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Bulk Buys
Bulk buying can be a huge help in cutting your budget while still keeping all of the needed staples available. Using bulk-buying techniques, you can save 10-90%, depending on the item you are purchasing. Good candidates for bulk buying include staples, grains, baking needs, maple syrup, kitchen supplies, canned goods and more.
Spices
I purchase one-pound bags of the spices I use most often to keep the price as low as possible. We can easily go through a pound of onion powder or garlic granules, paprika, cinnamon, cumin and other spices that see a lot of use in our household before it goes bad. Other spices, we split with other group members. The cost savings is quite significant, to the point that I’d still save money even if I threw out half of the bag for many of these spices, but so far I haven’t had to throw anything out.
Bay leaf is close to a 90% savings, but you need to have multiple families to go in with you, since a one-pound bag is incredibly gigantic. I can purchase one pound of bay leaves for $12.90, which is 57 cups of bay leaves, or I can purchase a jar of bay leaves, which is .15 ounces, for $4.88. Even if you wind up throwing out half of your supply of bay leaves after a couple of years, you’re still well ahead financially. However, bay leaves, like most spices, gradually fade, so you would just need to increase the number of leaves you’re putting into the food to get the same flavor profile.
The drawback is that Frontier does have a minimum order of $250 to get free shipping. Since Frontier carries many items outside of spices and herbs, it is quite easy to meet that minimum if you form a group. I run our co-op group and we place an order every 3-4 months so we can hit the $250 minimum.
Grains
Bulk purchases of grains from the grower, or even directly from the health food store, can also save. I’ve found some cases, such as whole sorghum, where buying directly from the grower saves 75% or more of the cost of the grains, even when you factor in shipping. A sealed, 5-gallon bucket of sorghum might cost me $40 to have shipped to my house, but if I purchased the same amount of whole sorghum in one-pound bags, I would pay over $110 at the local store.
Even if you’re not willing to order things online and your only option is a local health food store, ask them if they would give you a 10% or more discount over the bulk bin prices if you purchased a 25-pound bag (or whatever size the item comes in). This tactic can still build up your pantry, all while cutting your food budget. For grains, we do one bulk order a year, saving us as much as 75% off the price of some of the items compared to our local health food store. I found that if I ran a big order for multiple families for grains, even when I pay shipping from Bob’s Red Mill to my door, we still come out significantly ahead. It only took me a little time to gather the orders and break the orders up when they arrived on my doorstep. This minimizes the shipping cost per pound, which maximizes the savings.
Beef
When I purchase a whole cow and divide it among a couple of families, I can get all of my beef for around $4.50 a pound, just a little over the local price of decent, organic ground beef that runs $4 a pound. However, my beef isn’t just organic, it’s also pastured. 🙂 I’m basically paying fifty cents extra a pound for the pastured ground beef, BUT I’m also getting steaks, ribs, roasts and other cuts for that same $4.50 a pound price. Since many organic (but not pastured) steaks can go for $15+ here, that’s a good deal.
No, steaks aren’t necessary, but when times are tight, having steak at a ground beef price can be a major morale booster that makes life more bearable when you don’t have any other luxuries. Being able to do a really great steak for Christmas dinner when my husband was unemployed and we were having a very small Christmas with a very tight budget was a major morale boost. It allowed me to relax and enjoy the day, instead of being worried about our financial situation.
Bulk Storage
Then I take it a step further and when fresh produce hits its rock bottom prices, I begin purchasing extra to dehydrate, can, freeze or otherwise store for the times it is not available fresh and in-season. We’ll talk about that more coming up in this series.
The down-side to bulk purchasing anything is that you do have to factor in the time and equipment needed for processing or storing the items. However, after running the math, I found that many things, such as a grain mill and dehydrator, would pay for themselves in a year or less under normal use when compared to having to continually purchase food at the store. In some cases, such as the canned tomato products, it would be even healthier due to the lack of additives in the home-made products.
Prepared
Another up-side to this way of doing meals is that when something does happen, such as a big emergency that both eats up your emergency fund and chews down into your monthly budget, you can easily slash or even eliminate your grocery budget all-together and go to only consuming your pantry. In the last year, when our emergency fund was really being stretched and we were working hard to meet all of our bills on time, it was really nice to be able to drop my grocery bill to under $100 (which only covered raw milk and eggs) to keep from having to touch the emergency fund and meet all of our bills on time without worry. This method is one of the ways we have gone through unemployment for two of the last three years without ever having one late bill or house payment. It also allowed us to keep from spending our emergency fund- we just ate off of what we had instead of continuing to purchase groceries, then when money loosened up later, we replaced the items we had used.
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I’ve menu planned this way for years, and for the same reasons – the places I shop don’t publish sales flyers. It’s just easier to shop, then plan.
I see you are near Asheville. Where is the salvage you are speaking of? We are in that area a few times a year. Btw, I love this method of meal planning, and storing pantry items in bulk makes a lot of sense!
Amy, I use two Salvages. One is Amazing Savings, the other one is Dickie’s. Both are chains. Amazing Savings has a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/AmazingSavingsMarkets
I absolutely agree… the only way to menu plan.
Hi KerryAnn,
This may be obvious to everyone else but what is the salvage?
Also, you mentioned the Frontier co-op. Do you have any advice on how to start a co-op? I live in the desert southwest and haven’t found many options.
Thanks for the wonderful article.
Lorri, the salvage is a grocery store that sells salvaged products. For example, it might be close to being out of date, or it might have one corner of the box dented or the label on a can might be torn. Look in your phone book under ‘salvage’ or ‘salvage house’ or ‘discount grocer’ to see if you can find one locally.
