So I’m kind of a weirdo. I really enjoy grocery shopping. However, I don’t enjoy spending a lot of money on groceries. And probably like many of you, I also just don’t have a lot of extra room in my budget to be overspending on groceries. I love reading about other people’s grocery budgets and the different ways in which they stretch their dollars, so I decided to start tracking and sharing a week or two each month of my budget grocery shopping and meal planning strategy on this blog. My hope is to give others some ideas on ways they can tweak their own grocery budgets!

 As it is right now in my household of 3 adults, we typically aim to spend between $40-$60 a week on our grocery budget. 

And I think we eat pretty well! Sometimes it’s a little bit simple. It’s not often particularly gourmet. It’s definitely not always perfect, but I’m pretty happy with my grocery and cooking habits, which is why I want to attempt to break down (some of) my weekly grocery trips, including how much I spend and how much my meals cost, to encourage others who may be struggling with their own food budgets or who are looking for ways to change up their current routine. 

A quick overview of my household: two of us are women (my mom and I) and one is a man (my boyfriend). None of us has any major dietary needs or restrictions. Two of us will eat just about anything, while the third is lot pickier. I do the majority of the cooking. We typically only go out to eat two to three times a month on average. 

As for some disclaimers:

We all have different dietary needs.

Different people have different dietary needs and not everyone has the same definition of what constitutes a healthy diet. If what I do doesn’t work for you, that’s okay! This is just what works for me and my family, and I’m always trying new things. 

We all have different preferences.

There are definitely plenty of changes I could make that would change both the overall nutrition and cost of my grocery budget. I think it would be easy to get my weekly budget consistently under $50. However, since we are eating and purchasing food collectively as a family I have to take other’s preferences into account, even if that means buying those expensive salad kits that my mom loves or limiting the number of times we eat potatoes in a week because my boyfriend gets tired of them quickly.

I rarely buy organic and I understand that is a part of how I keep my budget so low. I personally feel safe and comfortable buying conventionally grown produce and animal products. However, you should of course do whatever you feel most comfortable with. And if you choose more expensive meat products based on the ethics of their upbringing, I applaud you. It’s something I may consider in the future when my income changes. For now my personal focus is on eating less meat overall, especially less red meat, again keeping in mind the rest of my household’s preferences. 

We all have access to different food sources.

Food prices can differ drastically depending on where you are geographically, what kind of transportation you may be limited to, dietary needs or restrictions, etc. If my budget doesn’t work for your life or situation, that’s okay! I’m not writing this to say that anybody “should” be able to do what I do or that they even would want to do what I do.

On to the food!

We do most of our grocery shopping between Food Lion (super average mid price grocery store chain – strangely it will also ALWAYS have a Chinese restaurant in the same shopping center) and Aldi. Occasionally we’ll pick up a few things from Harris Teeter (chain of generally overpriced grocery stores that will sometimes run ridiculously good sales) and I have a handful of things I pick up every few months from the Asian grocery stores or Sprouts. 

I’m going to give both the total we spent on groceries, and the totals that each meal cost to make, because we don’t necessarily use every ingredient we buy each week or all of each ingredient. There are also certain staples that I try to keep stocked in our pantry regardless of whether we plan to use them that week (pasta, rice, flour, etc).

So the total amount we spent on groceries between Food Lion and Aldi was $50.42.

The total spent for all of our meals from Sunday night to the following Sunday afternoon was about $55.99.

I estimated and added $6 to the total to account for random peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, eggs, etc eaten as snacks or lunches for my boyfriend that our leftovers didn’t cover.