One of the biggest hesitations people have when considering changing their diet to whole plant foods is, “Aren’t all those specialty foods expensive? I’m on a tight budget.”
Nothing could be further from the truth!
I think people envision themselves shopping at Whole Foods and adding ancient Himalayan superfoods to their cart that are priced like they are infused with the elixir of life itself.
A whole food plant-based diet can be at least as affordable as a SAD (Standard American Diet). I’m willing to bet that meat and cheese are two of the highest priced items on your grocery lists. Those are going to be replaced with things like black beans, brown rice, and sweet potatoes.
Plus, most Americans are actually paying much more for groceries than they need to. Most of these strategies will work on ANY diet. Though if you’re a die-hard couponer and sales shopper, you may find yourself a little out of your element with a whole food plant-based diet. After all, you’re trying to avoid the processed food that usually has coupons! No worries, there are lots of tricks of the trade.
How important is recipe choice?
Many people search for frugal recipes, but I would argue that frugal strategies are going to be far more helpful to your grocery budget. You can take those strategies and apply them to any recipe, and you will have the confidence to decide if a recipe is frugal for your unique situation.
Rather than needing a “cheap recipe” to make, we need frugal habits of meal planning, shopping smart, storing food, and reducing food waste.
How important is recipe choice?
I know, I know, before you even see how much I spend, you’re already thinking that you live in an expensive area, or you have special allergy needs that make things more expensive! You don’t have time to meal plan or cook from scratch. You don’t have a big pantry or room in your freezer.
All our circumstances are unique, but I will say with some creativity you can work around just about anything.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
How low your grocery budget is does not reflect your success in life! It seems silly to say so, but I think lots of us walk around feeling sort of sheepish about our grocery bill. Maybe we recognize how impulse buys or lack of planning have increased it, or how we’re consistently throwing out fresh produce we bought with the best of intentions. We’ve all been there! But if you’re looking to slim it down going forward, you’re in the right place.
It may be that a higher budget reflects your values because you prefer to buy organic or support small businesses when you shop. That’s cool too. The lowest price tag may not be what you’re going for, but the right habits will save you money regardless.
That being said, our family spends about $115/person per month on groceries. That doesn’t include things like diapers or dish detergent. It’s just (mostly) conventionally-grown food. It also doesn’t include going out to eat, which we do every few months. It does include boatloads of fresh seasonal fruit, frozen berries, loads of whole grains, beans, lentils, leafy greens, sweet potatoes, nuts, plant-based milk, and more.
In medical school and residency, we kept it lower, but we’ve loosened up a it and more frequently indulge in “extras” now.
Putting a grocery budget in perspective
Anyone who is in poor health can tell you that good health is priceless. A hundred million Americans pay for prescription medication to treat the symptoms of a poor diet. Type II Diabetes is reversible with a plant-based diet and costs tens of thousands of dollars of care over a lifetime, yet we still tend to balk at the price of the produce at the grocery store that would reverse it. Why is that?
I think the bell peppers and kale feel optional, whereas a medical bill feels mandatory. Yet, it’s often the opposite way around! So many medical bills become non-existent when we eat more vegetables.
Meal Planning is Key
I wish it wasn’t so, but thinking ahead about what you’re going to eat solves so many expensive problems: Last minute take-out, spoiled food that you bought without a plan, leftovers that went bad because you winged it again, individual servings bought when you could save buying in bulk, extra last-minute trips to the grocery store with their accompanying impulse buys, the list goes on.
The good news is that meal planning can be much less painful when done just once a month, and I have a whole walk through on once-a-month plant-based meal planning here.
Do you already meal plan but have a hard time executing the plan? Read my post on Meal Planning lynchpins here for help.
Shop at the Right Store(s)
It turns out that even keeping your grocery list the same, you might pay wildly different amounts of money depending on where you shop. Of course we joke about Whole Foods being called Whole Paycheck, but even the other grocery store chains vary widely in their prices. And since you’re eating a plant-based diet the things you buy the most may not match up with their weekly circulars. I highly recommend creating a Price Book to help you choose which stores to patronize regularly. It takes some extra time on your first few shopping trips, but in our case, this one simple activity has saved us a thousand dollars a year ever since!
Here’s a complete primer on creating a Price Book, and a guide on buying bulk food.
We try to minimize our shopping trips because we love the time and money savings when we do. So, we shop every 7-10 days. After creating our Price Book, we determined where we want to do our big monthly shops (Winco and Costco, in our case), and where we like doing our mid-month produce runs (Winco, the farmer’s market, or Safeway).
This means we stock up on our applesauce, whole grain pasta, dried beans, and more at Winco, but when we just need fresh veggies and fruit and don’t want to drive across town, we can just stop in at nearby Safeway and pick up some basic produce plus whatever produce is on their weekly special.
Identify Your High-Ticket Items
Zero in on the things that make the biggest impact on your budget, either because you buy so much of them or because they are individually more costly. Here are some of ours and how I address them:
Nuts and Seeds
Because I’ve made a Price Book, I know that nuts and seeds are spendy. We enjoy them, though!
– We rarely just snack on them. If I left them out on the counter for free grabbing, we’d have to significantly increase our grocery budget!
– We recognize that pinenuts are twice as expensive as pecans, which are twice as expensive as walnuts, which are three times as expensive as sunflower seeds. That means that if a salad calls for pecans on top, I’ll frequently toss some walnuts or sunflower seeds on instead. We’ll save pecans for dishes where they really sing.
