You can have the most organized pantry in the world, but you also need a plan to replace products and put your groceries away. Jaz shows you how you can label, replace, and re-label your food and consumables independently! She shares tips for making a grocery list and how to make it easy to label food once you’re home.

Check out our other posts with Jaz to help you can create a 360-degree plan for independence to keep your pantry stocked and organized!

• Best Tips for Organizing Your Pantry and Cupboard
• The Ultimate Guide to Keep Track of Everything in Your Fridge and Freezer

Don’t miss Jaz’s video on her channel, Insight4Blind, about all the useful apps to help you read product labels. 

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Transcript

– Hi there. Jaz here, your blind OT from the Insight4blind channel on YouTube. And I’m here today to show you how to create a complete system for tagging, consuming, replacing and retagging your consumables. So you’ll understand how WayAround can integrate with other adaptive tools and techniques to help you find whatever you need in the kitchen. I call this having a 360-degree plan for independence, and you can do it with any degree of vision loss. Let’s get started.

You can have the most organized pantry and refrigerator in the world using the techniques I showed you in previous videos, but if you don’t have a system in place to maintain it, what’s the point? You need a 360-degree plan to be truly independent. This means you need to know your options for replacing and retagging your grocery items. Here are a few ideas to get started.

It’s important to have a list. It doesn’t matter how you do it, you could create it in Word, print it out in large print if you have low vision, you could use the notes app on your phone, or there are grocery list apps out there you could use. It really doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you put thought into what you need before you go to the store, that’s what’s gonna make it quicker and more efficient. Now I’m gonna show you my favorite way of doing a grocery list, and that is to actually send myself an email. So I have my email open here, I’ve got the list. I’m gonna send it to myself. So now magically it’s in my smartphone.

– Jaz grocery list, free selected.

– All I have to do is open it up.

– Actions available. Peanut butter, jelly, relish.

– And I’m good to go. It’s just that easy. Now in previous videos, I had suggested that you have a certain spot where you keep all of your WayTags when it’s time to replace a product. And so I’ve got them here. They are the perfect thing to get your list started. So I’m going to show you how WayAround makes it really easy.

– WayAround.

– If you take out your WayLink, the WayLink is designed for reading tag after tag, after tag. So when you are ready to start creating your list, all you have to do is hold up your tag.

– Ground beef.

– Great, I got ground beef, I know I put that on my list. Next tag.

– Children’s Pepto-Bismol.

– Ooh, that’s a really important one. I’m gonna put that one on my wrist. Easy peasy. So whether you order your groceries through Instacart or you use shopper assistance at the store, or you shop with a family member or friend, having a list with you at the beginning of the process is going to help you at the end when you’re at home and you have to identify and retag your groceries. But there are a few other things that can help you while you’re in the store. So let’s go shopping.

I’m here at Rouses Market today, so I can show you a few tricks on how you can use your sense of touch to keep track of your groceries while you’re shopping. So make it easier to tag them when you get home. So thanks Rouses for supporting the Insight4blind channel.

A lot of products may feel similar, like these boxed goods, but if you pay attention to their size and weight, it can help you tell the difference between them. For example, I have two boxes of cereal here. Now, cereal is pretty light, but I always make sure that I get my children’s cereal in a bigger box ’cause they’re gonna eat a lot more of it than I do. And so my cereal is gonna be the smaller one. Now these two boxes over here are even smaller, but heavier. I’ve got some instant pancake mix here, which has a pretty good weight to it. And the smallest box is for muffins. All four of these are very distinct from each other.

Even jars can feel quite different from each other if you’re paying attention. I have here two glass jars that are about the same size, but I can clearly tell the difference between them. The pickle relish in my left hand is in a nice, smooth jar with a cap that is ridged around the edges, which makes it nice and tactual. The jelly jar actually has branding that is raised, like a raised signature, at the top of the glass of the jar, and then when you touch the lid, it’s smaller and nice and smooth around the edges. I have here, a couple of plastic jars that are very, very similar, but again, if you’re paying attention, you can clearly tell the difference, mayonnaise and peanut butter. Your peanut butter jar is always gonna have a wider mouth, so the cap is gonna be a lot bigger than the mayo, which is gonna have a smaller opening at the top. Cans have unique textures as well. Of course you can get them in different sizes, but nowadays you can also often feel the difference from the top of the can. Some old fashioned traditional ones are flat, but the newer ones actually have pop-tops. If you have a bunch of cans though, that feel the same and you can’t tell the difference from the top, you can create your own tactual method of identifying them. For example, I have two different soups here, for one of them, I took the wrapper and folded it back a little bit, so when I feel that when I get home I’ll know exactly which soup it is. If I need a little more help with tactual marking, I like to travel with some rubber bands to the grocery store, ’cause I can pop a band around a can and then I’ll know exactly what I have when I get home.

