How to Bag Groceries: The Bagger's Order of Operations

Field Notes

The Bagger's Order of Operations

How to load groceries so nothing gets crushed.

On February 2, 2019, a 55-year-old man named Bradley Bower stood in the checkout line at a Giant Food Store in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, and watched a cashier drop canned goods into the same bag as his chips, smashing them. He asked him to stop. On his way out of the store he turned back and said, "Do you have a problem with me? Because I have a problem with you."

The cashier, who told police he assumed this was a joke, said: "Do you?"

Bower — six feet tall, 250 pounds, per the police description — grabbed him by the neck and shouted "You idiot!" The employee shoved him off, other staff pulled them apart, and he went home with bruising on his neck. Bower went home with a simple assault summons. He later told officers he knew he was in the wrong. He was just having a bad day, and the chips sent him over the edge.

Let me be unambiguous: he was in fact in the wrong, spectacularly so, and no snack food on earth justifies a hand on someone's throat. But I want to sit for a second with the thing underneath the crime, which is that a startling number of otherwise reasonable people carry a small, private, seething relationship with how their groceries get bagged. Bower is not an outlier in feeling. He's an outlier in behavior. Somewhere in Fremont, California, a man once beat a Safeway employee about the face with a loaf of French bread. The register is a place where people lose it.

So let's fix the actual problem. There is a correct order. Here it is.

First, a note on why this is a real skill

The National Grocers Association has run a Best Bagger Championship every year since 1987. State winners fly in, bag identical 40-item orders in front of a crowd, and get scored on speed, bag-building technique, weight distribution, and — this is real — style, attitude, and appearance. In February 2026, Rocco Cammarota of Publix in Georgia took the national title and a $10,000 check.

Ten thousand dollars. For putting things in bags well. That should tell you the difference between good and bad bagging is legible enough to be judged.

The core insight the competitors understand and most of us don't: bagging is not a packing problem, it's a structural engineering problem. You are not filling a volume. You are building a small load-bearing structure that has to survive a cart, a checkout counter, a trunk, three left turns, and a walk up a flight of stairs.

The Order of Operations

Work in layers, bottom to top. Never place an item without knowing which layer it belongs to.

Layer 0 · Quarantine (before anything else)

Three categories never enter the main bag system:

  • Raw meat, poultry, and seafood. Own plastic bag, then own tote. USDA guidance is explicit about keeping raw animal juices away from ready-to-eat food, and "the package looked sealed" is how people get sick. If you use a reusable bag for meat, dedicate one bag to it forever and wash it.
  • Chemicals. Cleaners, bleach, laundry detergent, batteries, shampoo, deodorant. Instacart tells its shoppers to bag these separately for good reason. Detergent leaks. Detergent leaks silently.
  • Frozen items. Cold with cold. A cluster of frozen goods is its own refrigerator; a lone bag of peas in with the bananas is a puddle.

Layer 1 · The foundation — heavy rigid rectangles

Canned goods. Cartons of broth and milk. Bags of rice, flour, sugar. Boxed drinks. Jars of sauce.

Flat sides down. You are laying a floor. The goal is a single continuous flat plane at the bottom of the bag with no gaps and nothing that rocks. If the foundation wobbles, everything above it is already doomed.

Layer 2 · The walls — rigid mid-weight boxes, stood on edge

Cereal boxes. Pasta boxes. Frozen pizzas. Cracker boxes. Anything flat and rigid.

Stand them vertically along the inside walls of the bag, spines facing out. This is the single most underrated move in bagging, and it's what the championship people mean by "bag-building technique." A paper or reusable bag has almost no lateral rigidity on its own. Boxes on edge turn it into a box. Now the bag holds its shape, stands up on its own, and — critically — protects everything in the middle from being squeezed when the bag gets picked up by the handles.

Layer 3 · The core — sturdy fill

Dairy tubs. Blocks of cheese. Apples, oranges, potatoes, onions, citrus. Sealed deli containers.