– We buy pecans, almonds, and walnuts at Costco because they’re a better price. We buy pinenuts there because they are fresher. We store any nuts we won’t eat in a month or so in the freezer so they stay fresh.
– We buy “pieces” when it comes to cashews, because we don’t really need whole cashews and pieces are cheaper.
– I recognize that any dish that calls for a large amount of nuts, such as in a creamy sauce, will be a pricier (and richer) dish so I make it less frequently.
Spices
We love flavorful food! Spices can really add up if you cook from scratch a lot and buy the little jars at the store. Here’s what we do instead:
– We buy spices at ethnic stores. Mexican and Indian markets in particular tend to have big bags of spices for much less money.
– We buy spices in bulk at Penzeys. Their stores are great but they also regularly offer shipping deals so you can catch them online without paying extra. Years ago I bought these tins in 4oz and 8oz sizes and we just fill those up from Penzey’s bulk bags. The quality of the spices is fantastic, my cupboard stays neat and I don’t have to keep paying for bottles every time.
– You can keep spices in your freezer to extend their life, but we don’t do this and just buy enough to last a year or two at a time and it works out great.
Berries
We love berries! They are nature’s reward for eating plant-based. But they can really be pricey! Here are some ways we enjoy them year-round:
– We pick our own in the summertime. There are lots of blackberries growing wild where we live, and we eat our fill for more than a month, then frequently put several bags in the freezer. We go to U-pick farms for blueberries and strawberries.
– We buy a big bucket of strawberries and one of raspberries every year through our local Rotary Club sale. When it arrives, we bag most of it up into quart size portions and freeze. We’ll defrost these throughout the year to eat on pancakes or waffles.
– We buy frozen berries and cherries at Costco (because it’s the best price!) and have one morning a week where we eat steel-cut oats and berries or cherries. Besides the frozen ones we eat on waffles or pancakes, we don’t eat fresh berries in the winter time. They are much more expensive and much less delicious.
Other fresh or frozen fruit
We buy fresh fruit as follows: Always bananas, and always lots of apples, pears, and/or oranges as long as they are sitting around $1/pound, grapes if they’re $1.50/lb.
The kids can have 1 piece of fruit every day as a snack year-round.
We eat lots and lots of fresh fruit in season (pomegranates in the fall, watermelon, cantaloupe, and peaches in the summer, apples and pears in the fall and winter), but fall back on our standard fruit otherwise. We also have frozen fruit for smoothies (Costco!), canned pineapple and jarred unsweetened applesauce.
Dried fruit
Here again, the source really matters. We buy most of our dried fruit from the bulk bins at Winco. We order a whole case of raisins or date crumbles and save an extra 5% that way, plus the hassle of scooping out sticky stuff into bags so often.
We don’t often snack on dried fruit, saving it just for eating for breakfast in oatmeal and muesli.
We buy date crumbles instead of whole dates for this, because they’re half the price. We save the soft, whole dates for when they’re really awesomely deliciously needed, like in these cupcakes and their frosting:
Plant-based milk
Cheese and Meat Substitutes, prepared vegan food
Identify your highest ticket items (for us, it’s nuts and seeds and spices), berries and other fresh/frozen/dried fruit.
Don’t Waste Food – plan your meals so you aren’t buying stuff you don’t have a plan for eating, store things appropriately, use your freezer, set yourself up for success so you don’t bail on making a meal and order take-out instead, get creative with the odds and ends
Minimize trips to the store because every time you walk in the door it’s costing you extra money. Just the gas to get there, or the impulse buys are enough to drive up your grocery bill. (meal planning, substitutions, pantry/shelf cooking, have meals in the freezer, keep a well-stocked pantry)
Know your lower-cost substitutions. Walnuts for pecans
Make it yourself (when it makes sense) – You can have a make it yourself or do without rule. But investing in an instapot, for example, saves us hundreds every year. It is truly so easy to make your own beans.
Become a pro at reading price tags. (shredded broccoli slaw in a bag was cheaper per pound than the heads of broccoli were… broccoli was really in 5 different places at the store). Oats in the health aisle vs the breakfast aisle.
Find a place to buy in bulk. Walnut example. The baking aisle at the store.
https://www.amazon.com/Walnuts-Halves-Pieces-Raw-lbs/dp/B001SAXKYO
https://www.amazon.com/Sincerely-Nuts-Large-Medjool-Dates/dp/B00HQN1POE
Buy online and split with friends. We’ve done this with vanilla, spices, and more. These seeds are $8/lb if you by one pound, but you can get 5 pounds for $15: https://www.amazon.com/Sincerely-Nuts-Sunflower-Delicious-Antioxidant/dp/B00I9DABVI
Be a little flexible (kale vs. chard comparison) . Sweet potatoes vs. winter squash.
Coupons won’t help you as much when you stick to the produce section most of the time, but you can be flexible when it comes to seasonal sales on produce. Shift your diet so that your everyday munching fruits and vegetables follow seasons.
Organic or not? There’s also buying in season, buying local, gardening…. organic snack food is not really healthier. If you want to do that for ethical reasons, by all means, but don’t let that excuse keep you from embracing a healthier diet. There are lots of ways to help the environment (use reusable grocery bags, buy in bulk and cook your own, take fewer trips to the grocery store, etc.) but one of the very BIGGEST is stop eating animals and their products because it’s ruining our planet to have those farms.