Inflation in food products over the past few years continues to make headlines and challenge households struggling to work within preexisting food budgets. While a little bit of inflation in certain products, like the rising price of eggs, is unavoidable, you can avoid significant food inflation by choosing certain food products over others.
This is not just a condescending suggestion to buy food in bulk. While we go to Costco and buy the giant bag of rice to fuel us for eternity, I recognize that folks cannot do this while living paycheck-to-paycheck. When I do offer bulk comparisons below, I will also include the regular grocery store alternative to show the contrast. In most cases, buying for the short-term had similar differences between the items studied.
These tips can lower your food costs and help you avoid the biggest areas of inflation at the grocery store right now. Implementing any of these will cut your bill. Implementing all of them will likely lower your costs to the point that inflation has no noticeable effect on your food budget. This does not mean that your grocery costs will be the same as January 2020. However, these tips can put the increases in your food budget more in line with the average wage increases over the past few years.
Avoid Highly Processed Products
Inflation is hitting highly processed foods the most. We already know that highly processed foods are generally less essential to a healthy diet than unprocessed foods, but now they are hurting our wallets. For an easy example, consider breakfast choices.
First, the bulk comparison for my fellow privileged Costco shoppers: Quaker Oats packages from Costco contain 113 servings per container and cost $13.49 for a 10-pound box. This puts the price per ounce at $0.08 and the price per serving at $0.12.
Compare this to Honey Nut Cheerios, also purchased at Costco in a double box. The double box costs $10.99 and contains 27.5 ounces of cereal. This puts the price per ounce at $0.40 and the price per serving at $0.26.
Hypothetically, say a two-person household eats a double serving of breakfast food every day for a month:
Quaker Oats: $14.33 for two people each eating two servings a day for a 30-day month
Honey Nut Cheerios: $31.40 for two people each eating two servings a day for a 30-day month
Over the course of a year, that Costco-shopping couple would save $204.84 eating Quaker Oats instead of Honey Nut Cheerios.
There could be subtle differences in the preparation of either, but most people will pour the same milk into either option and potentially add fruit to add flavor. You could argue that the sprinkle of cinnamon I add to my oatmeal makes the oatmeal more expensive than indicated. But if you consider the $0.01 of cinnamon I add to my oatmeal each day, we will still save more than $200 a year over a couple buying Honey Nut Cheerios.
This is a bulk comparison, and those who are truly living paycheck-to-paycheck sometimes do not have the ability to buy in bulk. But the comparison is more pronounced when not buying in bulk. Compare the least expensive smaller versions of these products at Safeway:
Quaker Oats: $5.99 for a 42-ounce container ($0.14/ounce)
Honey Nut Cheerios: $3.49 for a 10.8-ounce container ($0.32/ounce)
I chose Safeway because it was the least expensive box of Honey Nut Cheerios that I could find. Some boxes were more expensive than the $5.99 Quaker Oats! Additionally, Target had Quaker Oats on sale for $4.99, bringing the price per ounce to $0.12. Forgoing highly processed breakfast cereals in favor of natural alternatives like oatmeal can save you money whether you have the freedom to buy in bulk or need to buy groceries more frequently due to financial constraints.
As an added bonus, oats are better for your nutrition than processed cereals, on average. A serving of oats also offers 10 more calories than a serving of Honey Nut Cheerios, making the cost per calorie even more advantageous towards oats. The option with greater health benefits also helps you better avoid inflation.
While I used Honey Nut Cheerios as an example, more exciting cereals generally offer even greater cost discrepancies. If you typically buy cereal, you have probably noticed increased prices over the past few years. I do not typically buy cereal, but I remember buying some as a holdover while staying at an AirBnB in Crete for two weeks in July 2022 and being shocked by the cost. Cereal is expensive because it is highly processed. Other highly processed foods have experienced similar increases. If you want to avoid these increases in costs, avoid highly processed foods.
