How The Dinner Daily Helps You Manage Your Family Grocery Budget
A key part of our mission at The Dinner Daily is to help families eat healthier, and at the same time, lower their food bills. Eating healthy does not need to be expensive or time consuming….you just need a plan for your family dinners and ideally a plan that makes use of all those in store specials at your grocery store. If you are going to the store without a plan or are not making use of your store’s key specials, they most likely you are spending hundreds of dollars more each year on groceries than you should be. It is worth paying attention to how we spend our money on food, given it is often the 2nd largest expense item for most of us, after rent or mortgage.
Our customized weekly plans for family dinners are designed to use as many of the sales on fresh ingredients as possible without a repetitive menu, but we wanted to put it to the test. SO we took our Stop & Shop menu and shopping list and put it in action. Our plan used 23 in store weekly specials, as shown in the store flyer, to come up with our healthy and delicious, yet still economical, plan. Dinner planning at The Dinner Daily ALWAYS starts with the store specials from the flyer:
What was on the menu? This is no rice and beans austerity plan! A snapshot of our menu, taken from the top of our shopping list is below
And here is all the food we bought for $69.20 for our 5 dinners!
Not only was shopping the list quick and easy in the store, the proof of the savings all happens at the register.
The grand total for these five dinners, with sides, for a family of five amounted to $69.20 which translates to $13 per dinner, or $2.76 per person. I should disclose I did not buy the rice for the first meal as I had that in my pantry already.
Although this total varies each week at all our stores, depending on the specials available, it is representative of our plans we create for family dinners every week of the year. Sometimes it might be a bit more and sometimes even a bit less, but on average the total is kept under $85 across all our plans.
If you are looking to save money and eat better at the same time (not to mention eliminate that tiresome task of walking the aisles in your grocery store wondering what to do for dinner), start planning out your meals for a few weeks and use your store flyer in the process. Once you experience the organizational bliss that comes from shopping with a well thought out plan, you will never going back to the routine of the daily trek to the grocery store!
Don’t have the time or desire to do the planning yourself? We can help. For as little as about $1 per week, a membership with The Dinner Daily will provide you with weekly plans for Stop & Shop or over 16,000 grocery stores across the country we offer our unique “menus based on your store specials” . Find out more about our program.
