5d • Kitchen Topics
Who else does meal costing?
I've been wondering... How many people actually track or calculate the cost of their home-cooked meals?
The way the cost of food has been rising here in Canada, and I am going to guess many other parts of the world, watching that grocery budget has become an almost mandatory chore.
One way we manage our household food budget is to set a per-meal budget. This meal is usually our supper or evening meal. We don't usually do a family lunch or breakfast, so we haven't really done any costing for those. Over time, we have figured out who eats how much or how many of a particular meal item.
Now, we have a family of four and try to keep each meal in the range of 10 to 12 dollars each. Note, I said per meal, not per person. It is NOT an easy task at first, but with practice, it can become almost second nature.
In a general scope, we do this right in the Grocery store using some or all of the following:
- We do our shopping weekly to maximize our chances of finding reduced pricing on items. We also shop weekly to make use of weekly flyer deals; however, we don't often use coupons because they are usually for items we do not purchase.
- We check all the discount racks in our local grocery stores for any price-reduced produce and bakery items first. For bakery items, we mostly look for 100% whole wheat bread and any style of bun that could be used as a base for a meal. In the produce department, we look for things we can repackage and freeze, such as broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and green or yellow beans, to name a few. We will also look for things like garlic bulbs and onions because they are actually usable far past their assigned expiry date.
- We check the meat department for any reduced-price meats such as ground beef, pork or chicken. These are usually marked down by 30 to 50% depending on which grocery store we are at and how close to expiry they are. There is nothing wrong with them other than that they are within a couple of days of their best-before date. We extend that by repackaging and freezing everything into meal-specific portions. In this department, we usually skip any pre-sliced/prepackaged sandwich meats as they tend not to be a good value and often blow our per-meal budget to pieces, even with a discount.
As we add things to the shopping cart, we do some quick math. An example would be Ground beef. Let's say a 3-pound family pack is $9.00 after a 50% price reduction. The cost of one pound, which equates to 1 meal for us, would be $3. We do this; we always start with the most expensive meal ingredient. This lets us know how fancy we can get with the remaining ingredients. As long as we don't exceed the maximum of $12 per meal, our budget is good. Of course, less is better!
When we've finished our grocery shop and have returned home, we get to repackaging and storing ingredients, mostly meats and vegetables, into meal-specific quantities. This allows us to avoid waste and maximize how many meals we get from that particular shopping trip.
Now I know this post may seem a bit disjointed. Bear with me, in a future post, coming next week after our shopping trip, I'll be diving deeper into how we calculate the cost of a meal.
Until then, I'd love to hear any little things you do to manage your grocery bill and keep your food budget manageable.
All the best and have a great weekend!
Roy
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Who else does meal costing?
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