You need to do some thinking before you ever get near a shop.
What kind of foods do you and DH like to eat? A mixture, very plain, very spicy, particular cuisines like Italian/Chinese/Indian/Mexican, long slow cooking or fast prep????
Do you like quite a varied menu, different things all the time, or do you have the same few meals on rotation every week/fortnight? Or somewhere in between?
Can you (both) cook? Do you like to cook different things?
Do you like to cook from scratch (peel and fry an onion, add herbs and spices individually), or always use jars of sauces, or somewhere in between?
Do you have time to cook, or it is a mad rush when you get in from work? (Are you both home at the same time and eat together? And do you both eat the same thing - seems a daft question but I'm becoming more aware of households where the adults each different dinners to each other).
DO you have any dietary issues, or preferences, that you need to take into account?
And not just thinking about dinners, but lunches, breakfasts, snacks etc as well.
Look at what you usually like to eat, and think about what is freezeable if you want to batch cook. You can batch cook by setting aside a whole day to cooking for the freezer - or you can simply build it up slowly by making 2 or 3 portions of freezable meals when you are cooking them rather than just 1 meals-worth. (So instead of enough spag bol for 2 people, make enough sauce for 6 people and freeze either 2 dishes for 2 people each, 4 dishes for 1 person each, or 1 for 2 people and 2 for 1 person - as best suits your needs). If you do the same once a week with different dinners, you will build up a stash relatively quickly.
I prefer to have tins of individual ingredients, as then I can make up different types of meals - tins of tomatoes get used for lots of Italian dishes, but also Mexican, Indian curries, soups, casseroles, ratatouille, Spanish stuff etc. But a jar of pasta sauce is more restrictive on how I can use it.
So I have lots of different herbs, seasonings and spices to suit the different kinds of food we like.
Lots of foods have long life, or long life options, available.
Tins are great and last years.
Carbs - rice, pasta, noodles - all are long lasting when dried (admittedly the fresh ones are very handy for nights when fast dinners are needed). You can also get long life gnocchi in some places in vacuum packed packages. Potatoes are also generally good for a number of weeks when stored in the dark.
Useful longer life meat I keep in the fridge tends to be things like bacon lardons (Lidl do a 2 portion pack that is really useful) and chorizo sausage and regular bacon/rashers/gammon. Vacuum packed meat tends to last longer than fresh from the counter types (I often get vac packed duck breasks, or confit duck legs, with a couple of weeks at least before they need to be used). Big joints or larger pieces like chops generally last longer than chunks and mince. And most meat is fine to freeze.
Longer life veg includes squashes and pumpkins, carrots, parsnips, brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli) etc. Onions and garlic are both good for storage. Frozen veg are generally good and have just as good nutrition as fresh - I like petits pois peas (smaller and sweeter), corn, and sometimes some mixed veg for variety. Tinned peas (DH likes mushy ones) and beans are great - I use a lot of cannellini beans, chickpeas, haricot beans and kidney beans from tins, and DD makes a lovely Mexican bean thing using the "4 bean mix". And we always have some baked beans for lunches.
I like to keep a bag of frozen uncooked prawns to throw into stir fries and curries and pasta dishes for fast meals - you can cook those straight from frozen.
I sometimes am organised enough to chop up and/or marinate my meats before they go into the freezer - so they are faster to defrost and prepare at the other end, and absorb the flavour well.
I also have a good baking cupboard - a mix of flours (cream, self raising, rye, coconut, corn), sugars (caster (we use that instead of granulated in daily life too), icing, royal icing, golden, muscovado (dark brown), golden syrup, treacle), various dried fruit and nuts, decorative elements, raising agents (yeast, baking powder, bread soda etc), and that means I can do both savoury and sweet baking, and lots of other things with those. Like "flour, egg, breadcrumbs" treatment to the outside of fish cakes using leftover mash or homemade chicken goujons. The base of a sauce or thicken a soup. Or even to just prevent shop bought pastry from sticking to the worktop if I want to make a quick pie. I throw porridge oats into a fair amount of baking also.
But when starting to build up a storecupboard, the best way is to get an extra couple of items you use anyway on a weekly basis. Otherwise, it can seem very expensive to go out and do a "stores" shop as well as a regular weekly shop. Remember to put things with longer dates at the back and to check dates periodically so that you do use up older things rather than letting them go past use.