I budget about $400 every month for groceries, and this seems to be a realistic target. But not all too many years ago, my goal was $200 every month, although I rarely achieved this, typically spending closer to $300. Then the pandemic happened, and everything has gone up since then.
This still kind of shocks me because even though I understand how inflation works, I remember going to the grocery store with my family as a kid, and we would sometimes try to guess how much the groceries were going to ring up as. My mom was usually the closest, of course, but I remember how a giant cart full of groceries for the whole family would be maybe $200 and last us a whole 2 weeks, so it makes it all that much easier to see my $400 a month for just myself, and feel kinda pathetic.
But the truth is, it takes almost nothing to spend $100 these days, and that’s essentially what I am budgeting each week. Moreover, I no longer buy the cheapest foods available, as I no longer see food as something to spend as little as possible on. But I wanted to dig into this a little bit.
[I do always get a chuckle, though, when some farmer in a documentary or book tells us we should be spending more on food.]
First of all, I think it’s extremely misleading to assume that a higher cost means a higher quality. I had the misfortune of learning recently about the store chain called Erehwon, which caters to rich people. At first it sounded interesting, like it must have super rare foods and ingredients, but mostly it was just overpriced everyday grocery items slapped with a “premium” brand name, great for milking suckers out of their money. This sort of thing happens a lot, so you have to be careful. Even the ultra-fancy cold pressed canola oil I bought might only offer small advantages over the standard schlock, at least if several reasonable studies are to be believed.
Nonetheless, I don’t choose $1 pizzas the way I did as a kid (or whatever those cost these days). Cheap foods like that often operate on the principle that cheaper ingredients are being used, and the cheapest ingredients tend to be chemicals. Mind you, food itself is technically composed of chemicals, so it’s not chemicals themselves that are bad, just often that the human-made chemicals with uncertain health effects are being added to foods often stripped of their natural constituent ingredients in the name of preservation and baking-quality (or whatever).
I think it’s better to think of foods as being in their own categories, rather than comparing them with other foods. So while bananas may be super cheap, it’s not because they’ve somehow been bastardized in the manufacturing process (although their history and the politics of their production is questionable). So you aren’t doing yourself any favors comparing the price of bananas to, say, the price of flour. As far as flour goes, or at least flour from wheat, the cheapest tends to be white flour which has been bleached. 5 pounds of that might cost you well under $5, while the unbleached costs more, and the organic unbleached costs even more than that, at around $10 or $12. In reality, you would not easily be able to substitute this with bananas anyway, since most of the bananas would likely go bad before you even had the chance to consume all $10 worth of them!
How much you spend on groceries is, then, both a product of the quality of food you buy as well as the types of food you buy.
I avoid cow’s milk because of its tendency in the past to give me heartburn. I’ve occasionally purchased goat’s milk, which is considerably more expensive than cow’s milk, and this has been necessary for me from a health perspective. Even then, though, I don’t really consume goat’s milk these days, although I do use goat’s milk kefir. It’s $10 for 1 quart, which is insane compared to the price of cow’s milk, but they aren’t really comparable, since you don’t typically use kefir the way you do milk. I put a small amount in smoothies as a supplement to the almond milk I use, so the kefir easily lasts me several weeks. Nonetheless, it can add a punch to the total cost I spend at the grocery store on any given day. If I budget $100 per week, one bottle of the stuff is instantly 1/10 of my entire budget for that week.
The big honking expense in my budget is eggs. Because I prefer to buy pasture-raised eggs, it’s about $10 for 18 eggs. Back when I was eating 3 per day, this meant 18 eggs only lasted me 6 days, so I was technically buying more each week. If you buy organic pasture-raised eggs, it’s more like $13 for 18 eggs, which is just insane, but they are, in my opinion, delicious, and distinctively better tasting than their non-organic counterparts. If you were hard-pressed for money, the standard supermarket eggs are probably $5 for 18, so they are way cheaper, but I value my eggs being pasture-raised, and sometimes it’s hard to put a price on that value. Granted, about a year after switching from my old breakfast to 3 eggs per day, my LDL cholesterol was shown to be about about 20 points higher. There’s a ton of nuance around cholesterol which I’m still learning, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the eggs are responsible for this rise, so I’ve been cutting back on these in exchange for organic oatmeal. It’s amazing to me how much cheaper the oats are overall, and it actually makes me more likely to buy the fancy organic pasture-raised eggs, since I’m not tearing through them so quickly anymore. It’s actually a pretty interesting trade-off, and I’m slowly figuring out which profile of ingredients for oatmeal I prefer the most.
