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The Great Grocery Experiment

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Have you been wondering what I learned in my month of tracking my grocery purchases? I have! I am finally taking a moment to review the information and my shopping habits for the month past. November was a fairly typical month for our family even with Thanksgiving. We had a small gathering of just Great-Grandma plus everyone in this crazy house* for Thanksgiving and we didn’t really go overboard with the food.

What I thought: We buy more pre-packaged food than I think.

What I found: Interestingly enough we don’t buy that much pre-packaged food. But when we do it gets eaten twice as fast as the made from scratch equivalent. Even in review I’m not certain why that happens? I also noticed that if I am shopping shortly after a meal or after giving the boys a snack we are much less likely to come away with impulse purchases. The old “don’t shop when hungry” adage.

What I thought: Our grocery bill hasn’t changed much in the last six months because it’s perpetually a crazy number to feed this family.

What I found: That’s not quite true. In fact many of my regular purchases have crept up a few cents there and a few cents here. I knew food prices had gone up for much of what I don’t buy but I hadn’t really internalized how much they’ve got up for what I DO buy. Additionally we’ve moved to much more brand specific purchasing than in previous years (read:poor college graduates). The brand specific purchases eat away at our budget quickly because we usually don’t look at the price.

Some other random things I made note of:

Coupon clippers I don’t get it. I read through the coupons every week and can only come up with maybe 3 that are actually for food. Most of my cart is raw or unprocessed items which don’t seem to have coupons available. I can however watch for the good coupons for some of our household items and our pet supplies. But even then I am not really clear on how to save any significant amount especially since there is no double coupon day around here.

Our main store for groceries is the best on average price. There is no point to shopping at the other options because their prices are higher on the whole. So cherry-picking the ads is the way to go. I snagged unbleached flour for $1.48 for 5 pounds but did my main shopping at the other store.

The local stores don’t carry enough for you to really “stock up” on a good sale. For instance the above good price on flour I was only able to buy 50 pounds which given that it’s baking season will only really last a month or possibly two. (I average about 5 to 7 pounds of flour a week at the moment – it’s the biscuits and the cinnamon rolls :D ) I’m looking at finding a co-op for bulk orders.

*This crazy house includes: a Grandpa, a Grandma, a Daddy, a Mama, Jr., Lil’B and at the moment an Auntie too. (The boys say we need to also count the 3 dogs, 2 cats, 3 toads and our lovely lady praying mantis who is still with us.)

09.12.2008 musings 4 Comments

Menu Plan Monday

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

Well it’s now officially November so I better get hopping on my big grocery plan. Thus far we’ve (Mr. Numbers and I) have spent $125 at the stores. We’re still crunching the numbers on what it was exactly that we bought especially since Mr. Numbers managed to squeeze everything into just five bags!

First up though is sketching out our menu for this week. My goal is that we will not hit the store again this week and possibly next week except for our perishables that we need. We have a couple things that the store just never has enough so we almost always have to head back to get the amount we needed. Milk is the primary one.

I always flop my days so I’m copying Not Jenny with just listing my meals!

Breakfast (choose any one): Muffins, Oatmeal, Eggs & Toast, Yogurt & Fruit

Lunch (choose any one): Leftovers, Fried Egg Sandwich, PB&J/Cheese Sandwich.

Suppers often roll into lunches as leftovers. I’m keeping that in mind when I cook anymore to try to make that happen more often than not.

Meal 1 roasted potatoes, carrots and roast beef side of applesauce

Meal 2 chicken curry with lentils and flat breads

Meal 3 BBQ Pork Sandwiches, cottage cheese, oranges, sweet potato baked

Meal 4 Beef Tacos, fresh veggies and fruits

Meal 5 Homemade Pizza,

Meal 6 Beans and Ham Stew, Cornbread

Meal 7 Vegetable Beef Stew

03.11.2008 musings 4 Comments

Groceries: A confession

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Amy over at the Foilhat (which appears to be having some technical difficulties) posted recently about her grocery budget, plan and implementation. I was thrilled because I love to talk about food. So I was all set to sit down to discuss our own take on groceries. Then I sighed and realized that first I had to make a confession.

We’ve been making some small changes to our grocery purchasing as in the “what” but we’ve not tackled the money part of groceries very well. And we’ve been making lots of changes in what ends up on the table most nights. But for all our steps forward when it comes to what we are eating, we’re not managing the budget. And if you were to look at our spending (disregarding what we buy) you would quickly see that it kills all the good things we are doing.

Our worst offense has got to be the frequent “run to the store to get a single item but come out with a dozen we didn’t know we needed” problem.

A quick look at our household will show you 4 Adults, 2 Kids with an occasional Auntie. We split the groceries between Grandparents and Parents though we are not very coordinated in our efforts. Though if we are going to the store and the house is out of bread we’ll get it. Same can be said for the Grandparents too. Our typical list will consist of mostly real foods. I’m the lady in the store buying all those beans, flour and oatmeal. I cook mostly from scratch as we’ve developed many issues with commercially processed foods. As much as I like the ease of popping in a boxed pizza, I’ll suffer for it later with heartburn. So we stay away from packaged things as much as we can. We budget $400 dollars a month for food. We figure conservatively that when you include what the Grandparents spend we are near a $600 grocery budget.

My goal for November is to track all the grocery purchases to get a better idea of the overall family purchasing. I’m also working on finding the right combination of store stops to find the best deals on the things we buy. In this last part of October we’re spending some time with our freezers cataloging how much and what we have.

Did you know we had 4 turkeys in the freezer? Me neither and that is a problem.

Planning the menu is an exercise in torture here. We have so many that won’t eat certain things that it is a headache to try to find meals that every one will actually eat. An unfortunate home truth is that we have TWO meal plans – the grandparents are mostly separate except for the fact that they aren’t. When we do plan for the number who eat to include them they inevitabley do not eat. If we plan a special (read expensive) meal just of us then we will of course have a few more mouths to feed. I don’t think it is on purpose but it is frustrating to try to plan meals when there is that level of chaos in play.

Nonetheless I’m trying to really plan or more precisely I’m trying not to eat out. Our budget is fried this month with vacation so it’s somewhat a necessity that we be home for the next few weeks as much as we can.

So we’ll see how this next month goes. I’m planning on continuing to catalog how things have gone. If for nothing else so I can look back to show my boys how awfully hard I worked to feed them when they were picky and small!

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21.10.2008 musings 1 Comment