Before I got into frugality I spent no less than $400 a month on groceries for just myself. If you include restaurants, coffee, and alcohol, I spent easily double that, with expensive months going over $1,000. I don't have good granular data on my pre-frugality spending habits, so this is a bit of a guess.
Now, my average cost for 'everything I put in my face' (food or drink from any source, including alcohol and coffee. If I smoked or did drugs, I'd include it in this number) is less than $200. I'm working on getting below $100/mo at the moment, but I'm not yet in the Two Figure Food Club.
There are many ways to reduce food costs. This post describes the way I did it. My method involved a spreadsheet. (Surprised?) You don't have to build a multi-tabbed spreadsheet with VLOOKUP functions all over the place to eat for less, I'm quite sure, but I did. Even if you aren't a spreadsheet junkie, I think you'll find useful information in this post that you can apply to your own approach.
This is what I did, in approximate order of impact on my food cost:
Identity
I chose to become a person who doesn't go out to restaurants, bars, and cafes very often, and instead prepares his own meals.
Strategy
I did a calc and came up with a 400 calories per dollar metric. I use this as a quick rule of thumb for in-store purchasing decisions.
I built a spreadsheet with the per-serving cost of foods I buy and made several meal plans to get a sense for what eating under $200 looks like.
Then I tracked every single thing I ate over two weeks, entered it in the spreadsheet, and observed my actual daily food cost.
Tactics
I found sources of cheaper groceries.
I bought in bulk. Duh.
Identity again
I became a person who likes to make things from scratch myself.
Identity, Strategy, and Tactics
You'll notice that 'finding sources of cheaper groceries' is one of the last things I did. You might think that should be the first thing to do. Nope.
Finding cheaper ingredients is a tactic. When trying to effect change, it's way more effective to start with identity and strategy. I want to be doing the 'right' things, even if I don't always do them perfectly. If I'm doing the wrong thing, it doesn't matter how well I'm doing it.
Avoiding restaurants and crafting a deep understanding of the calorie/dollar cost of various food types are strategic moves. Even if I screw up and buy the more expensive 25lb sack of brown rice because I'm too lazy to check another source, I'm not going to be spending much money on food.
Clipping coupons for bulk orders of caviar, on the other hand, isn't going to get me below $200/mo no matter how dialed my bargain-hunting tactical proficiency is.
Alright, we've got a lot of ground to cover, let's dive in.
Identity
First, I stopped buying food from restaurants, including alcohol (bars) and coffee (cafes). This one is pretty obvious, since a meal at a restaurant is so much more expensive than preparing your own food. I was only eating out a few times a week, and I knew how to cook well enough at home that this didn't require a huge amount of practical skill learning.
Since I knew how to cook more or less, there was nothing complicated about not going to restaurants. I just... stopped walking into restaurants. The difficult part was changing my identity, the story I consciously and unconsciously told myself about myself. I 'knew' myself to be a person who would casually walk into the kind of restaurant I liked, the sort that reflected my personality and values, and plop down $20-$100 on food and drink for myself and my partner and a friend or two if they were with us.
I liked this story about myself. It said things about how cosmopolitan I was, what my tastes were like in choosing solid but not pretentious establishments, and communicated signals about my generosity and approximate level of wealth. It felt good to go out, and that feeling had only a little to do with fulfilling physical hunger.
Ending that story was difficult. Well, no. It would have been difficult, I imagine, if I hadn't made my decision to stop going out a month before the lockdowns of 2020. As it turned out, the first few months of this identity change were quite easy due to the inaccessibility of restaurant food. So I lucked out and ran this step on easy mode. By the time access to restaurants opened up again, I was habituated to preparing all my own meals.
Briefly, though, the primary strategies for going off restaurant food is to learn a handful of meals to make that are tasty and easy. I think a lot of people either go for the whole Gordon Ramsay thing and think cooking at home involves lots of googling recipes and buying exotic ingredients. Your dinner on Tuesday doesn't have to be Instagram worthy or take three hours. It can be easy. Most of my baseline meals take about ten minutes of prep time.
Also, sometimes people who go for home cooking immediately go for eating really healthy, or what they think is healthy, and they wind up with bland or boring food. This is a great way to get demotivated to cook for yourself. While you're still establishing the habit of cooking at home instead of going out to restaurants, go for tasty and don't overly worry about being super healthy. Positively reinforce cooking at home first if that's a struggle. You can dial in 'healthy' once home cooking is a habit. Whatever you make at home is almost sure to be healthier than what you can get at restaurants anyways.
