Buy Groceries More Often to Throw Less Money Away

You’ve probably heard that half the world’s food, after being bought by consumers, is thrown out. That’s staggering.

According to one account, the average food bill in Canada is $7,305 / year for a household of two point five.

Now, if half the food is being thrown out, that means that $3652.50 is being literally thrown away. For that amount of money, I could pay off nearly half my consumer debt. That’s ridiculous.

When I first heard this statistic, I vowed to change things in my household at least. We’ve been very careful with our food purchases — so far we’ve tossed out some spinach (we bought too much and it went bad) and some celery (same!).

That’s literally it. We’ve been tracking this since March 1, and that’s all we’ve tossed out. I haven’t done the math, but that comes to like $5, that’s if you’re really liberal with the rounding. That’s .068% of an average Canadian’s annual food bill. I’m disappointed we had to toss out good food, but I’m happy it’s been so little.

Before we moved places and changed up our buying routine, we would do what we called “super shops.” We would go to a huge grocery store, like the all-too Canadian Superstore, and buy a ton of stuff. We’d buy a bunch of vegetables, meat, bread, pastas and stuff — tons of stuff, tons that we didn’t need too. Invariably much of this would end up going bad. We didn’t keep track but we must have tossed out at least a third of all that we bought.

And, I’m noticing, we spent a lot more money. We’d spend about $200 every two weeks, and toss out a third of it. Now we spend a bit less than that and, more importantly, we’re tossing out .068% of it (and that’s if you’re very generous with the rounding). That’s ultimately the key — our dollar is being stretched quite a bit farther because we’re not wasting money. It’s a great place to be.

So, what’s our real trick? We go grocery shopping every other day (sometimes every day, sometimes less often of course).  mapaetzo of The Better Life Project asked some time ago why I went grocery shopping so often, and that’s it.

What usually happens is we’ll pick up some meat for protein and some vegetables; two days later we’ll stock up on more meat, but not veggies because we usually have enough. Another two days pass and we loop the cycle. This means more frequent trips to the grocery store, which isn’t fun, but it does mean shorter trips — we used to spend about an hour on our super shops, and now we spend about five-ten minutes at the grocery store. If we’re doing 7 trips every two weeks (vs the one-hour long one) at ten minutes each, we’re spending more time with our new system but it feels like less time because it’s so spread out.

Of course, the beauty of this is that our fridge usually just has enough food in it for a meal or two, but never more. Foods are never bought in excess and we end up tossing nothing away. Before, with the super shops, 30% of our $200 wound up in the garbage can (that’s about $60). Now, again .068% winds up in the garbage can (so for the same amount of purchases, that’s a full 13.6 cents. That’s nothing.

Frequenting the market more often takes extra time, but the cost and food savings are there and they’re huge. It also helps to clamp down on impulse buying (I can only buy what I can carry home, too) and makes you fully aware of what is in your fridge. I’m not at home right now, but I can tell you in my fridge I have:

• eggs (14)
• almond milk (full container)
• coconut milk (almost empty)
• pickles (half jar)
• two stalks of kale (sautéed kale for dinner, I think!)
• two cuts of steak
• a broccoli crown
• half a head of romaine
• salad dressing
• two onions
• garlic
• 500g of bacon
• cheddar

You can see there I might have a meal or two right there — obviously I’m set for breakfast, the pickles make a decent snack, and I could broil some steak with broccoli and onion and have sautéed kale on the side. We could eat the entire contents of our fridge within a few days (well, the eggs would slow us down) — that’s where you want to be.

That’s all there is to it, I think — know what’s in your fridge and buy food more often and you wind up tossing much less away.