Mormon Family Dinner (Photo credit: More Good Foundation)
I have nothing against people who like to come up with systems and plans for tackling the family grocery bill. There are some people who can simply set a weekly limit on their grocery budget and make it work. I’m not that kind of person.
When I was a kid my favorite sesame street character was the Count. I was a mathlete before I was the high school bowling team captain. I’m the guy with an excel spreadsheet, crunching numbers and running statistical analysis. If you’ve ever wanted to see someone over analyze the family grocery bill, this post is for you.
The Average Family Budget by Serving
I’ve added, subtracted and averaged family spending in so many ways, but the results are always the same. Annually the budget looks large, but by serving it’s very small.
Let’s take the average family grocery bill. Annually, the average family spends $3,624 on groceries. That works out to $302 per month or $9.93 per day. Let’s assume three meals a day and a family of three. That means the average family spends $1.10 each meal.
Think about it for a moment. What meal can you buy for $1.10? It’s not a great deal of money.
Small Amounts Each Severing Will Add Up Quickly
The family grocery bill is very small when you look at it by serving. That’s a very important characteristic to consider. What if we bumped up spending by a mere $.25 per serving? At the end of the year, you’d have a food budget of $4,434.75 and spend nearly an extra $1,000.
While even a small amount of spending can mean big bucks at the end of the year, small amounts of saving can have the same impact.
It’s Not the Price of the Meal; It’s the Price of a Serving
When you realize just how much an extra few pennies each serving impacts your budget, you start to realize that controlling your grocery bill isn’t about the cost of a meal. It’s about how many servings you can each and how does the cost of a recipe break down into a serving.
Take a favorite American meal like hamburgers:
- Hamburger – 1lb – $2.00
- Buns – 4- $.75
- French Fries – $1.00
- Beans $1.00
- Carrots – $.50
- Condiments – $.25
Total Cost: $5.50
Servings: 3
Cost per Serving: $1.83
You could celebrate over cooking a meal for the family for $5.50. However, when you consider that the meal feeds only three people and the cost per serving is a $1.83 you are on your way to nearly doubling the average family grocery bill.
How My Family Has Used this Information
My family struggled with the grocery bill for a long time. Like the hamburger example above, we that the meals we cooked were low cost. We’d rarely make a meal that cost more than $10 to make, never considering how little food the recipes made.
As I mentioned earlier, we dropped our grocery budget from $650 to $350 by paying attention to the cost per serving. Our family recipe target is a cost of $1 per serving. We don’t always find that price, but we can often get below $1 and make up for more expensive recipes. We also spread out the more expensive recipes so that we aren’t always spending on the expensive meals.
While my grocery budgeting sounds like a lot of adding, this is what has worked for us. I’ve found that we eat just as well as we did before, but for $3,600 less each year. That kind of money is worth some time tracking.
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This is an excellent way to break down grocery budgets. Sometimes I cringe when a meal comes in at $15-20, or when you are BBQing, it can be over $20. This shows how breaking things down to their most basic elements is the way to real savings.
Definitely. But, I really hold fast to the per/serving measure. One of the cheapest recipes (per serving) my family makes is home made spaghetti sauce complete with meatballs, sausage and pork ribs. It costs a total of $18 to make, but serves about 24. It’s a big initial bill, but with the help of the freezer its a very satisfying meal.
So do you find that you can eat healthy meals with this in mind. We don’t eat processed food at our house. With healthy food, it seems to fill us up faster so we tend to eat less. Just wondering if you have had the same experience?
Chase
You are stealing my thunder a little, because my next post is how to eat more healthy for less. I definitely think that mixing in more veggies and fruit will save you tons of money, makes food taste better and is far more satisfying.
Interesting that I eat more than the average family. That’s me, mind you, not my family. Blame California prices and lots of calories a day?
Is it me or is that bane of your entire budget California fault 🙂 It’s like all my budgeting wisdom is defeated by a single state government.
Those are some crazy numbers to see written down! I am a single guy, so my average cost per meal is much higher than the average family. Lucky for me, though, that budget is not one that stretches me too much.
The food budget is interesting when it comes to family size. Singles have it rough because buying in bulk and getting lower prices usually means eating the same meal for a week. There is definitely economies of scale at work once you get to three people in a family; your cost/serving drops far lower.
While I don’t go out of my way to spend more, food is one thing I don’t scrimp on. We eat well and we eat what we want. That said, I will buy generic over brand name and do watch for sales and we do eat little meat.
Although I am willing to spend more for food and grocery, I stick to the budget as much as I can since we rarely dine out for the past few months. Likewise, I do not only look at the cost per serving but also at the nutritional benefits that we will get from the dish.
We generally do the same, but we don’t always spring for the healthy premium food. We’ll look to things like farmers markets to find healthy but lower cost.
John, is it possible that these numbers are low because of restaurant dining and ordering in? My family spends about $600/mo for the 5 of us. I’m not ashamed of that at all, because I know that we eat healthful foods and that we NEVER eat out! (We ate out once this year for my son’s birthday…it was his request.) We plan meals, eat leftovers for lunch, clip coupons, and buy generic/store brand if cheaper. We even shop at Aldi’s first before heading to the more expensive, but way bigger, grocery store. I am looking forward to your next post on how to eat for less while eating health-conscious foods! I will be taking notes as we will gladly try anything to make that number go down even lower! Great post! Have a great weekend!
Yes. These numbers are artificially low, because I’ve removed eating out. In fact, the total budget is in the ball park of $6,100 and 40% of that is eating out. The problem was that there was no way to account for the “if you weren’t eating out, what would your grocery budget be” scenario. If I had to guess; and I do. The average family eats out once or twice a week, which definitely makes a big annual expense, but probably doesn’t impact the family grocery bill by leaps and bounds.
I’m almost done with the post and it should be out this coming week!
You’re right – you did overanalyze it, but I LOVE it! (I love to overanalyze things too!) Great numbers – and I love how you clearly illustrated how a relatively simple meal that “feels” like a good value is far from it. I’ll never look at burgers, fries, and corn the same way.
Thanks Elizabeth! I hope, however, that I haven’t ruined the meal for you.