Don’t Fall for Shrinkflation
This is a subset of avoiding highly processed foods, but it warrants its own section. “Shrinkflation” is the phenomenon of a product retaining its same price but containing less of the actual product within the packaging. The famous guilty party of this lately has been Doritos: If you buy a bag of Doritos, there are now fewer chips in the bag than before!
How do you know which products are practicing shrinkflation? Compare how many ounces are in the bag versus how many there were in previous purchases. If you are a normal person and have no idea how many ounces a bag of Doritos used to be, you can often see this information on old receipts. Additionally, in the most dramatic cases of shrinkflation, a new Universal Product Code (UPC) is required if the package size or weight changes by more than 20%, making it apparent that the product has changed from receipt-to-receipt.
However, the easiest way to avoid encountering shrinkflation at the moment may simply be to avoid highly processed foods and buy whole foods and vegetables (more on that below). Supermarket Guru Phil Lempert recently described where shrinkflation is happening the most in a BiggerPockets podcast episode worth listening to if you want to take lowering your grocery bill to the next level:
“The center aisle, those unemotional jars, cans, boxes, that’s where we’re seeing shrink more than ever. We’re not really seeing it in fresh foods, we’re not seeing it in produce, we’re not seeing it in meats and so on. It’s really taking place there. It hasn’t hit the frozen food case yet, it might to be honest with you, but most of the time it’s those boxes, jars and cans.”
This does not mean that shrinkflation will not hit other parts of the grocery store, but it is more difficult to use the tactic on products like produce or meats since they generally rely on weight for more transparent pricing. Because highly processed foods are less likely to rely on transparent weighing, it is easier to trick customers by removing a couple chips from a bag.
Buy Whole Fruits and Vegetables
This does not mean you need to buy fruits and vegetables from Whole Foods or the local farmer’s market where fruits and vegetables can sometimes be more expensive than those found at the grocery store. You can do this, but “buy whole fruits and vegetables” is much simpler than that. It means buy the entire pineapple and core and cut it at home. Do not buy pre-cut pieces of pineapple or a can of pineapple.
A fresh whole pineapple at Harris Teeter is $2.99. An entire pineapple is about 32 ounces, but to be conservative we can say after removing the skin and coring the pineapple, we can consume about 24 ounces of that pineapple. This puts the price per ounce at $0.12 for a whole pineapple.
Contrast that with a Cored Golden Pineapple at Harris Teeter. It costs $6.99 for 24 ounces simply because that pineapple was pre-cored for easier consumption. That results in a price per ounce of $0.29.
Canned options are not any better. In fact they are more expensive, even when purchased in bulk to save a bit of money. Tropical Gold Pineapple Slices are $32.14 for a six-pack of 15.25-ounce containers. The price of canned pineapple is even higher than the pre-cored pineapple at $0.35 per ounce.
If you eat one pineapple a week in your household, the monthly (4-week) totals are:
Fresh ripe whole pineapple: $11.96
Cored Golden Pineapple: $27.96
24 ounces/week of Tropical Gold Pineapple Slices in a can: $33.72
Over the course of a year, enjoying one whole pineapple a week rather than a cored pineapple will save you $192.00. If you currently purchase canned pineapple slices, you would save $261.12 annually by switching to a whole pineapple.
Significant food savings do not come from just purchasing one whole fruit or vegetable. This concept applies to fruits and vegetables across the board. A head of lettuce is much less expensive than the same mass of spring mix. Sure, you may find it boring to just have lettuce, but you could overlap two types of salad bases (e.g. lettuce and spinach) and alternate different bases to keep it exciting if you enjoy different tastes in your salads.
Not choosing pre-cut fruits and vegetables is an even simpler switch. A carrot is much less expensive than a bag of baby carrots. While baby carrots are the perfect snack size, they are ultimately just cut from larger carrots, making them the same as a regular carrot! They just cost more money per ounce.
