Grocery diary, in detail
How much do those slow cooker meals really cost?
This whole ‘Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy’ enterprise is built on a spreadsheet I’ve been using for four and a half years to track our food spending. Earlier this month, for one week, I took it a step further (why yes, it is possible to get even more obsessive about tracking food and money!). I wrote a Grocery Diary for TheKitchn, and as part of that I wrote down what we ate every day for a week, and how much we spent on food. I don’t typically do a large weekly grocery shop, so some of what we ate that week was food I had bought days, weeks, or even months before the official grocery diary period. But because I had my glorious spreadsheet, I could work out exactly how much the food we ate in that week cost. For everything we ate that week, I checked the spreadsheet for how much I spent on the item, and then figured out the cost per serving (for example, by going to the container of quick-cook oats to see what a serving size was and how many servings were in the container). The editor at TheKitchn (wisely) decided that they didn’t need this level of detail for the Grocery Diary, but since this newsletter has been, from its inception, about food spending detail you didn’t know you needed, I’m putting it here. Think of it as a companion or appendix to the Grocery Diary.
Total spent on groceries: $125.46
Eating out total: $136.38
Total spent on food this week (groceries plus eating out): $261.84
Total cost of food eaten (bought over the past few months, not just during this week, and including meals eaten out but NOT food we didn’t pay for): $321.89
Food we didn’t pay for: $25 gift card to the bakery, $22.20 at a sandwich shop on 6 June 2023, $15.58 at a bakery on 1 June 2023, $11.54 on coffee at a cafe on 6 June 2023 ($74.32 total), plus one dinner at my in-laws
This was a pretty typical week for us. My husband was home for the whole week (no travel), there were three meals that were eaten out (bakery, Vietnamese, pizza — all of our usual haunts), one meal at my in-laws (since construction started, we’ve been eating dinner there about once a fortnight), some cooking, one easy packaged meal, and some leftovers.
If you look at the cost of the food eaten that week, you’ll see it was about $321, but we only spent $125 on groceries and $136 on eating out — about $60 of what we ate during that first week in June was food that we already had at home. There is a lot of ‘rollover’ food, and it makes me wonder how easy it would be to truly budget for food expenditure if you need to factor in things you use but purchase in bulk. How do people who do a lot of their grocery shopping at Costco figure out how much they spend on food? This question is what led me to starting the spreadsheet back in 2019, and I’m not sure if I’m that much closer to an answer.
The cost-per-day amounts were interesting too. The day with the lowest amount was 6 June, at $8.83. This was because the food was mostly leftovers (so the amount was already factored in on earlier days that week), and two sandwiches that were expensed. The most expensive days were the days that included eating out ($65.34 and $109.68). On average, we spent about $35–45 a day on food if we cook at home and aren’t eating leftovers. This works out to be about $2.90–3.75 per person per meal — the most averagey average of all (technical term; apologies to any economists and mathematicians reading this).
One of the things I was curious about and could finally work out was how much it cost to make one of the slow cooker meals I’ve been cooking so much of late. The ingredients of the lentil minestrone cost $19.67 and it made about twelve serves, so that meal cost about $1.64 per serve. The spaghetti cost $21.77 and it also made about twelve serves, so that comes to about $1.81 per serve. Which isn’t bad considering I’m using the ‘fancy’ Rancho Gordo beans and lentils for the minestrone and pasture-raised beef from Farm Foods for the spaghetti. Cooking from scratch, even using more expensive ingredients, is so much cheaper than buying pre-prepared meals or eating out. Pre-prepared meals from Trader Joe’s, Vons, and Costco end up being about $5–6 per person (because the serving sizes listed on the packets are often overly optimistic about how little someone eats, so that thing that supposedly serves six actually only serves three). Eating out at a fast casual restaurant (takeaway) usually comes to about $12 per person. Eating out at a dine-in restaurant can easily be $20 per person after you include the tip.
So here we are. After four and a half years of tracking food spending, a very granular look at exactly what we eat in a week and how much it cost. Now back to your regular programming (plain old food spending tracking). And after working out these numbers, and knowing the cost of the lentil minestrone and spaghetti, especially when I compare it to other meals, all I can say is this: thank goodness for the slow cooker.