Healthy grocery food shopping 🛒is a weekly top of mind chore for many of us. It’s one I actually enjoy coming from a foodie work background planning parties and catered events.
…And you can find your happy and healthy reasons or get inspired in other ways. 🎉
On that mission, doing your own shopping, meal prep, and cooking/baking can be just what you need for your busy lifestyle and can save you $$ in your wallet and waistline.
…And btw, if you want a weight loss healthy tip and make healthy lifestyle moves that also saves you money, you should check out this easy way in this free guide.
You can use “make your life easy” mantra, and that’s why we we love our easy cooking tools and food prep hacks. Amen?
Like this one: I’m using my ice trays for scrambled egg cubes…
(Along with a little homemade ice cream sandwich love to cool things off the hot seasons we’ve been experiencing! ❤️)
Little things like these help to make up for this past week in food, where I couldn’t find common healthy grocery food list staples like bananas and milk. I shopped online on different days, but I can only imagine how empty the produce section must’ve looked.
…In other weeks, it was eggs, oranges, or meat shortages. And I’m sure you’ve seen similar, so it’s good to stay flexible these days!
It’s practical to stock up on some goods when possible, and especially if you want to save money and time from food shopping. Also be open to what’s abundant and on sale.
And if you want to make it quick out of a store, shop around the store perimeter where you also find the fresh healthy grocery food items. The aisles is where you can get lost a little.
Growing up, for healthy grocery food we had “gourmet foods.” I remember a test Gourmet Giant store near us. They had these great big barrel bulk bins lined up with every gourmet food you could think of. I was in food heaven as a young, picky food eater that’s pretty normal today for us in our modern 🌈 variety.
Back then, the idea of “organic” wasn’t popular yet, but gourmet variety foods like strawberry brie could be found (and probably worked on me as I went into catering planning years later when I had tasted the food possibilities early on 😋).
Food changes are a ‘lil fun (even though it’s a wee bit frustrating looking for specific items that you fell in love with that are discontinued).
But in the positives, you focus on other foods. Last year, I saw an abundance of Cara Cara oranges. And where you’re at, there could be other types or a new breed of organic strawberries as an example. That’s something to get excited about. 🤸♀️
Healthy Grocery Food Storage
But one thing that hasn’t changed is the freezer. A refrigerator is irreplaceable as there’s nothing else like it. When you’re young, it’s where you store happy ice cream and popsicles that sit in front of the frozen uncooked foods.
And freezers not only keep your food from spoiling but also preserve food so you can actually plan meals further out than one week. You can buy in bulk and not waste money.
And frozen veggies are a great way to always have low-calorie, nutrient-dense green foods around. You can always find occasions to use a frozen bag of kale or peas.
The fridge top shelf is your next coolest ally. That’s where the cool strawberries belong in peak season.
Morning strawberry quinoa cereal and light angel food cake are two ways I’ve been optimizing strawberry dishes…
That’s one fruit you don’t want to freeze if you want to keep them fresh and plump. 🍓
But for just about everything else 😉, optimizing your freezer for preserved food hacks is still one of the best grocery money-saving tips. Freeze bread, meats, smoothie fruits, and so many other healthy grocery food items.
You can freeze those extra tubs of yogurt and have frozen yogurt. Now that’s smart…and takes no prep work!
If you have ripe bananas, you can freeze them, so you don’t have to grocery backtrack (and that’s what I did in the banana shortage).
They’ll look frozen and scary brown or black in appearance, but they are good and taste as good in a smoothie, and even better in a baked banana bread recipe.
Just remember to prep the food before you freeze it. Like cut the bread loaf into slices, scramble the eggs, and remove the fruit peels.
7 Healthy Grocery Food Money Savings
✅Stay flexible with fresh and frozen produce. Sometimes the same items are abundant or about to expire and cost less than frozen items. And sometimes frozen items are less.
✅Stock up on some cans. Sometimes canned items are less expensive than other times. But I don’t sub fresh/frozen vs canned as they don’t usually translate the same. Such as, frozen or fresh peas are great, but canned, not so much. And canned beans are great, but frozen beans, well… we can move on…
It’s also hard to predict what will run out on the shelves, so you can keep some cans available that stack nicely, and free up your freezer space that’s in high demand.
You can also always find some happy mediums. Like applesauce works for many baking recipes instead of storing refrigerated apples.
And to save money, you can do an apples-to-apples comparison online where grocery is usually priced per ounce, lb, or count.
Shopping online makes this easy to do as you’re not distracted. And also so you don’t have to drive all over creation to compare costs between stores…
These days, that’s super smart as sizes have gotten smaller, so using basic quick math tools help.
Sometimes healthy grocery food store chains have found a way to be the lowest cost store for a specific food item you’re looking for.
One like Whole Foods you would think is more pricey is often less costly than other chain grocery stores on certain items. When there’s abundance, the goal of the store is to sell the abundance of produce as fast as possible to maintain top freshness, and competitive pricing is the best strategy.
✅Wherever you shop: one smart item to keep on hand is a shelf-stable milk substitute. Such as milk powder packages, nut milk cartons, and/or evaporated milk cupboard cans. They can come in handy for a recipe or shortage, and they last a long time.
✅Look for your holiday baking items after the holidays. If you look for pumpkin puree or chocolate chips online around the holidays, good luck. You may find them at an astronomical price.
You’ve probably already experienced that before (and today is a good time to start looking 👀).
✅Another option for fresh alternatives and self-sufficiency is growing your own garden greens, herbs, fruits, and veggies.
That’s what many of the American Blue Zoners do (in Loma Linda, CA) that we can learn from. These are the Adventist Health community-goers. They’re the largest group of oldest Americans that have celebrated 100 with flying colors.
But if you don’t plan to have a garden in the city or have a brown thumb, then you can still support those who do. You can get fresh “in season” from a local farmer’s market stand where you shop.
✅Save at ethnic food stores that have cropped up everywhere metropolitan. And when you get curious about exotic foods, then you open your palate and become to variety that’s good for your gut. Ethnic grocery stores often carry more healthy ingredients. In America and other western world grocery stores, we tend to have an abundance processed foods staring us in the face and in the check out lines.
✅And finally, when you find one good item from a brand, search the brand itself as they rarely just stop at producing one item that you love.
They learn to leverage economies of scale, so they add more products to their portfolio. And then you can be a customer for life (or as long as their shelf life).
One that comes to mind, is a money-saving club like King Arthur flours for those who do a lot of baking. Then there are the local cost-saving clubs we all know that are packed any given weekend. I avoid those bulk places for many reasons. They’re warehouse-size for a reason.
And instead of jumbo stocking up on and eating the same items, you can switch it up. That pleases this Vata (…and maybe you too?)
For more healthy goods, anti-inflammatory recipes and planner all-in-one, check out my shop.