For most families, food is their fourth largest expense, falling only behind the mortgage/rent, health insurance, and car payments. Savvy shoppers, however, understand the real secrets to cutting their food bills down to size, saving $1000, $2000, even $3000 or more per year in the process.
Below we present 15 easy ways to cut your food bills by thousands.
Get your bread and bakery products at ridiculously low prices
One of the best kept secrets around is the bakery outlet. Outlets receive bread and baked goods directly from the bakery, bypassing the supermarket middleman in the process. A popular bakery outlet brand that I frequented in Chicago, for instance, received deliveries directly from the company bakery three times a week. The savings can be tremendous with prices 40% to 50% less than supermarket prices.
Many bakery outlet veterans suggest that you stock up and store the extras in the freezer, creating a long lasting supply of cheap bread, bagels, muffins, and other baked goods. Search the internet for a list of bakery outlets near you.
Eat less without even knowing it
You can cut your food bill and slim your waistline at the same time. According to leading food psychologist Brian Wansink, we all continue to eat well after our hunger has been fulfilled. This unconscious overeating is due to visual cues that guide our consumption.
We simply have the tendency to finish everything that’s on our plate, regardless of whether we’re still hungry or not. Unfortunately, over the last two decades the size of our plates has grown tremendously.
A few decades ago 10 inch dinner plates were the standard. Now, 12 inch dinner plates have become commonplace. Simply by switching to smaller 10 inch dinner plates we will generally consume 22% less food, saving both our waistlines and our pocketbooks.
Create leftover magic
The average family of four throws out $1,350 of food every year, much of this in the form of wasted leftovers.
In my humble opinion, no well stocked kitchen should be without eggs, salad greens, and potatoes. These are what I affectionately refer to as “leftover extenders” and they are a great way to make sure leftovers get used instead of tossed away.
Almost any leftover meat can be diced or shredded and used in an omelette. Dice those leftover vegetables and add them to the mix as well.
Meat leftovers combined with salad greens create the perfect dinner salad. Toss in some leftover vegetables for added crunch. Almost any sauce from the previous night’s meal can be layered over a baked potato. Add shredded or diced leftover meat, sprinkle on a little cheese and you have a delicious dinner potato.
Menu plan to shop the sales
Want to save some serious grocery dollars? Take a few minutes to plan your meals for the week. Of course anything with the word “plan” in it conjures up thoughts of intense effort, time and frustration. Yet, menu planning can be fairly simple and straight forward.
Decide what you’ll serve for your main meals, locate the recipes, and write an ingredient list for all of the meals. Use your grocery store sales flyers to help you determine what you’ll be serving for the week.
If chicken breasts are on sale this week for a ridiculously low price then there is no need to serve your family hamburger. They’ll be getting chicken.
When planning your meals take it a step further. Make your food items serve double duty. If you plan to serve chicken breast one evening, for example, then use the leftover chicken for chicken tacos the next evening.
Understand the supermarket sales cycles
It may be difficult to notice at first, but almost every item in a supermarket has a natural “sales cycle.” One week a box of cereal may be offered at a 15% discount. Three weeks later you’ll find it on sale for 25% off the regular price. But every so often it will be discounted 50% or more.
These are what I call the “super sales”. A typical “buy one, get one free” offer is a perfect example of such a super sale. Stock up at super sales and you’re guaranteed to save hundreds of dollars each year.
Store surf to cherry pick the best deals
There’s a reason supermarkets push their loyalty cards so hard. The discount cards lure you in with cheap sales prices on some items but the store counts on you staying to purchase non-sales items as well.
Use this to your advantage. Shop multiple food chains and “cherry pick” the best deals from each store. Try to locate grocery chains that have stores near each other. Frequently, supermarkets locate stores right across the street from their competitors.
Try supermarket store brands risk free
Did you know that supermarkets frequently make more money selling their own store brand items than selling name brand items? As a result, they have an incentive to create high quality store brand items.
Of course they understand your fear of trying a store brand product and not liking it. That is why many offer money back guarantees on all their store brand products. Try a store brand. If you don’t like it, simply return it for a full refund. But if you find store brand products you love, you’ll save money for years to come.
Check with your store for the particular details on their store brand policies.