One way to approach this first step is by doing a Month Long Experiment or Challenge. Instead of thinking that you're never going to step foot inside your favorite restaurant, bar, or cafe ever again, just commit to going a month of only home-prepped food and drink. You can do, or not do, just about anything for a month. And you'll have reset your habits and learned new skills by the end of it.
Quitting the eating out habit made a huge difference and I didn't have to do even a little bit of math.
Strategy
The next steps involved some number crunching. I even built a spreadsheet.
If you don't like number crunching, here's a short pep talk: Some people think intuition and number crunching are opposed to each other. This is wrong. The point of crunching numbers is to cultivate an accurate intuition. The term for an intuition that isn't informed by real numbers is "a wild ass guess". Per Josh Waitzkin in The Art of Learning, you run the numbers to forget the numbers.
I no longer look at my food spreadsheet at all, because I spent a solid month using it every day as I was learning what food actually costs, rather than just wildly guessing or scribbling confusing notes on the back of envelopes. I now have a solid intuition for what kinds of ingredients to buy, at what price points, that will result in a sub$200 grocery bill. I put out a brief burst of focused attention a couple years ago, and now I rarely have to think about it consciously. I did the numbers and then I forgot the numbers.
I first calculated how many calories per dollar I needed to average in order to get below $200.
$200 per month is $6.67 per day.
At the time I ate around 2,700 calories a day.
2,700 calories / $6.67 = 400 calories per dollar.
(If you eat 2,000 calories, the number is 300 calories per dollar.)
With this 400cal/$ number in my head, I could walk into a grocery store and quickly get a sense for what kind of food would be a good fit. Pick up a jar, and multiply the calories per serving by the number of servings in the jar. Then divide by the cost. (I'm bad at mental math so I use my phone calculator app).
If a jar of peanut butter comes in at 200cal/dollar, I put it back on the shelf. If a fancy mayonnaise I really like is on crazy sale and it's at 850cal/dollar, I put the hand basket back, get a cart, and buy them out.
Now, yes, there is more to food than just calories. Veggies aren't about calories, they're about nutrients n stuff. And even if you're getting enough calories and nutrients, life is going to be dim and dark if your food is bland and boring. I think of food in three categories:
Baseload calories like coconut and olive oil, brown rice, legumes, sweet potatoes, steel cut oats, nuts and seeds, etc.
Nutrients n stuff like kale, onions, peppers, carrots, organ meat, fermented stuff like kimchi and saurkraut, etc.
Stuff to make my food tasty if it isn't already - salt, pepper, hot sauce, salsa, oregeno, paprika, chili powder, and the like.
The calorie/$ number is useful because I know that if I want to get close to $200/mo, most of my baseload calorie foods need to be well above my 400 calories per dollar number, because veggies and the like are going to be under it. Happily, there are many such foods. I buy coconut oil above 1,000 calories per dollar. Steel cut oats, lentils, wheat berries, and rice are all foods that can be got for around 1,000 calories per dollar.
Bring Out the Big Guns
Quitting restaurants and using the 400cal/$ metric made a big impact in my food cost, but I was still bouncing around above $200 per month. So I got serious. I made a spreadsheet.
I built a table of all the ingredients I typically cook with, and figured the price per typical serving size - e.g. $/cup of rice, or $/tblspn of honey, or $/pinch of salt. It also gave me the calories/$ figure for everything I ate.
With all this data, it was easy to make daily meal plans and see exactly how much each meal cost. Breakfast: two eggs, half cup of oats, coconut oil, handful of almonds: $1.37. Etc. My spreadsheet told me how much my meals cost, and how many calories it was. If the cost for a day's worth of food, about 2,700 calories for me, was over $6.67, I knew that I was eating 'above' $200/mo.
I then fiddled with the ingredients. I substituted things. I changed relative amounts: more coconut oil, less butter. More legumes, less meat. Less cheese. Even less cheese. Dammit, alright, NO cheese - theeeere we go.
By the end of the exercise, I had several meals planned out that came in under $6.67/day, AND - this is the critical part - I'd build some intuition over how much relative amounts of certain kinds of foods impacted my food bill. I saw that even a few beers a week adds a huge amount of cost. Cheese is massively expensive. Two eggs/day is fine, but three really pushes it. I could eat 1/4lb of hippie ethical meat a day maximum - any more on a regular basis would push me way over $200/mo. (At the time I was trying to eat Paleo-ish. I now eat way less animal products, which makes eating frugally a lot easier. Meat and cheese is expensive, and difficult to find ethical sources of.)
