"What the article doesn't mention: Aldi optimizing the speed of their cashiers is nothing new. The northern Aldi ("Aldi Nord") for a long time had three-digit article codes for every product that cashiers had to know by heart--which also meant that they couldn't have more than 1000 different products. In fact, that system was so efficient that they completely switched to bardcodes only in 2002 as they didn't see any advantage before that."

Hmmm ... so you could populate an Oh By Code[1] with your list of grocery codes and just give them that single code, which they could look up and parse ...

Well, provided your grocery list was not longer than 4096 characters...

[1] http://0x.co