PORTLAND — What’s for dinner tonight? If you’ve got a well-stocked pantry, you’ve probably got some of the building blocks you need already in your cupboards.
Canned beans and diced tomatoes can be the foundation for a delicious weeknight chili. A carton of chicken broth and a bag of rice becomes an easy risotto. And a can of tuna turns a simple green salad into a protein-rich entree.
With overall grocery prices going up, making the most of grocery staples can help people stick to their budget. In the last year, meat and egg prices have gone up dramatically, and consumers have also seen increases on produce and dairy. But prices for canned goods, boxed cereals and other pantry items have remained relatively steady. That makes looking for good deals in the center of the grocery store essential for balancing out higher prices along the perimeter.
For Jessica Fisher, author of “Good Cheap Eats: Dinner in 30 Minutes (or Less!)” ($17.95; Harvard Common Press; 320 pages), maximizing her pantry begins with taking stock of what she already has on hand before heading to the grocery store.
“I keep an inventory of what I have so I don’t overbuy,” she says. “I feel like we sometimes let so much go to waste in our pantry. We’ve lost some cash when we let things go bad.”
Fisher is cooking for her husband and six children, so she’s got to make every dollar count.
“We go through massive quantities of food,” she says. “Finding good prices is essential.”
She stocks up on canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, chicken broth and beans when they go on sale. She allows a few splurges when it comes to ingredients that save time, since getting dinner on the table quickly can mean the difference between eating at home and going out on busy nights.
“A lot of people have told me that they don’t want to cook at home because they don’t want to clean up the mess,” she says. “So they eat out, and pay four times as much to avoid a dirty kitchen. If you’ve bought a couple of shortcut things — minced garlic in a jar, or precooked bacon — it makes it easier to eat at home, which is always going to be cheapest.”
Knowing what’s a good buy
While buying all groceries at one store is convenient, you can maximize savings by cherry picking sale items at different stores.
“I know my prices and know where I’m going to get the best deals on the things I want,” Fisher says. “I have a target price for the things I regularly buy, though that’s fluctuated a lot in the last year as prices have been going up.”
Prices can vary wildly from store to store. Take an everyday item like Amy’s Organic Chili. At one premium grocer recently, it was selling for $3.79 a can. A block away, it was $2.69 a can at a medium-priced store. But the exact same chili was just $1.99 a can at a no-frills grocery discounter. While store aesthetics and overhead account for some of the disparity in price, you’ve got to wonder about such a large gap.
That canned chili is just one example, but you’ll find similar price differences on thousands of items. A sale price for a box of Wheat Thins or Tricuits at one store might actually be higher than the regular price at another.
Carefully reading shelf tags is a key to getting the best price. Knowing how much a product costs per pound or ounce is a better way of gauging good deals than going by the price of a bottle or box.
There’s even more fluctuation with products that come in various sizes, like cereal. At Fred Meyer recently, for example, the price ranged from $5.18 per pound for the smallest box, to $3.10 per pound for the largest box. And you could save even more with an in-house coupon that shaved 50 cents off the large box, bringing it down to $2.68 per pound — almost half the price of the small box.
Clipping coupons is another grocery saving strategy many people use, though the nature of manufacturer’s coupons has changed in recent years after extreme couponing hit its peak.
Fisher says that she’s noticed most manufacturer coupons now are for heavily processed foods, which she tries to avoid. But she’s a big fan of digital coupons that grocery stores give out through frequent customer programs because they’re customized for items she regularly buys.
“I know I’m going to have a coupon for mushrooms and Tillamook cheese, because they track what I buy from them and give me a good price,” she says.
Stock up — to a point
Brookings resident Jim Graham likes to stock up on essentials and staples when they go on sale, but he says there’s a danger in going overboard.
“Unless you’re a prepper, don’t tie up your life savings in aging foods in the pantry,” he says. “A friend gave me a whole tub of food that she thought would get her and her husband through the coming Armageddon, earthquake or whatever. The irony is it was all canned beans and canned fruit. You can’t really put those together to make a palatable dish.”
Graham likes to buy a lot of canned goods at a grocery discounter, even though they may be on the older side.
“I know and understand that food expiration dates are largely food industry fiction,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me a whole lot that they’re selling near-expiration date foods because they’re at such a deep discount.”
