What should be on a healthy grocery list?

A workable healthy grocery list covers eight groups: produce, protein, whole grains, dairy or alternatives, healthy fats, pantry staples, frozen foods, and a small number of snacks. This builder fills each group from a 65-food database using your household size, weekly budget, and goals, then tells you which items are worth buying organic.

Which foods are worth buying organic?

The foods where organic changes the most are the ones with a large measured gap between organic and conventional residue samples that you also eat often — leafy greens, strawberries, grapes, and stone fruit lead. Avocados, sweet corn, onions, pineapple, and asparagus show so few detections that conventional is a reasonable budget choice.

Does a pesticide residue detection mean food is unsafe?

No. The EPA is explicit that detecting a residue does not mean a food is at an unsafe level, and USDA testing consistently finds more than 99% of samples below federal benchmarks. This site ranks relative residue evidence to help allocate a limited organic budget — it is not a safety score.

Nutrition × pesticide data × organic price × budget

Build a Healthy Grocery List

Create a personalised shopping list based on nutrition, pesticide residue data, organic price premiums, and your weekly budget — then find out where your organic money actually does something.

Build my list Explore foods

✓ No account, no email
✓ Saved in your browser
✓ Works offline in the store

My healthy grocery list

26 items

Produce

✓AvocadosConventional is reasonable
✓BlueberriesHigher priority
✓BroccoliConventional is reasonable
✓CarrotsConsider organic

Protein

Whole grains

Weekly total: $130.42
Organic upgrade budget: $8.00

Step one

What matters to you?

Pick as many as you like. The generator changes which foods it reaches for, how many of each group it includes, and how it spends the organic part of your budget.

Ordinary healthy grocery lists say

Buy fruit
Buy vegetables
Buy chicken breast
Buy oats
Buy nuts

This one answers

→ Which specific foods?
→ Which are denser in nutrients?
→ Which carry more residue evidence?
→ Which are worth buying organic?
→ At what premium does organic stop paying?
→ If I add $20 a week, what should I upgrade?

Step two

Spend your organic budget where it matters

Tell the optimizer how much extra you can spend each week. It ranks every item on your list by priority points bought per dollar — combining the measured organic-versus-conventional gap, how often you eat the food, how confident the sample sets are, and what the organic version actually costs.

Open the optimizer

$18 extra per week

spends $15.28 · 86% of available priority

🥕Carrots+$1.00/wk
🥗Romaine lettuce+$1.88/wk
🍃Spinach+$2.40/wk
🌿Kale+$2.00/wk
🍓Strawberries+$4.40/wk

3 items on the same list came back as conventional is a reasonable budget choice — the money does more elsewhere.

Explore

Explore pesticide residue and nutrition

Four quadrants, four different things to do. Nutritious food carrying more residue evidence is where an organic dollar buys the most; the top-right corner is where it buys almost nothing. Click any food for its numbers.

Open the map

Upgrade here firstHigher nutrition, more residue evidence

Best overallHigher nutrition, lower residue evidence

Most room to trade upNormal nutrition, more residue evidence

Easy conventionalNormal nutrition, lower residue evidence

Pineapple Avocados Blueberries Sweet corn Carrots Kale Peaches Spinach Cabbage Strawberries Potatoes Bananas Apples Broccoli Grapes

Explore all 36 foods →

Click any food for its numbers. Ring colour is the organic upgrade verdict; mark size reflects how many conventional samples sit behind the score.

🍓

Strawberries

$4.29 / 1 lb container · organic $6.49

Residue evidence96/100

Higher priority

🍃

Spinach

$3.29 / 5 oz container · organic $4.49

Residue evidence99/100

Consider organic

🥑

Avocados

$1.49 / each · organic $2.29

Residue evidence5/100

Conventional is reasonable

🍎

Apples

$2.09 / lb · organic $3.19

Residue evidence77/100

Higher priority

🫐

Blueberries

$3.99 / 11 oz container · organic $5.79

Residue evidence61/100

Higher priority

🍷

Grapes

$3.29 / lb · organic $4.99

Residue evidence73/100

Higher priority

Popular food checks

Every food gets one page that answers the whole question — residue evidence, the organic comparison, nutrition, price, how to wash it, and what to buy instead.

Trust

Built from transparent public data

Every score on this site is computed from published inputs by one documented formula. You can read the formula, see the sample counts behind each food, and check what the site does when the data is too thin to support a recommendation — which happens, and gets labelled rather than smoothed over.

Methodology Data sources Editorial policy Changelog

USDA Pesticide Data Program (PDP): Residue detections, sample counts, and organic/conventional sample sets.
U.S. EPA — Food and Pesticides: Tolerances and benchmark context for what a detection means.
USDA FoodData Central: Nutrition per serving and the inputs to the nutrient-density score.
USDA Economic Research Service — Fruit and Vegetable Prices: Baseline retail price levels and organic price premiums.
FDA/EPA — Advice about Eating Fish: Mercury categories used on the seafood entries.
65 foods: 36 with residue data, all with nutrition and price. Dataset v1.0.0.