Then, with this newfound insight into the cost of food, I methodically tracked the amount and cost of everything I actually ate for two weeks.
Since I had a spreadsheet with all of the cost data for the types of food I ate, this was easy. I just recorded how much of each kind of food I used (half cup of brown rice, two tablespoons of coconut oil, etc) throughout the day. At the end of the day I entered what I ate into the spreadsheet, and it told me how much that day cost.
At the end of two weeks I knew what the spreadsheet was going to tell me before I entered the information in... which was the whole point of the exercise.
Easy Money
Sound like a lot of work? Well, yeah. It was. The cost of food occupied a lot of my attention for several weeks while I did this. But here's the thing. Let's say I spent two hours a day for those two weeks thinking hard about this and fiddling with my spreadsheet. That's 30 hours, which is probably an overestimate, but it's close enough.
Let's further say that the effort brought my grocery bill down from $400/mo to $200/mo. This is probably an underestimate, but, again, lets just go with it. That's $200 savings per month.
For my first month's worth of savings, then, I spent 30 hours in order to save $200. That's an hourly rate of $6.67 saved per hour of effort. Not great.
But, those savings stuck. I didn't have to spend another 30 hours in month two, because those 30 hours built me a durable system and intuition that I didn't have to rebuild every month. In month two I saved $200 again but without having to put in any extra time. So my hourly rate was $400/30 hours, which is $13.33/hour. Still not terribly compelling.
By the end of the first year, though, I'd avoided spending $2,400 and still only spent that original 30 hours of effort. My hourly rate was up to $80/hr. This is starting to sound like a pretty sweet gig, no?
I did this project two years ago. My current hourly rate is $160/hr. I've saved myself $4,800 so far. In another two years my rate will be $325/hr. Now we're talking.
And this is just the savings associated with the effort of building a spreadsheet to reduce my grocery bill. The effort of not going out to restaurants all the time is saving me at least $400 a month, and arguably took all of one minute (rounding up!) to say to myself "self, let's eat out less so we can be more free and do what we want with our lives instead of being beholden to the tyrannical and undignified expectations of a parasitic self-terminating ideology." (You don't have to be so melodramatic about it; that's just what works for me.) The hourly rate on that decision was, phew, something like $288,000 an hour just for the first year.
See? Math is fun.
Tactics
Finding cheaper sources of groceries
The exercise with the spreadsheet directed my efforts to find cheaper ingredients. I could see right in front of me the impact finding less expensive baseline calories would have on my budget, and that motivated me to search around and adjust my meal plans.
What store you buy food at is less important than what kinds of food you buy. People make a lot of noise about how expensive whole foods is, but the cost of a whole foods organic apple isn't that much more expensive than a Safeway organic apple. The granola? Oh, yeah, that's WAY more expensive, but buying granola is a dumb thing to do if you're trying to eat for less than $200/mo, so who cares? Make your own granola out of bulk ingredients for way less, and for all of fifteen minutes a month.
Most things that come in boxes or sealed plastic bags have low calorie/$, and are unlikely to have a high nutrient density either. Breakfast cereal, for example, or premade pizzas, just aren't a good fit for a wise frugal person's food system. I don't even notice these things in the store any more. It's unnecessary for me to walk over, read the label, and do the calorie/$ calc or try to decide if it's got enough nutrients in it to justify the cost. I just know: it's in a box, it's probably not worth it. My conscious mind is untroubled by the vast majority of items for sale in a store.
You might not expect it, but shopping for food became much easier and simpler for me because most of the stuff available in stores is expensive consumerist garbage that I don't even look at. Any food that has a marketing department is suspect.
Once I figured out what kinds of foods are expensive vs not, no matter which store I'm in, I turned my attention to finding the least expensive sources of the least expensive kinds of foods. For where I live, for example, Grocery Outlet is hard to beat in terms of finding screaming deals on stuff. Again, I don't buy frozen pizzas just because they're cheaper there than at Whole Foods; frozen pizzas just aren't a good deal because they're still a low calorie/dollar food and there's basically no nutrients in them. I don't even look at them.
Buy in Bulk. Duh!
It probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: buying in bulk is kind of a no brainer. Buying 16 ounces of rice is silly. If you eat rice, buy 25 pounds of the stuff. Coconut oil is really expensive if you buy little 8oz jars from boutique sellers with marketing departments. Buy a 5lb tub of the stuff (organic! fair trade! etc!) that has a label some WOOFer made using Microsoft Paint, scissors, and a gluestick.
There are a lot of 'bulk' food online shops that seem to have cropped up since the pandemic. A lot of them just sell normal sized quantities of food, at slightly cheaper prices than what you can buy at Whole Foods. They have really good marketing departments though. Avoid that trap. I'll save you some googling around and point you to Azure Standard as an example of the kind of bulk food place I'm talking about. There are many others.
For non-bulk stuff, I hit up Grocery Outlet first. You don't go into Grocery Outlet and buy whatever's on your list: you buy whatever is on your list AND is on screaming discount. Like canned tomatoes for $.59/can, maple syrup for $7/jug, and hippie eggs for $3/18ct.
Then I get produce from wherever I can. The ideal first place is the garden. The second best place is the neighbor's garden. Then the Farmer's market. Then the produce section of the grocery store. You might have a store that has a discount section for stuff that's about to go bad, but is perfectly fine if you use it within a day or two. Gold mine.
Identity Again: Making Stuff from Scratch
Once the main effort of getting costs down is accomplished, I got into the zone of diminishing returns. That means for every added unit of effort, I was saving less and less money. In the beginning, all I had to do was 'stop going out to restaurants all the time' and I saved hundreds of dollars a month.
Then I built a spreadsheet and did a bunch of math, and that cut another couple hundred or so from my burn rate.
Then I started make fine tuned adjustments to diet and food sourcing, and I was saving dozens of dollars a month.
Eventually, I had to replace my motivation for futzing with my food system from "I gotta get my costs down" to "I am a competent person who enjoys being a master of the food I eat." It becomes more about being a producer, a skilled and competent individual, than about spending less on food.
Making stuff from scratch is an example of this sort of thing. You can make tortillas or flatbread for half the cost you can buy them in the store and it's incredibly easy. Salsa is just chopping up some onions and peppers and putting them in a bowl. I made my own energy bars for a long walk I did the other day. These things aren't a huge savings, and if you're an otherwise very busy person it might not make sense to do this. But if you do have the time, you can really enjoy the process and take pride in it, and as a bonus your food costs will drop even more.
I really like good coffee. Like, the $20/lb kind of stuff. That'd be about $40 a month for me, or $480 a year. What I do instead is buy green (unroasted) coffee beans (organic, fair trade, etc) 20 lbs at a time, and roast them myself about every two weeks. The cost is $120 a year, or $10 a month. The time involved is thirty minutes twice a month.
This is going to sound strange, but I'd actually prefer to drink more. At the moment, I just don't drink much alcohol. I often go months at a time without drinking anything, and then I'll go a month or two having a couple drinks a week, then back to no alcohol. Getting a nice solid buzz on once or twice a month is actually good for my mental health, as far as I can tell. It reminds me to take myself and reality less seriously. Anyways, I intend to learn to make wild fermented wine soon.
Strategies Beyond the Fringe of Acceptable Society
It needs to be mentioned: a huge amount of food gets wasted because it goes past its date and stores are legally required to dumpster it, even though the food is still totally fine to eat. There is a thriving subculture of folks who salvage a lot of food from the dumpsters out back of the grocery store. It's worth a look.
I don't dumpster dive because I live thirty miles from the nearest dumpster. If I lived in a city, I'd totally dumpster dive. But, as I've shown, you definitely don't have to dumpster dive in order to get below $200/mo. It's more of an identity thing.
This post is a lie
I mean, this post isn’t really about how to eat food for less than $200 a month. $200 is a totally arbitrary target, for one thing. For another, different people are going to find it easier or harder to reduce food costs depending on their circumstances. Vegans with no allergies ought to have a pretty easy go of it. Paleo-folk with intricate patterns of food sensitivities are going to have a more difficult time. Powerlifters need to eat more calories than off-season climbers. Et cetera.
The point of this post was to lay out an argument for strategic thinking. It is almost certainly inappropriate for you to make the same specific choices about food that I did, because you and I are different people. But anyone can use a similarly strategic approach to food to generate and inform their own set of specific choices.
The style of strategic thinking I emphasized in this post can be applied to any realm of personal change - and not just changes having to do with money. Money is but one flow in our lives that we pay attention to. There are many other flows that are just as deserving of strategic attention.