The Benefit of Shopping Around

Photo by: Ruthanne Reid, Flickr.com

If you’re on a budget and you want to buy natural food instead of pre-packaged junk, you’re going to have to use some ingenuity to make it work. You may already be using coupons and sales to save on regular food, and that’s great! The benefits you’re already seeing from being a smart, frugal shopper can be multiplied several times when healthy food is involved. Not only can the prices on some of these items be, well, astronomical, but the difference in prices between stores could blow your mind. Shopping around can save you a huge amount of money.  

Let me illustrate. Almond flour at the store where I shop most often was a whopping $11.00/pound! I love almond flour, and it packs extra protein and good fats into a lot of hidden places, but that was just plain out of my budget, so we went without. In the meantime, however, I began checking around at other stores. After awhile, I scored big time by finding some priced at $4.00/pound.

Another example: vanilla. A lot of vanillas contain added corn syrup, so I began looking around for a pure vanilla. Here's what I found: Store #1: 2 ounces of pure vanilla for $10.00. Um, that would be a big fat no. Store #2: $5.00 for 4 ounces. Better, but still not good enough. Store #3: 16 ounces of pure vanilla for $6.88! Now, that’s more like it!

These are the kinds of price differences you might find if you do your homework and take the time to compare. The problem is, who has time to drive around between a bunch of stores comparing everything, especially ingredients that might be unfamiliar? This chore gets even more time consuming and frustrating when you have to drag one or more children with you through the stores. It’s enough to make a person just give up!

So, how can busy families actually find the best prices without making grocery shopping become an unpaid second job? Below are some tips that have worked for our family. They’re by no means exhaustive, and you’ll have to find what works for you, but hopefully they’ll give you some ideas to get you started!

Start small. When we first started buying different food, we only shopped at two stores. It was fairly easy to compare prices between the two. If a particular item was too much at both stores, we just didn’t buy it. If it was a necessary ingredient for a particular recipe, we either found a substitute or didn’t make that recipe. There were a lot of times when I came out of the store with several items not checked off my list, because the price was simply more than we could do. Later, we added more stores and began to increase the amount of healthy products we could buy as we continued to find better prices.

Use online options. I’ve been really surprised at the amount of grocery items I’ve been able to buy online for very competitive prices. Sometimes Amazon beats my local grocery stores’ prices and sometimes they don’t, but it’s very little effort to just look up a few prices online before you head out to the brick and mortar grocery store.

Check the buy-in-bulk stores, like Sam’s and Costco. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find several items for fabulous prices at Sam’s, like organic berries, raw almonds, organic spinach leaves, several spices, and pure maple syrup.

Work shopping into your schedule. Instead of planning a giant shopping trip where I have to stop at multiple stores, I now plan shopping into my week and enlist my husband to help me. It only takes a few minutes for him to stop by one store on his way home from work. I also plan trips to different stores based on the places I’ll already be going that week. The longer you do this, the more natural it will become. You'll probably find, over time, that most of your items can be found at one main store, and then you'll have a few items sprinkled around between several other stores. It's not really that inconvenient to quickly stop by one of these stores to pick up one or two items if you'll already be going past it.

Watch for sales. At first, I thought I would never again be privy to great sales because I was buying more “alternative” food, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Even organic and natural food goes on sale! When I hit the store, I always swing by the organic produce section first. Whatever is on sale is the fruit we get that week. I also quickly run through the health food aisles and watch for unexpected sales. If I see a product on sale that I know we’ll use, I go ahead and stock up.

Use store brands. Again, big surprise for me when I noticed that some of my favorite stores carried their own generic brands of things like organic kidney and black beans (with no added syrups or sugars), organic tomato paste, whole wheat pasta, organic dairy products, and more. These options definitely keep me within my budget, and they often don’t cost much more. This weekend, the price difference between a bag of regular baby carrots and organic ones was 20 cents. No sales—those were just the regular prices.

Give yourself time. You’ll eventually memorize which items are the best buy at which stores and will fall into a routine of stopping by to pick them up, but at first, it might be inconvenient and seem overwhelming. As with anything else, be patient, take it one step at a time, and don’t give up.

Looking for additional ways to save? Check out Ten Tips for Eating Healthy on a Budget.

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