The price of ground beef is insane.
There are plenty of reasons why this is, but at $7 a pound, it’s definitely no longer the kind of convenience food you can just pick up when you need it or wait until it pops up on special, and you can only freeze it for so long — so what happens when the price of food goes up, available assistance goes down, and you’re trying to feed a family?
Grocery shopping is going to have to change a little.
The cost of groceries is rising more slowly than it has over the last few years, but it’s still up more than 3% over last year, and while retailers are competing to keep your Thanksgiving meal under $40, it’s pretty clear that this will be a tighter holiday season than in previous years — and tighter still if the government can’t get its act together and pass a continuing resolution to fund the government before November 7, when programs like SNAP are due to run out of cash.
This isn’t the time to debate food policy, though, it’s a time to change habits. So here are few things I’ve found that have kept grocery budgets low for our family (besides setting a budget).
Before Hitting the Grocery Store
Unfortunately for those of us who aren’t planners, keeping grocery costs low requires some measure of aforethought. The best advice to keeping costs low is making a meal plan in advance, creating a shopping list, and sticking to it, hell or high water.
Plan Your Meals: This seems more complicated than it is. Sit down on Sunday and just…figure out what you’re eating for the week. This includes all meals, but you should focus on making only one meal truly a revolving cuisine. Breakfasts and lunches can be automatized with a limited menu, so long as you don’t have too many family limitations, like allergies.
Breakfast for us is cereal, bagels, or toast, with eggs and milk or juice. Lunch is a sandwich or “toddler tapas,” which is just a meat, a cheese, and a fruit on a plate. Dinner is where we switch it up.
Set a Budget: This doesn’t have to be low, but don’t make it achievable without work. Ours is $150 per week, and I give myself permission to go above that by about $25-40 if something needs refilling, or I need a spice I don’t have or a speciality ingredient. That number doesn’t count things like paper goods or laundry detergent; I have a separate budget for things that need constant replenishment. If I go below that, I buy something fancy for dessert or I stock up on something my pantry is missing, even if I don’t need it that week.
Stick to Your Plan: At one point, I was wondering what was destroying my carefully curated meal plan and budget — and it turns out I was getting to mid-week and deciding, at about 4pm at night, that I didn’t feel like cooking, at which point I just ordered takeout. A quick assessment of that strategy showed I was spending at least as much on takeout per week as I was spending on every other meal.
Stock Your Pantry: This is one of those “broken record” things for me, but a once-in-forever splurge to make sure you have basic things like flour, sugar, dried pasta, spices and seasonings, cooking oil, milk, eggs, butter, and baking necessities on hand will save you a lot of time, energy, and money in the long term. Even if you aren’t following my instructions to the letter, look at what you’ve got on your weekly menu, and, if there’s room in your budget, stock one major thing. Rice, for example, is cheap, and if stored properly can last forever. A $25 bag can, if you’re not a member of my household, keep you in food for months.
If you have a master pantry list, you can also stock what’s on sale when it’s very cheap. Kroger, for example, sometimes lowers the price of its dried pasta from $1.25 to $.75, a significant enough reduction that stocking up makes sense.
Declare Your Grocery Loyalty: I hate Kroger. I hate it. But it’s my store. Loyalty to one grocery store breeds savings, and that sometimes means you have to make sacrifices. With Kroger, you earn fuel points, but there’s also weekly “super saver deals” that appear in the app on Sunday and help to dictate what I plan to make that week. These are deep discounts that are available only to people who use their app and loyalty program, and the circulars are available one week early on Kroger’s app, so you can plan ahead better.
Just never use the Kroger custom bakery. There might be a trick to actually getting a decent cake out of their system but I haven’t found it. I, on the other hand, has inferior cake, but better decorators. Publix has the perfect mix of good cake and good decorators, but not everyone is lucky enough to have a Publix.
At the Store
Embrace Humility: I’m not saying you have to shop at Aldi all the time, but I am saying that their produce is great, their deli meat is fine, their packaged meat is cheap, and their frozen food is great. You don’t have to live in the “generic brand” space forever, but if you’re in a spot where things are tight, it does save you money — so long as you stay out of the center Aisle of Shame, where they stock a bunch of stuff you don’t know you don’t need.
You can get one pair of novelty fuzzy socks and that’s it.
Shop Unit Price: Sometimes bigger is better, sometimes you do fine buying individually portioned items. For most groceries, though, you need to read the fine print to figure it out. Most grocery store shelf labels have something on it that looks like a series of numbers — $.40/oz or similar— listed as an “avg. unit price.” That tells you how much you’re getting for what you’re paying. Bigger boxes sometimes have lower unit prices than smaller boxes, and if that unit price makes the product cheaper, you’re getting a better value.
