Daniel Bachhuber Avatar

Exploring our monthly grocery spend

We’re a family of four, love good food, and pretty regularly go over our $1400/month grocery budget.

I’ve always been curious as to why we go over budget. “Overspending” is an obvious answer, but not particularly helpful. Has food gotten more expensive over time? Do we have certain indulgences that are major contributors? Is $1400/month simply a fantasy?

Additionally, with the tech industry where it’s at, the specter of layoffs is never far away. If I were to get laid off again, our “war budget” cuts us down to $1000/month for groceries.

Grocery store spending by month

To start exploring, I exported this year’s Grocery transactions to CSV, uploaded them to Google Sheets, and produced this breakdown:

Ok, May definitely seems to be the outlier. It looks like a wild month at New Seasons drove it up a couple hundred more than normal. Generally, when we go over budget, it seems like we overspend by $150-$250.

Marginally helpful, but not yet actionable. One thing I do know is that New Seasons tends to be 50% more expensive than Fred Meyer. If we switched exclusively to Fred Meyer, we could save $70/month right there (30% of $200/month average spending).

April and October spending per category

Because I’ve been curious about our grocery spending for a while, I’ve saved most of my Costco receipts over the last year. I also have access to most Fred Meyer receipts from their website. I collected them to a folder and used ChatGPT to parse April’s and October’s:

Parse the receipt into a CSV with these columns: date (YYYY-MM-DD), store, item name, item size, item code (number), number of units, price per unit, total amount for the item, and category. Please include the full receipt data set in the CSV.

Putting this receipt data into Google Sheets produced this summary:

Before analyzing, it’s worth highlighting a couple limitations:

  1. The data doesn’t represent 100% of the month’s overall spending, nor does it represent 100% of spending at each store. I was missing some receipts, and I also didn’t validate ChatGPT’s parsing.

  2. We tend to buy in bulk, so I’d really need several months of data to know what our true monthly spend was for a given category. As a simple example, a Costco bag of flour lasts 2-3 months.

With those caveats applied, here’s what stands out:

  • We buy Kerrigold (the most expensive) butter at Costco. We could probably save $20/month by choosing the low cost alternative.

  • We spend roughly $200/month on fruits and vegetables. Because they have a short shelf life, I imagine we waste $60/month of that. We could save there, but it would require a fair amount of conscious thought.

  • We don’t buy super fancy meat, but we could probably save $30/month by eating less of it.

  • I don’t normally buy health supplements out of the grocery budget. In October, I bought some magnesium supplement and haven’t used it. $30 wasted right there.

  • We spend a lot of money on snacks ($150/month average). We could probably cut that in half to $75/month. I’m not sure what the substitution would be, though.

  • Seafood is a luxury that we could purchase when we explicitly have the budget for it.

The primary levers seem to be:

  1. Is it a luxury or indulgence?

  2. Is there a lower cost alternative?

  3. How much are we wasting?

Definitely no silver bullet, though.

If we applied all of these constraints to October, we would’ve spent $1,252.99 instead of $1,577.99 ($325 savings). That’s under our $1400/month budget, but still a bit from our $1000/month “war budget”.