Food Futures: Can Your Pantry and Freezer Save You Money?

This is a guest post from Funny About Money, one of my favorite personal finance blogs. Her food futures project has fascinated me since the day she first posted about it.

I’m very flattered that Carrie invited me to write a guest post for It’s Frugal Being Green, one of my favorite personal finance blogs. Carrie asked if I would give you an update on my “food futures” project, wherein I bought a freezer and stocked up on three months of meat, frozen veggies, beans, rice, pasta, staples, and household goods. The dual goals were a) to save on food and household supplies by purchasing in bulk and on sale, and b) to reduce the number of trips to grocery and warehouse stores.

This project got under way on February 22. It’s now July. So…how well is it working? Or is it working at all?

Well, one of the things you need to know is that food is a big-ticket item for me. I don’t go out to eat, I don’t spend on clothes, I don’t travel, I don’t go to movie theaters or live concerts, I have no expensive hobbies. But I do love to cook and I love to eat well. So, I buy the best I can afford (Costco meats, which run about the same as most grocery stores, but are far better than anything available in our supermarkets), and because I don’t eat processed foods, few cents-off coupons apply to my purchases. Also, I fold wine and beer into the grocery bill—and I drink a couple glasses of wine or a bottle of Corona almost every day.

In February, when I began the stocking-up project, the grocery bill racked up $570.39. I had figured that grubstaking the project with three months’ worth of products would cost around $250, and I planned to pay for that from a savings account that holds money for various indulgences. Since the January bill came to $330.99, it looks like that was a pretty accurate guess.

In January, I made 15 grocery trips. In March, I made nine. This didn’t come anywhere close to my goal, which was to cut grocery-store junkets to no more than two a month. But it still was an improvement over the previous habit.

In March, the overall bill was about the same as January’s: $331. So, even though I made fewer trips to the store, no significant savings occurred. However, during March I continued to stockpile goods. This means that the amount I was spending on food I actually ate must have dropped, since many of my purchases went into storage. In April, I bought a great deal of beef, chicken, lamb, and fish plus a bottle of Maker’s Mark at Costco, racking up a $220 bill in one dizzying trip. This brought April’s total to $407. Again, if you subtract an estimated $250 stockpile bill from the groceries I bought for immediate consumption, you see that amount drop to $157.

Building a complete stock of freezable, canned, and dried foods cost significantly more than I expected: over the course of four months, I spent about $665 on the project. However, once the food was on hand, the monthly cost of groceries dropped markedly. In June, for example, my total grocery cost was $276.66: only about $70 a week!

This is amazingly low, given my high-toned eating habits.

It develops that the food futures scheme has three sources of high costs:

• Meat (including poultry and fish)
• Coffee (I’m very picky about coffee)
• Alcohol

Obviously, if one were to get off the sauce, the cost of booze would go away instantly. IMHO, however, there’s a limit to the degree of asceticism I can tolerate, and foregoing a glass of wine with dinner goes beyond that pale. Fine vintages in the $8 to $10 range are to be had at Trader Joe’s, Costco, and Cost Plus (World Market); for the time being, this is affordable. As for coffee: right now I’m buying an expensive variety of espresso from my favorite overpriced purveyor of gourmet chow. When my job ends in December, I’ll switch to Costco’s French roast, almost as good and stunningly cheaper. And meat? I’m not cutting corners on that. The trick is to buy enough at one time to last for a couple of months, and then not eat so much of it. One ribeye or sirloin strip steak gets cut into three pieces, each of which satisfies me for a meal.

Once all your supplies are stashed in the freezer and pantry, you can replenish as you go when you find products on sale. That’s where the “food futures” ideas kicks in: you’re stocking up for the future with items found on sale now, or betting that inflation will drive up present prices.

A week ago, for example, what should I find at Safeway but chuck roast at $1.27 a pound! I had the butcher convert about a ton of it into hamburger. Fresh-ground chuck or round roast is far superior to the best burger you’ll find on the grocery-store meat counter, and $1.27 was a far cry from the $2.25 to $3.15 Safeway was asking for hamburger that day. The freezer now holds enough premium hamburger to last me and the dog for the rest of our days!

So how is the food futures project working? At least in the most recent month, it seems to have worked quite well.

Apparently the tricks are first to get your basic supply into the house, and then to keep a firm grip on spending by shopping only with grocery lists, by routinely purchasing certain goods where you know you can get them cheapest, by replenishing or adding to the stock with sale items, and by limiting the number of shopping trips as best as you can.

A list is crucial. The most effective way to keep grocery shopping under control is to know what you need, write it down, and buy those things and only those things while you’re in the store. I keep a running list of items that need to be replenished, estimate how much of the item is needed for the short term and how much for a three-month supply, and then, using Word’s Table > Sort function, I organize each list by my first and second choices of stores.

I’m glad I started this project eleven months before my job ends. Without an income, it would be difficult to come up with the several hundred bucks needed to grubstake the stockpile. You could do it, but building the base supply might take a lot longer.

Over the next few months, we’ll see how this shakes out. As goals, I’d like to make fewer shopping trips and to keep the routine grocery budget to under $200 a month. Time will tell!

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