Although many stores offer plastic grocery bags as a bagging option, more and more stores are eliminating these bags in favor of more environmentally conscious alternatives. Choose to bag your groceries in plastic (if offered), paper or your own reusable canvas grocery bags. Whatever kind of bag you choose, the bagging techniques are essentially the same.
Group the heavy items together before you begin to place them into bags. For best results, heavy items should be spread out among all of the grocery bags and not all placed into one or two bags. Create a balanced mixture of heavy, medium and light items in each bag.
For best results, look at everything before you begin to bag and place some items together in bags. For example, cleaning items should not be bagged with food items, if possible. Produce items can often all be bagged together in one or two bags (place the easily bruised fruit on top). Frozen items should be placed into the same bag so that they can keep each other colder until you get home.
Place the heaviest items (cans, for example) on the bottom of the bag. If you have many cans, distribute the cans to the bottom of several bags. On top of the cans, place items of medium weight. The final top layer in the bags should be the light items, the fragile items, or the items that can be easily bruised.
Large bottles of soda or other liquids are often best left out of bags because they may be too heavy or tear paper bags. When bagging with canvas bags, these bottles can be bagged, if desired, with no concern about breakage. When placing bottles into bags, always place them standing upright to minimize any leaking messes if lids come open.
Be conscious of how space is used in the bags to minimize the number of bags. Always place cereal boxes or other boxes on ends to enable more boxes to be placed into each bag. If there are many boxes, try to fit them all together into one bag in a jigsaw-puzzle-like fashion to protect the food from damage and maximize your bagging space.