In addition to financial savings, purchasing whole fruits and vegetables has the added benefit of fewer health risks. Pre-cut fruits and vegetables are prepared in processing facilities that often process other foods, leaving them susceptible to the germs that cause salmonella, E. coli, and other dangerous diseases. Within the past year, the CDC issued a recall of pre-cut cantaloupe due to a salmonella outbreak. Preventing illness is always ideal, especially when it is the less expensive option.
Eat the Food You Buy
Between 30% and 40% of food in the United States is wasted according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. If you have never previously made an effort to make sure you eat food before it spoils, simply setting a goal to eat the food you buy may cut your food budget by a third. The average household wastes more than six cups of food per week. Eliminating or reducing that food waste will save you money.
Nobody is perfect. We all have unexpected travel that comes up and prevents us from finishing the produce we bought before it spoils. But an intentional effort to avoid food waste will reduce your waste significantly enough to impact your grocery bill. We have lived this. We were not intentional with food purchases at all, set out to be, and have almost completely eliminated food waste in our household. This is still an “almost” for us: Some mangoes spoil more quickly than others, and sometimes you get some lettuce that wilts almost instantly. Nobody can help that, but if you are taking stock of the food you already have on a regular basis, you will waste less food.
How Much Money Will These Efforts Save?
Everyone selects different foods at the grocery store, so the impact of a few adjustments on your own food budget is unique to you. The best I can do is give you an insight into our experiences. Washington, DC had the seventh highest food costs of major cities in 2023 with the monthly cost of groceries per person averaging $486.63. Our household grocery budget for two people was $250 a month last year, or about $125 per person.
To be clear, we also have a budget of $200 to dine out each month, and there are economies of scale when buying food for a two-person household versus a one-person household. The price per person goes down as you buy for a larger family. However, our total groceries budget of $250 and our total dining out budget of $200 totals $450 and covers two people. This total is still less than the average grocery budget for one person in our area.
Some of these savings come from our privileged position of not living paycheck-to-paycheck. We go on Costco trips about every other month to buy some staples in bulk that will not spoil quickly like oats, pasta, rice, quinoa, olive oil, chocolate chips (for my hot chocolate, of course), and frozen berries. We have the financial flexibility to buy the giant bag of rice at Costco and the space to store the giant bag of rice in our kitchen. Not everyone has these luxuries, and it definitely helps our frugality pertaining to groceries.
But some of the choices are replicable for anyone. I eat stove-popped popcorn as my snack of choice rather than Doritos because it saves a ton of money. I love the nacho-flavored Doritos, but they are not an essential grocery. Typically, we only buy them if we are having a fun gathering with friends, or I make sure to enjoy a snack bag when I encounter them at events that include bags of chips. Other than that, my popcorn is great and way cheaper.
We also avoid most frozen dinners entirely and just prepare our own food. Our one exception is that we usually have a package of frozen pizzas from Costco in our freezer for the days when we are out of leftovers and neither of us feels like cooking something new. We use these sparingly so they seem all the more delightful when we enjoy them. Like so many people, we are also crunched for time and understand why people turn to frozen pre-made meals. To prevent ourselves from doing the same we usually each cook about once a week but cook in bulk (8-10 servings) so we can eat the food throughout the week.
We cut our own fruit. It does not take that long, it is way less expensive, and it lets us buy fruits that we enjoy more; our chosen fruits may be slightly more expensive than other fruit options, but they are still less expensive than any of the pre-cut fruits! Enjoy your fruit more, cut it yourself, and save money.
Most impactfully, we have reduced our food waste. This was one of the first steps we took on the adventure to reduce food costs, but it is by far the biggest improvement you can make. If you have not taken stock of your food waste, giving it your attention will immediately reduce your food budget with the added benefit of decreasing food waste across the country and world just a bit. Our complacency can often be costly for us and for others, but it does not have to be.
コメント