To start a co-op, check out http://www.frontiercoop.com/wholesale They require a $250 minimum order to get free shipping, but in a small group, that isn’t difficult to do.
I love this in theory, but in reality, it doesn’t work for us. We come home from the store, think of all sorts of things we want to make from it, only have half the ingredients, and end up ordering out (if we have the money) or eating plain pasta or rice and beans (if we don’t). If I’m in a hurry, I need to meal plan before I get to the store or I get overwhelmed. On the other hand, if I’ve got time to shop alone (because the kids chattering wrecks my concentration), I can sit down and revise the meal plan once I get there. Nothing’s set in stone until it’s paid for. Of course, a lot of that is counting on wifi to search for nice looking recipes, since I’m criminally indecisive and scatterbrained.
Sandra, the trick is to keep all of those ingredients you don’t have in stock to make the meals you want to in your pantry already. Buy ahead, not when you need the item. Once you switch to doing that, you figure out how to only shop during the sales for those items and your food bill will start dropping.
I understand that, but it hasn’t been an option for a while. After Gary lost his job, our stockpile of staples dwindled. That’s on the top of the list for when he has a job again!
I shop on Thursday afternoons. One of my tricks is having dinner on Thursday already planned (and preferably working in the oven or crockpot) while I’m out shopping. Then, it’s easy on Thursday evening to sit down after the kids go to bed and make up my plan for the next week. I rotate through the same protein on the same nights of the week. Sunday is always fish, Friday is always chicken, Tuesday is red meat, etc. Last, I make basically the same meals regularly instead of always looking for something new to do with a particular food item. For example, I have a basic vegetable curry recipe; several nights a week, I will make that curry, using whatever mix of vegetables I currently have available. A roast chicken every friday night, although I mix up the seasonings in that chicken regularly. If you always make pizza on Saturday nights and you always have a pork roast for Sunday dinner, it’s a lot faster and simpler when it’s time to sit down and menu plan. 🙂
Visiting from Raising Homemakers. . .
Thanks for all the great “black-belt” tips for pantry cooking. I’ve used this method for a long time, and it is far more economical for our family. You had several tips I haven’t seen. I like the watch list idea especially.
One technique I use from when I was brand new to reverse planning is to have a theme for each night: (Italian, French, Chinese, Mexican, Vegetarian, Pizza,Hot Sandwiches, Soup & Salad, Crockpot, Grill Out) so that I can use any type of meat or veg, but still have a framework so I don’t repeat.
Rebecca recently posted..Preparing To Plant!
I plan this way, too! I’m not quite as good at getting everything I need in a once-a-week trip, but luckily there is a supermarket on my way home from work (literally, I just get off the bus two stops early and then walk home from the store) so I can pick up an extra ingredient if necessary. The trick is just keeping a lot of things in stock, buying a variety of stuff, and being willing to swap some ingredients.
I’m sorry to hear you lost all your chickens to a predator–that must have been horrifying to discover! 🙁
‘Becca recently posted..Four Weeks of Pesco-Vegetarian Dinners (early spring)
Statistics show that the majority of households rotate among only 15 of the same meals – that saved me some consternation knowing that my “limited” cycle of family favorites wasn’t outside the norm. Takes pressure off thinking that I “should” be constantly coming up with new, fancy dishes to tantalize the family!!
Excellent article, KerryAnn! I do many of the same things, particularly with keeping the staples stocked. I’m definitely going to share this with my readers. You provide so much helpful info, as you always do! Blessings, Kelly
Kelly @ The Nourishing Home recently posted..Favorite Mother’s Day Breakfast Recipes
Terrific advice. I follow some of these steps, such as buying beef and pork directly from the rancher, keeping our own chickens, shopping the farmers market, some bulk purchases, etc. But we don’t plan menus, just meals. We take meat out of the freezer for the next day and figure out what to do with it. We use homemade stock for soup (sometimes thawed from the freezer because I usually freeze half a batch) and also to reheat leftovers. There are just two of us and we work long hours, so we are very familiar with leftovers. We also keep lots of pantry staples around. Our local grocery store has introduced its own line of dried herbs and spices, and for a huge amount, at least twice what normal spices cost, it’s usually only $3.99. If something gets too old, I feed it to the chickens. (Between chickens, goats and dogs, there is little to go in the compost, much less to be wasted.)
We still manage to shop just a couple of times a week. Just getting to town is 6 miles round trip (and to our favorite health food store with great produce, it’s 20 minutes each way) so we do combine errands and minimize trips. At least I’m not commuting to work anymore!
Thanks for some new ideas.
I meal plan this way, too, and always have! I have always kept a well-stocked pantry with extras of all the items I use to make my usual recipes. It takes up some space, but that is space well-used. I don’t do salvage – we have been blessed with financial good times and I don’t want to interfere with someone else being able to buy what they need there. What items we can get for significantly less at Costco we do. What we save there on coffee alone pays for the gas we use to get there and back.
When you are cooking Real Food you soon discover that coupons and sale items are most often for things you have no interest in buying.
rhiamom recently posted..In Search of Perfect Beef Brisket
Thank you for your choice on salvage. We are currently living on a shoestring budget (for the US) and really, really need that break to make our budget work.
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I run into the same problem Sandra mentioned. To a large degree, I do this. But if I try to use this as my primary/only method of planning, then I get home and find that to make THIS meal, there’s one other ingredient I need. To make THAT meal, there’s this other thing…or I make sure we’re stocked on sour cream and it molds in the back of the fridge because we NEVER needed it all, and then when I DO need it, we don’t have it.
I prefer to make an actual menu plan before I head to the store, but start by planning around what we already have.