat in his office wondering how his customers might carry more groceries. He put a basket on a folding chair and wheels on its legs, and on 4 June 1937 the shopping trolley went into his shops. It did not catch on at first. Men thought it effeminate, and one woman told him she had pushed her last baby. Goldman hired models to push the trolleys round the store until shoppers copied them, and he became a multimillionaire. The trolley paid for itself, though not for the people pushing it.
Every supermarket since has kept both ideas. You walk past everything, and everything has a chance to get into the trolley. The shop is not laid out for your health. It is laid out for the till. The till has been winning for a century.
That is no reason to dread the weekly shop. It is a reason to go in with a plan. Here are ten grocery shopping hacks for a trolley built on meat, fish and eggs, and for getting out again without the things that were placed there to catch you.
1. Shop fed, with a list
Plan the week's meals before you go, and write the list from the plan. It saves time and money, and it means you buy what you came for. If the list is short, take a basket. The trolley was invented so that you would carry more.
Then eat before you leave. How to Detox From Processed Foods, linked below, has the 94 students who shopped in a virtual supermarket: the impulsive ones bought the most calories, most of all in snacks, and only when they were hungry. A hungry shopper is the shop's favourite customer.
2. Know whose shelf it is
The products at eye level, on the ends of the aisles and by the till are not there by chance. When the evidence on supermarket marketing was gathered from 20 industry sources and 54 more on shoppers, it showed food and drink makers paying the shops for it, through what the trade calls promotion: fees for shelf space, called slotting allowances, money towards price cuts, and shared advertising. And it works. Price promotions and prominent placement raise sales. The cereal at eye level is not there because it is your best option. It is there because it paid.
The same article on processed food has what happens when a shop stops. When six British supermarket chains took sweets, chocolate and crisps away from their checkouts, purchases of those small packets fell by about 17% straight away. Until your shop does the same, walk past the till displays as if they were not there.
The offers lean the same way. When the price cuts and multibuy deals in British shops were followed through household shopping, they leaned towards the less healthy categories, and they did more than move stock. The extra packets sat in the cupboard at home, and they got eaten or thrown away. Three for two is only a saving if you wanted three. Take an offer when it is on the list, or when it is meat or fish for the freezer.
3. Start at the meat and fish counter
The old advice was to start in the produce section. Start at the meat and fish instead, because that is what the trolley is built around, and fill it before you reach anything else.
Do not be afraid of fat. What a Diet That Supports Your Health Looks Like has the case for fattier cuts over lean: ribeye, short ribs, pork belly, lamb shoulder, chicken thighs with the skin on. The fat is the fuel, and a meal without it does not hold you for long. Lean meat is a dieting habit, not a law of nature. Good bacon and proper sausages belong in the trolley too, as long as the label is short.
Buy the fish whole where you can. A fillet has lost the skin and fins that tell you what it is, and the label is not always honest. Oceana's two-year investigation of US seafood, published in 2013, found over a third of its samples mislabelled, with snapper and tuna the worst. In Ireland, 28% of cod products were mislabelled, against 7% in Britain.
Meat has the same problem, the further it gets from a whole cut. In January 2013, DNA tests on frozen beefburgers and lasagne sold in Irish and British supermarkets found horse meat sold as beef, and some Findus products turned out to be up to 100% horse. Pig DNA turned up in 23 of 27 of the burger samples. The scandal spread to 13 more European countries and showed how little of the chain anyone could trace. A steak cannot hide where it came from. A ready meal can.
4. Buy the cheap good protein
Eating well costs less than it looks when you know where to stand. 10 Practical Strategies to Overcome Barriers to a Healthy Lifestyle, linked below, has the prices pooled from 10 countries: the healthiest diets cost about $1.48 a day more than the least healthy, and the biggest gap sat in meat and protein. That is where the cheap choices pay: eggs, among the cheapest good protein there is, mince, chicken thighs and whole chickens, tinned sardines and mackerel, such as , and liver, one of the most nourishing foods in the shop and usually one of the cheapest.
Buy eggs by the tray, mince in the larger pack, and a whole chicken in place of breasts. Whatever is on offer goes in the freezer.
The word on the egg box matters less than the hen. 7 Surprising Sources of Vitamin D3 You Need to Know for Better Health has the yolks from hens that saw the sun, which held three to four times as much vitamin D3, and the warning that came with them: free-range eggs bought at random from supermarkets were low, because a door to the outside only counts if the hens use it.
Compare the price per kilo on the shelf label and ignore the price on the pack. Packs shrink while the price on them stays put, a trick common enough to have a name, shrinkflation, and a rise in price per gram that the price tag never shows. Pringles tubes in Australia went from 165 grams to 134.