Use Coupons and the circular: Shopping with coupons, especially in the digital age, makes shopping a much cheaper activity, especially if you’re preparing your list from a meal plan you’ve made based on what’s on sale at your store.
Buy Generic (Sometimes): For a lot of stuff, the generic version isn’t really better or worse than the name-brand version. I find that my kids prefer certain things, usually the flavor, when it comes to name-brand snacks, chips, and drinks, but for the most part, the differences are subtle, especially if you’re buying packaged or pre-prepared food.
There are slight differences between generic and name brand when it comes to ingredients, especially items used in baking. Get the best flour, butter, sugar, and salt that you can afford — King Arthur, Land O’Lakes, C&H sugar, and Diamond Crystal, if you can. Mot of these items are also sold in bulk. Because cooking is biology, ingredient quality doesn't always impact the final product. You can always add more salt or use a different olive oil. Since baking is a more exact science, like chemistry, quality ingredients do matter.
And Then, There’s What You Do At Home
Shop Mostly for Pickup: I have a very serious problem with buying things I don’t need when I treat grocery shopping as a hobby. I love shopping, and grocery shopping is no exception. And it’s not what I buy or what I spend money on; it’s just the thrill of the hunt, which often means that I buy unnecessary things to “try” or pre-packaged food that’s on sale, or an inferior product because it’s been cleverly marketed. For me, limiting myself to shopping for pickup or delivery ensures I stick to my plan and my budget.
Alternatively, shop around the edges of the store. This is an oldie but a goodie: the “edges” or walls of most grocery stores have what you need to survive — produce, meat, dairy, eggs. If you stick to shopping that, you’ll shop mostly ingredients. I don’t follow this practice, but if you have a habit of buying lots of prepackaged and ultra processed foods, it could really change your life.
Stock Your Pantry and Cook from Scratch: I’m not saying you have to make everything, but avoiding pre-packaged, pre-cooked, and individually portioned meals does bring the cost of food down. It also allows you to control portion size, and gives you the luxury of leftovers, even if your house is like ours and they never get eaten, but instead stand testament, in the refrigerator, to our belief that one day we will change our ways.
It’s also healthier for you; there’s a lot of talk about seed oils and whatever, but the truth is that you can just control what goes in your body better when you’re seeing what goes into your food. This isn’t to make anyone feel bad — I use Cream of Mushroom Soup and my kids like Kraft macaroni and cheese far better than my homemade stuff — just that you’re spending a lot more money to buy pre-packaged and getting a lot less, both in terms of quality, and in terms of value.
Avoid Grocery Clubs and Online Delivery Services: Look, I fell for Misfit Market. I love those grocery ordering services that let you buy weird stuff for slightly cheaper than the stores and have it delivered to your doorstep so you can put it in your pantry and never use it. But let’s be real: most of us buy way more than we need with services like Misfit and Thrive, and we buy overpriced products in smaller qualities with higher unit prices just because we think they’re novel and “healthier.”
Those companies, as well as “grocery delivery trucks,” mostly get overstocked items or factory seconds, and then sell those same items at retail prices rather than the appropriate discount. Many offer produce out of season, or in bulk but in unusable quantities, creating food waste. These companies — and even Trader Joe’s (SORRY) — also count on consumers to buy lots of things they don’t really want or need, just because the label looks cool or the flavors are interesting, passing the cost of food waste onto the consumer.
Sometimes you’ll get a deal, if food is just changing labels, or you happen to like the blackberry-peach-pepper jam that didn’t sell to big box retailers. But it’s rare.
Whatever you do, don’t panic. High prices aren’t forever (probably!) and the government will get back to work eventually — there’s simply no way to avoid it. We’re stuck with Washington, DC, unless it floats away into the Atlantic, and then that’s all we’d hear about anyway.
To make my weekly menu planning easier when our kids were growing up I assigned a certain protein to each day of the week. For example, Sunday was a roast, Tuesday and Saturdays were chicken, Wednesdays were spaghetti (a meal I knew everyone would eat), Thursday was vegetarian, Friday was ground meat (usually ground turkey) or pizza. That gave me a guide as I looked up recipes for the month. I knew what I had to take out of the freezer in the morning. I posted the menu along with the name of the cookbook and the page number for the recipe. When I went back to work full time, the kids could start the main course. I am a huge fan of casseroles and “one pot” meals..
The Balboa Ave in San Diego Aldi location does not list a phone number. Is this standard with Aldi? It seems an odd place to trim costs. Because of this article, I was willing to drive 20 minutes to check them out. Discovering they have no phone has considerably cooled my enthusiasm.