Breaking Down my Grocery Budget by Food Group

Let me start out this post by saying I know that all families, all circumstances are different. I am however on a quest to lower our monthly spending on groceries, and at the same time increase the amount of "real" food we consume in our diets.

My husband has always swayed towards eating healthy, where I, as the primary cook in our home sway toward convenience - which oftentimes does not make for the healthiest choices.

Since we have been attempting to get a better reign on our grocery spending (which for most families, including my own, is the second largest monthly expense next to one's housing), I have been carefully planning our grocery budget.

1. First and foremost I made a list of things we purchase on a regular basis and their costs.

For us that includes things like milk, eggs, bread, yogurt, shredded wheat cereal (my husband's daily breakfast) ...

By getting a feel for what we spend on our basics, I'm able to make sure we aren't overlooking anything.

2. Next I took a look at what we want to be spending our money on. I broke this down in parts according to the food pyramid: Grains, Vegetables, Fruits, Dairy, Protein, and Fats.

For the ease and simplicity of explaining, let's say our weekly grocery budget is $100. I have allotted a certain percentage/ dollar amount to each food area.

Grains - $15 or 15%
Vegetables - $25 or 25%
Fruits - $25 or 25%
Dairy - $10 or 10%
Protein - $15 or 15%
Fats -$5 or 5%
Misc - $5 or 5%

Of course these amounts can change drastically from week to week based on what I have in my pantry, my freezer, and what our menu plan is. It does however, help me to have a basis for how much I am going to spend stocking up each week with sales, and it holds me accountable to feeding our family healthy foods.

Let's take a closer look at these categories:


Photo Courtesy themarketsllc.com

As you can see fruits and vegetables make up our biggest spending each week.

I have recently realized that I consider purchasing fruits and vegetables as a large expense and often buy enough for my kids, neglecting the needs of my husband and myself. If I buy a large bag of grapes, I don't eat them. If I purchase kiwis, I buy enough that my kids can each have a couple, if I purchase citrus I buy what my children like instead of what I like.

You get the picture.

Now I feel like I have more freedom. I feel like I can be a bit more of a risk taker in what I buy. I'm giving myself flexibility to try new things - to feed my kids more than apples, bananas, and green beans.

The next largest area in our budget is grains. Technically this should be a larger portion of ones diet, but less so than fruits and vegetables combined. I find that purchasing in bulk at Costco, or using coupons can help me to keep this portion of our budget down. Also baking from scratch is noteworthy in being more cost efficient.

Meats make up the next section of our grocery budget. Since meat can be quite expensive, I usually stock up once a month at Costco for some basics: whole chickens, frozen ground sirloin, and frozen ground turkey. Then I take whatever money I have left for the month and carefully watch sales and stock up on other items. This seems to work well for us.

Next in line is dairy. Milk is our biggest purchase in this area. We currently go through about 1.5 to 2 gallons of milk a week. So in figuring out the price of milk at Costco, I was able to determine how much more I can spend in a week or month for other dairy products like cheese and yogurt.

As for fats, $5 a week is more than enough for a container of ice cream on sale, or ingredients to make cookies or another sweet treat. Using coupons in this area can definitely stretch the budget to cover all of the needs for a sweet tooth ;)

Finally the miscellaneous category... this includes randoms like baking supplies, seasonings, etc. Since I often don't buy these items on a routine basis, and when I do it is often in bulk, so it's easy to stay within budget limits.

I'm planning in the coming weeks to give some tips and ideas for stretching each of these food groups in order to make the most of each budget category. Do you have any particular way of organizing your grocery budget?