Tying this back into saving money, though, I’m finding that frozen produce is really the only way I eat produce. The last time I bought fresh berries they went bad within a week, and I was nowhere close to finishing them. My favorite way to eat fruit is in smoothies, and although I suspect that blending fruit is not quite as beneficial as having to chew it, I love those smoothies, and it makes it super easy to add things like kefir, flax seeds, and grated ginger. In the old days, bananas were the only fruit I ate consistently, so I think this has been a huge step-up for me. I prefer organic wild blueberries, and although a frozen bag costs me $10, it last for about 8 smoothies. Food doesn’t do you much good if you don’t eat it, so like with possessions, the worst food to buy is the food you don’t use; either you don’t bother to make or it goes bad before you get around to making it. Buying frozen has saved me a lot of money.
Long ago, I remember reading on various FIRE websites how you can gauge your grocery spending on a cost-per-meal basis. I still think there is still some merit to this, but I don’t think the idea is to get this number as low as possible. If you’re doing that, you could just as easily be eating pizza rolls for every meal, but that doesn’t give any indication whatsoever of whether what you are eating is healthy or not. Granted, if every meal costs as much as at a restaurant, something is wrong. It’s entirely possible you are buying high-quality ingredients, but it might be the types of food you’re buying that are to blame.
I still love chicken nuggets, so I often keep a bag of low-ingredient, high-quality nuggets from health food stores on hand. It costs about $15 for a bag that makes mabye 3 or 4 meals, so pretty expensive. If I were feeding a family on that, I’d be paying out the wazu, but it’s just me, and it just adds some variety every great now and then. Things like that, which require a lot of pre-processing, will often cost you dearly if you want them to be high-quality. There’s a fancy brand of smoothie/drink at Whole Foods that is $10 per little bottle, and although I’ve splurged trying a few here and there, I’m often disappointed (hence why I very rarely try them). Their blueberry flavor wasn’t nearly as good as my homemade blueberry smoothies, which kick serious ass. So when you buy pre-made stuff like that, you’re paying magnitudes more than you would pay making it at home for very little time investment (takes like 5 minutes to make a smoothie). So yeah, sure, the ingredients are often very high quality, but once again, it’s the type of food that really matters, and if you want pre-made things with quality ingredients that are both fresh and shelf-stable, be prepared to pay for it. That’s really when making things yourself has the greatest advantage. [Granted, unless you want to keep your own deep-frier on hand, it’s often advantageous to outsource this process and pay the extra for industrially-made nuggets, for example, assuming you don’t eat them very often. As a rule of thumb, you are probably better off not owning a deep-frier that you use frequently, ha!]
Aside from the considerations of both quality and type of foods, another factor is more psychological: frequency of visitation. By this I mean, the more often you go to grocery stores, the more money you will likely spend there. I have this weird tick where I get cabin fever very easily, so going to the store is a way to get out and feel like I’m “doing something”, but it also makes it insanely easy to overspend on my budget, as I find myself buying extra things “since I’m here”. Honestly, a lot of this is due to bananas going bad so quickly, as it often forces me to go to the store mid-week. One solution would be to buy frozen sliced bananas instead (or just slice and freeze them myself), but this dramatically alters the texture of my smoothies, since they become very globby and less smooth. If I could get it to work, it would be nice, though. The best I can do, though, is just to keep my visits to grocery stores infrequent, and try to stick to spending less when I need to grab some fresh bananas.
There are many YouTube channels covering various grocery “hacks”, but I often find these annoying, since the people making them all have different preferences in food and food quality. But especially now that I write this out, I feel more confident that yeah, preferring high-quality is probably better, but the type matters a lot. It’s still worth noting how stupidly overpriced things like breakfast energy drinks are, and although I tend to lump those into my personal expenses budget rather than my grocery budget, it’s an interesting reminder that some foods are obvious rip-offs. If you can optimize such that the easiest foods to make at home will determine the ingredients you buy in bulk (and often very cheaply), you can score some serious ROI in the kitchen.