Do I need articles in the shopping list?

Question

I have a sentence

Kaufe ich oft Hüttenkäse, Äpfel, Fleisch, Saft, Joghurt, Nudeln, Reis, Tee, Kekse, Brot.

What kind of definite articles do I need to use there and do I need to use them at all?

Answer 1

Your example sentence uses a strange or even wrong word order.

It should read:

Ich kaufe oft Hüttenkäse, Äpfel, Fleisch, Saft, Joghurt, Nudeln, Reis, Tee, Kekse und Brot.

Note, that I replaced the last comma by und to give a real sentence.

As can be seen in Canoonet, unspecific substances have no article, since neither the definite nor the indefinite would match. For piece-wise stuff as apples of course a number and for other as rice an amount in gramms or liters could be added to get a more recipe-type list.

Answer 2

What kind of definite articles do I need to use there and do I need to use them at all?

No you don't need any definite article to list things.

Let's assume that your shopping list has a part of frequent bought things, it should simply read like

Kaufe ich oft:¹
Hüttenkäse, Äpfel, Fleisch, Saft, Joghurt, Nudeln, Reis, Tee, Kekse, Brot

There's no need to prefix those nouns with their definite articles like

Kaufe ich oft:
den Hüttenkäse, die Äpfel, das Fleisch, den Saft, den Joghurt, die Nudeln, den Reis, den Tee, die Kekse, das Brot

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¹_{Note the colon (:) to introduce the following list.}

Answer 3

No, you don't need articles like "ein" and "der" in your list.

A real-world example

I recently bought a chocolate bar in Germany (Zotter brand, Hanfpraline, Vegan). Let's look at the back of it:

It contains this sentence with a list of ingredients and no articles:

Kann Spuren von Schalenfrüchten aller Art, Erdnüssen, Milch, Eiern, und Sesam enthalten.

(Also, the main ingredient list contains no articles, but that is not an actual sentence so maybe that is less compelling to you.)

Some logical reasoning

An article like "ein" means "one" or "a", and that would not make sense because many things on your list cannot be counted, or if they can be counted then it is unlikely you would buy just one.

An article like "der" means "the", which adds some amount of specificity to the object you are talking about. But your sentence is pretty generic; you aren't saying which grocery store or what brand, you're just trying to say that you generally buy these types of things.

I think you can see that anyone reading the sentence would totally understand it without articles. The articles do not add any crucial meaning to your sentence.

Disclaimer: I'm a native speaker of English, not German.