A Look at 10 Smart Ways to Save Money on Food

Every day, we find ourselves spending more money on food. A recent report showed that most foods, including meats and vegetables, are rising across the country.

As a result, more people today are spending a good percentage of their monthly salaries on food while millions of others are using food stamps.

If you regularly find yourself spending more money on food than you had budgeted, here are a few ways to help you out.

Just Cook

Recently, a lot of companies have come up with a way to make it easy for you to order food. Meal kit companies like Blue Apron and Plated, and meal delivery companies like GrubHub are delivering millions of food per day.

Also, restaurant companies are opening thousands of stores countrywide. They are doing all this because of the rising demand of their meal services.

However, ordering meals from restaurants and eating out is expensive. On average, you can prepare more than three meals using the funds you spend to buy a meal at your favorite restaurant.

The good thing about cooking is, you will make more food, which you can refrigerate to eat more times. Also, using freely available recipes, you can prepare world-class meals at the comfort of your home.

Buy Your Groceries

Meal kit companies like Blue Apron and Plated deliver to you unprepared recipes for a fixed price every week.

One of the most common complaints about these companies is about the quantity they deliver. Most people complain that the groceries they provide are not enough for them.

Research finds that meal kit companies are more expensive and less fulfilling than doing your own shopping. To save on money, I recommend that you go to the neighborhood food market and buy your own groceries.

To save on time, you can buy these groceries in bulk during the weekend and refrigerate them.

Buy Ugly Vegetables

We all love the beauty of the vegetables we see at the grocery stores.

Here is the truth. Most grocery stores carefully select the most beautiful vegetables and discard the ugly ones. The ugly vegetables are just as good as the ones we see in the stores.

As a customer, you can save on your groceries by buying the ugly vegetables. Companies like Imperfect Produce and Hungry Harvest purchase ugly produce from farmers and sells them directly to its customers. On average, the customers save between 30% and 50%.

Pack Your Lunches

Most people who use GrubHub are employed people who order food to their offices. On average, most employees in large cities like New York and California buy lunches during their lunch breaks.
If you do this, one way you can save your money is to pack your lunch and eat it during the lunch break. In a city like New York, the average price of a meal is about $48. This means, on average, you spend almost $200 every week on lunch.

By carrying your own lunch to the office, you can save more than $10,000 annually on lunches alone.

Finish Your Food

According to the USDA, between 30% and 40% of all the food supplied in the country goes to waste.

Every time you pour your leftovers to the garbage can, you are wasting valuable resources. A good way to deal with this is always to prepare and serve the food you can finish.

A common challenge comes in a family setting where the kids or their father have the habit of not finishing their food.
To solve this, you can start a policy on self-service where everyone serves the food they can complete. By doing this, experts believe you can save more than 10% of your total food costs.

Stop Paying for Names

A while back, we stood in a Walmart store with a camera and a mic. We wanted to know why people buy name brands like Unilever, while inches away, a similar product sold for much less.
The common answers among the shoppers were, ‘we have always bought this brand’ and ‘if this costs more, then it’s better’.

The reality is, for most products, expensive does not always mean its better. A few years ago, a young man used the shaving blades to explain this. He started a company to sell shaving blades directly to the customers, undercutting Gillette, which is the market leader.

A few years later, Unilever came knocking and bought the entire company for a billion dollars.

Another reality is, large companies spend billions on marketing while small, unknown brands spend none of that.

Therefore, when you are paying more for nationally renowned cooking oil, you are paying for the strategic place they have on the shop and the marketing dollars they spend.

Buy in Bulk

In a local store, a packet of King Arthur Organic Unbleached Bread Flour (80 Oz) sells for $10 while a bigger one (400 Oz) sells for $40.

Companies do this to give customers a choice between paying more for one and paying less for more.

Research shows that you can save a significant chunk of money if you buy groceries in bulk. Also, using a site like Jet.com, which is owned by Walmart, your price will drop the more you shop.

Stop Buying Bottled Water

In 2013, ABC challenged renowned doctors and scientists to do a thorough analysis between bottled water and tap water.

Before the experiment, the hypothesis was that bottled water is much better than tap water. In the end, they found that this was not the case. In other words, bottled water was not any better than regular tap water.

Therefore, if you take the recommended 6 liters of water every day, you can save more than $200 on drinking water every month.

Shop at the Bottom Shelf

The designers of grocery stores are master manipulators. They use science to strategically put expensive items at the eye level of the average consumer.

To save on money when shopping, I recommend that before you put an item on your basket, look at the bottom shelf.

There, you will find items that are of equal quality but at a lower price.

Compare Prices

Research shows that Whole Foods Markets is more expensive than Kroger. This is simply because WFM targets upper-end customers while Krogers target ordinary people.

But, why should a similar product cost more in one store than another?

Truth is this does not make economic sense. To save money, you should instead do your research on your neighborhood stores and find those that sell quality but reasonably priced items.

So, go ahead and try some of these methods. At first, it will be tough, but in the long term, it will all be worth it.