Operation: Cut Our Grocery Bill

I’ve attempted to cut our grocery bill down before by actually *gasp* looking at our spending, budgeting, and meal planning. That worked…sort of well. For a little while, at least. But since we’ve started using the nifty You Need A Budget software, henceforth to be referred to as YNAB, I was able to get a look at our grocery spending each month for the last year.

This feels like stepping on the scale after the holidays, and cringing a little when you see the number looking back at you. I say that in the most body positive way possible — I genuinely don’t much care about the number on the scale, but seeing +10 and knowing that you ate a truckload of mashed potatoes, cookies, pies, etc. has a way of slapping you in the face. That’s what this wakeup call feels like!

So, I present to you, but mostly to me and Kristian, our grocery bills for the last year:

Ay chihuahua! I almost screamed when I saw last July, until I remembered that we had a 20 person 4th of July party, and I cooked up a storm and bought tons of drinks for that. Alcohol, man. It’ll get ya right where it hurts — in the wallet.

So, some silver linings in there, but on the whole, we are way overspending for a family of TWO HUMANS. Granted, we cook and eat nearly every meal at home. We eat out once, maybe twice a month. We’ve come up with some strategies to majorly slash this crazy budget, which averages out to $608 per month right now. That’s just bananas! Even given the fact that we live in a high cost of living area, there is no way our grocery bills each month should be this high.

Strategies to Cut Down on Grocery Bill

1. Shop the garden first. If we have a lot of greens, base some meals around that. Tomatoes bursting? Use ’em. We don’t have a large enough garden right now to really make a big dent in our grocery bill, but we can be more mindful about how we harvest and let that lead the charge on meal planning.
2. Investigate other grocery stores. I try to shop close to where we live, and while we have a Ralph’s, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods 365 within 1-2 miles of us, I’m going to expand our radius a little bit to see if better deals can be had outside of Santa Monica. Case in point: I went to buy a can of coconut cream for a recipe the other day and it was TWICE the price at 365 as it was at Trader Joe’s. That is just rude.
3. Meal plan 10-14 days at a time, instead of once a week. Looking ahead a bit will help us be more mindful of shopping the pantry and stretch the time between grocery trips a bit.
4. Watch impulse buys. For me, this means not going crazy at the farmers market and shopping wisely. I bought a $14 loaf of gluten-free bread at a farmers market last weekend because I got swept up in talking to the baker. It was good, but not $14 good. Especially when I bake delicious sourdough bread myself.
5. Shop together. Right now, I tend to do grocery shopping during the week because my schedule is more flexible, but we’re going to get back to going together first thing Sunday mornings.
6. Find a good wholesale bulk supplier for beans and legumes. These can go for $2-$4 a pound near where we live, and a cursory Google search yielded much lower prices at a local restaurant supply company. I’m willing to drive a little bit further to save 50% on stuff that we can buy once every few months.
7. Kristian is making a spreadsheet so we can really drill down into our purchases and nerd out. This man loves a good spreadsheet (he’s a software engineer and his brain loves order and logic!) and you might be familiar with the seed database he created. Right now, we’ve been tracking our spending for the past year and optimizing here and there, but we’re ready to take massive action on slashing our grocery budget in half!

Update: I’m cleaning up blog posts and realized that I should do an update on this experiment since writing this post because we’ve had a baby and moved across the country and don’t have year round garden produce anymore. When that’s up I’ll link to it here!