Don’t pay for water
Now isn’t this just plain crazy! When we purchase those cartons of juice at the store, we’re in fact paying in part for the packaging, transportation, storage, and refrigeration of the water in the juice.
Why pay this extra cost when we can use your own water at home? Simply purchase frozen juice concentrates. You’ll save 30-40% by purchasing frozen juice concentrates in the freezer section. This adds up to several hundred dollars SAVED over the course of a year!
Drop the soda
Drinking water instead of a soda just once a day cuts nearly 200 calories from your diet. That’s 6,000 calories a month, enough to shed more than 1.5 pounds!
Use Brita water filters and enjoy chilled filtered water from the tap. Substituting water for soda just once a day could easily save you $30 a month or nearly $360 a year. Do the same for other family members and the savings multiply.
Are you tempted by those vending machines at work? Purchase your own stainless steel water bottle and avoid the temptation.
Rethink your snacks
Let’s face it, junk food is expensive. A typical snack size bag of potato chips costs $1, a candy bar 69 cents. A bag of cookies costs nearly $3.79 while two Hostess cupcakes can set you back nearly $1.29. Yet, snacking is the stealth food expense we almost always overlook.
Lower your snack costs and eat healthier by choosing better snacks. Surprisingly, I shop at Aldi’s supermarkets for snacks. I purchase eggs and boil them for healthy treats. The cost runs around 15 cents per egg. I also purchase cut carrots which make a cheap alternative to potato chips.
Cucumber slices dipped in a little bit of diluted vinegar or apples slices touched with peanut butter also do the trick. Also consider popcorn kernels cooked in a hot air popper. The cost works out to around 8 cents a serving, far cheaper than microwave popcorn, and takes almost the same amount of time to prepare.
Edit your shopping cart
Somewhere there must be a written rule that states once you put something in your shopping cart you can’t remove it. I have to admit it, I’m guilty of acting like anything I throw into my cart is super glued there until I get to the checkout aisle.
Studies indicate that nearly 40% to 50% of our grocery purchase are impulse buys, – items we had never even intended on buying once we entered the store. One way to cut impulse purchases is by getting in the habit of reviewing your shopping cart before checking out.
Find a quiet corner in the grocery store and calmly examine what you placed in your cart. Do you really need that box of cookies or that extra bag of chips? Can you buy that aspirin cheaper at the drug store?
Shop just once a week
This is perhaps one of the most effective ways to reduce your grocery bill. Again it deals with those impulse purchases that comprise 40% to 50% of all our purchases. The fewer times you visit the grocery store, the fewer impulse purchases you’ll make.
Remember, the key to once-a-week shopping is to make a comprehensive grocery list so you only have to visit the store once. You can also extend the time between grocery visits by using up everything in your kitchen, including the leftovers.
Keep a snack in your glove compartment
Anyone will tell you never go grocery shopping hungry. With the delicious smells and attractive packaging of thousands of tempting items in any typical grocery store, you’re bound to make impulse purchases.
One trick to make sure you never shop hungry is to store a snack in your glove compartment. Chips, energy bars, or gum all work well. I get my glove compartment snacks on the cheap from the dollar store.
Use meat as an accent
Its amazing that as Americans we have the unique culinary habit of making meat the unrivaled focus of our meals. We take pride in eating extra large Angus burgers or 12 inch rib-eye steaks. Yet our expanding waistlines and high rates of coronary heart disease are testaments to our love for meat.
Consider for a second that Mediterranean, Italian, Greek, and Middle Eastern cuisines all use meat as an accent to help enhance other grain and plant-based components of the meal.
By following their lead and using meat to add flavor and texture to a meal, instead of making meat the whole meal itself, we can save money and guarantee better health.
If you don’t know where to start, take a look at a Mediterranean or a Middle Eastern cookbook. They are chocked full of recipes that require less meat.
Try a “meatless monday”
Simply chose one day of the week to cook without any meat. A growing movement called Meatless Mondays is geared toward educating people on the high financial and environmental costs of consuming large amounts of meat.
A survey performed at the website Meatless Mondays found that families save $80-$100 a month just by skipping meat on Mondays. That’s cash in your pocket.
BMWK, how do you save money at the grocery store? Please share with us additional tips on saving at the super market? Do you use coupons?