Price per kilo is the honest measure. Price per calorie is the shop's. When over 50,000 foods sold by Walmart, Target and Whole Foods were scored for how processed they were, most of what was on the shelves turned out to be ultra-processed, and minimally processed food was a small fraction of it. The most processed items cost on average about half as much per calorie as the least processed ones in the same category. Calories are the cheapest thing a factory makes. At the meat counter you are paying for the protein and the fat that hold you until the next meal.
5. Use the freezer aisle
Frozen fish and frozen meat are fresh food that has been paused. They are often cheaper, they keep for months, and they end the guilt of the forgotten packet at the back of the fridge.
Learn the two dates while you are there. A use-by date is about safety and a best-before date is about quality, which is why frozen and dried foods carry best-before dates. Food frozen on or before its use-by date stays safe, because bacteria cannot grow on frozen food. So buy the reduced meat on its use-by day and freeze it the same day, and do not throw away a bag of frozen fish just because its best-before date has passed.
The same goes for the vegetables you serve on the side. Why Your Fruits and Vegetables Deliver Less Than You Think has why: frozen vegetables keep their vitamins as well as fresh ones kept for a few days in the fridge, and often better.
6. Read the back, not the front
The front of the pack is advertising. The back is the law. Labelling rules, in the US among other places, require ingredients to be listed in descending order of weight, so the first three or four tell you what you are mostly buying.
Look for short lists of things you would recognise in a kitchen. Where Seed Oils Are Hiding in Your Food — and How to Read Labels Around Them has the oils to watch for, and why one high up the list means there is a lot of it.
While you are on that aisle, pick the fats you cook with. Butter, ghee, beef tallow such as , and lard keep a pan hot without the seed oil, and a good unrefined salt with nothing added, such as , seasons everything else.
7. Walk past "low-fat"
"Low-fat" on the front of a pack sounds like a health claim. When the fat-free, low-fat and regular versions of the same foods were compared in the US food database, the low-fat and fat-free versions carried more sugar than the regular ones. Take the fat out of a yoghurt or a dressing and the taste has to come back from somewhere. Usually it comes back as sugar.
Buy the full-fat version, and read the sugar line on it as well.
8. Hunt the hidden sugar
Sugar turns up where you would not look for it: in bread, in sauces, in salad dressings, in "savoury" crackers and in most things in a jar. On the ingredient list it hides under other names, several of them ending in "-ose": glucose, fructose, dextrose, sucrose, maltose. Syrups of every kind count too.
If one of them is near the top of the list, put it back.
Bread opens that list, and supermarket bread has a story of its own. In 1961, at Chorleywood in Hertfordshire, three men working for the British baking industry developed a process that uses more yeast, a range of food additives and high-speed mixing to turn lower-protein wheat into a soft, fluffy loaf in a shorter time than the old way of kneading the dough and leaving it to rise. By 2009, 80% of the bread made in the UK was made this way. A loaf that soft and that cheap is a factory product, whatever the wrapper says.
9. Leave the drinks aisle with water
The drinks aisle is the easiest place to buy sugar without noticing. The Hidden Cost of Your Daily Sugary Drink has the numbers: orange juice carries 8.3 grams of sugar in every 100, close to cola's 9.9, without the fibre that slowed the orange down. "Natural" juice is no exception. Nature put the orange in a peel for a reason.
Water is the drink. Sparkling water if you miss the fizz, and a herbal tea if you want something warm.
10. Buy organic where it counts
Organic costs more, so spend it where it buys the most. Why Your Fruits and Vegetables Deliver Less Than You Think has the yearly list: in 2026 spinach came top of the Dirty Dozen, the produce carrying the most pesticide residue, followed by kale, collard and mustard greens, strawberries and grapes, while the Clean Fifteen, led by pineapple, sweet corn and avocado, mostly carried none. For the crops at the top, organic is worth the extra. For the ones at the bottom, it rarely is.
Out through the turnstile
Clarence Saunders built a shop that walked you past everything, and the shops have been getting better at it for a century. You do not need to be perfect in one. You need a list, a full stomach, a start at the meat counter and a habit of turning the pack over. Small changes like these add up, and after a few weeks they stop being changes at all.
On your next shop, go to the meat and fish counter first and fill the trolley there before anything else.
Eating well on a tight budget? 10 Practical Strategies to Overcome Barriers to a Healthy Lifestyle — what healthy food costs, the cheap end of the meat counter, and the other barriers that stop us.
Trying to get the packets out of the cupboard? How to Detox From Processed Foods — what factory food does, how long the cravings take to fade, and how to build the plate that replaces it.
Know someone who goes in for milk and comes out with a full trolley? Send them this, and their list.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health or diet, talk to a qualified health professional.
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