Fill the middle. Work outward-in, filling gaps so nothing can shift. Movement is what kills groceries, not weight. A bag with a hollow in it is a bag where things fall over in the trunk.

Layer 4 · The delicates — and nothing above them

Bread. Eggs. Chips. Berries. Tomatoes. Herbs. Bananas. Pastry. Anything with a hollow interior or a skin.

These go on top, in a single layer, and nothing goes on top of them. Ever. The top of a bag is not storage. It's airspace, and the airspace is the point.

Eggs. An egg carton is engineered to resist vertical compression from directly above — stacked flat, in a case, in a warehouse. It is not engineered to resist a can rolling into its side. Give eggs their own flat spot on top, or their own small bag, and keep them level.

Bananas. Bananas do not participate in the bag system. Bananas ride in the passenger seat like a small dignitary. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never unpacked a banana that spent eleven minutes under a melon.

The last mile, where most crushing actually happens

Perfect bagging is routinely undone in the parking lot. Two rules:

Bags go on the flat floor of the trunk, side by side, touching. Not on the seats. Bags that touch brace each other; a bag alone in a wide trunk is a bag that will lie down on the first right turn.

Fill bags to about 10–15 pounds and no more. An overfilled bag can't be lifted by the handles without the sides pinching inward, which is a compression event applied to precisely the fragile layer you carefully placed on top. A properly built bag stands up by itself when you set it down. If it slumps, your walls failed.

The other side of the counter

Since we're here: grocery workers have their own horror stories, and they're worse than yours. Trader Joe's employees on Reddit have described cockroaches walking out of customers' reusable bags, a pile of dead bed bugs spilling across the register, used diapers, used needles, black mold, and a dead rat. One found a feminine hygiene product adhered to the inside of a bag mid-scan.

So: wash your reusable bags. Also, don't pre-load your bag before checkout — the cashier just has to empty it to scan everything, and now you've made a small ceremony out of nothing.

The five axioms, for the fridge

  1. Density down, air up. Heavy and solid at the bottom, hollow and fragile at the top.
  2. Flat sides make floors. Rock equals ruin.
  3. Rigid boxes are walls, not filler. Stand them on edge against the sides.
  4. Anything that can leak gets its own bag. Meat, chemicals, no exceptions.
  5. A bag that stands on its own is a bag that arrives intact.

Follow the order and your chips arrive whole, your bread arrives loaf-shaped, and you never have to explain to a police officer that you were just having a bad day.

Or: there's another way entirely

Here's the thing I have to admit at the end of 1,300 words on bag architecture. Almost all of the above is a workaround.

Go back and read Layer 2 again. The highest-leverage move in all of bagging is standing cereal boxes on edge to manufacture walls — because the bag doesn't have any. We are using breakfast cereal as structural framing. It works. It is also, if you look at it directly, a little insane.

The alternative is to carry something that already has walls.

That's baskt: a rigid, modular shopping basket built for exactly this problem. It came out of a Navy couple's tour in Okinawa, where they noticed shoppers at the local San-A supermarket moving through the aisles with their own baskets instead of bags — sold right there by the entrance. They came home, went looking for the American equivalent, didn't find one, and built it.

What it does to everything above:

  • Layer 2 stops existing. The walls come with it. Nothing gets compressed inward when you lift it, because rigid sides don't pinch.
  • The last-mile problem goes away. A basket doesn't lie down on a left turn, and it nests in the trunk when it's empty.
  • The reusable-bag horror stories end. Non-porous surface, wipes clean in seconds. No fabric, no seams, nothing for a bed bug to move into.
  • You get your hands back. Phone holder for the list, cup holder for the coffee, so you're not the person balancing a carton of eggs on a cold brew.

Layers 0, 1, 3, and 4 still apply — density down, air up, delicates on top, meat and chemicals quarantined. You'd just be loading them into something that isn't fighting you the whole way.

See the baskt →

Sources

Back to blog