If creating your own tactual markings isn’t quite enough to remember what you have, WayTags can really come in handy. I like to keep a few rubber bands around my wrist, because then you can actually mark the item before you put it in the basket. So I’ve got several cans here that I have folded back to indicate it was a certain type of soup. Now I’ve got my WayTag that has a description on it, I put it on this one can, and I know that all the cans that feel like this with the wrapper folded back are all gonna be the same when I get home.

WayAround can make it easy for you to categorize your frozen dinners. If you bring a larger band and different clips, like a WayClip and oval hole button. I have here two frozen dinners that are the same and they’re banded together. So I know that they’re the same with a WayClip. And over here, I’ve got two different Lean Cuisines that are banded together with an oval hole button. I like to put a lot of details on my WayTag, so I have the important information that I need when I want it. Here’s an example. Here’s a tag I brought from home.

– Ready to scan. Ground beef, settings, settings, ground beef.

– [Jaz] Okay, so it’s ground beef.

– Purchase date, October 1st, 2021.

– [Jaz] It’s gonna give me important dates.

– 1.5 pounds.

– [Jaz] It tells me the weight of the meat and of course, directions for cooking. That’s a lot of information. So I could take this highly detailed tag and pop it onto a new container of meat. But it’s risky when you start bringing all of your good detail tags out in public. So, another option would be to create a temporary tag while you’re at the store with all of the bare minimum information you need, so that when you go home, then you can update your good detailed tags. Let me show you how quick and easy it can be. So all I have to do is click create.

– Create WayTag, heading level one. Create WayTag, enter the text you want written to the WayTag.

– And I’m going to record the bare minimum info I need. 1.3 pounds ground meat, use by October 15th.

– Inserted, 1.3 pounds ground meat use by October 15th. Toolbar, done, button, done.

– Hit done.

– Right, button.

– Right.

– Right, button, alert, ready to scan.

– Hit right.

– Success.

– And there we go. Now I can just take this tag, put it around the meat and keep shopping. Expiration dates are a great reason for using temporary tags while you’re at the store. You know, most stores do have some type of shopper assistance program, so you can have someone with a set of eyes to help you find your groceries and get important information like expiration dates off of your dairy and your meat products. So when you get home, then you’ll have those important details you need to create your WayTags. Lastly, if you have just a few important items that you absolutely don’t wanna forget, and it’s not something you get often, you can actually create WayTags ahead of time, before you come to the store, put them on a rubber band and put the band around your wrist as a reminder. Then when you’re in the store, you use your WayAround app to read them.

– Read button.

– And you’re sure not to forget.

– Ready to scan. Children’s Pepto-Bismol.

– See how easy? If you follow these simple tips, you should be able to restock your kitchen while maintaining your organizational systems for finding what you need, like I showed you in previous videos for tagging your pantry and refrigerator items. However, if you get home from the grocery and you find that there are still a couple of items that you’re not sure what they are, because they feel the same. You need to know your options for accessing product labels. In my most recent video on Insight4blind channel, I describe a multitude of devices and smartphone apps that can help you access that product label information. So if you click on the link below in the description, you can learn all about Alexa, OrCam, Aira and other smartphone apps that can work with WayAround to create a fully accessible 360 degree plan for independence.

So now you know your way around to replace and retag all of your items for your refrigerator and your pantry. You can be independent to manage your own groceries, all you need is to be prepared with a list, have some adaptive strategies in place. Of course, have a little extra technology for support and have your favorite WayTags on hand. Remember, you can put as little or as much information on your WayTags as you want. That’s the beauty of WayAround.

Before I go, I wanna give one more shout out and thanks to Rouses. Thanks for letting me come and film today. To place an order for more WayTags go to wayaround.com. And subscribe to WayAround channel on YouTube for endless ideas on how to tag everything in your world. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Insight4blind channel on YouTube, where I give you the tips, tools and techniques for living your best life with low vision or no vision. I’m here to help you learn your way around with vision loss. So no worries, you got this. See you next time.