10 Ways You’re Wasting Money On Groceries And What To Do Instead

Food has gotten expensive since Covid, and every few months we see wild swings in various products. However, eating well doesn’t have to mean spending a fortune. With a few consistent, timeless tricks, you can power through the market swings without even putting a dent in your budget, all while eating like a chef (although most chefs eat cereal after a shift).

One of the biggest mistakes people make at the grocery store is assuming higher price means higher quality. In some cases, this is true, yet most of the time, you’re paying for convenience and marketing.

As a chef and restaurant owner, it’s imperative I spend a majority of my time obsessing over food cost. In a restaurant, a few dollars wasted here and there eventually add up and become the difference between making money and closing your doors. Your home kitchen isn’t much different.

Here are 10 places I think people routinely waste money at the grocery store and what I’d buy instead.

1. Stop Automatically Buying Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts

Yes, they’re convenient, but remember, a false sense of convenience will cost you a lot of money in this market. Instead, look at chicken thighs, drumsticks, leg quarters, and whole chickens. Buy whichever gives you the best value that week.

As I have mentioned many times in the past, dark meat also has more flavor and is much harder to overcook. So if you are a beginner cook, or just someone who prefers flavor, you can use it for tacos, rice bowls, soups, pasta, sandwiches, and casseroles.

Keep in mind, if you buy bone-in chicken, don’t throw away the bones. Simmer them with an onion, carrot, and celery, and you’ve turned dinner scraps into tomorrow’s chicken stock. You can also just throw in whatever vegetable scraps are hiding in your fridge, partially cut, alone and waiting for a flavor bath.

Chef rule: Bones are never garbage.

2. Stop Thinking Good Steak Means Expensive Steak

You don’t need a $25 ribeye to have steak for dinner, and I would even suggest you are paying for a lot of fat when you purchase that ribeye. Look for chuck eye, flat iron, Denver steak, sirloin, flap meat, and even eye of round depending on what you’re making. The difference is in the technique. Salt it properly ahead of time, don’t overcook it, and use the same technique for most steaks regardless of the cut. Be sure to slice tougher cuts thinly against the grain; then finish with butter and herbs.

Learning how to make inexpensive cuts taste expensive is one of the most valuable skills you can have in a kitchen. I’ll take a properly cooked $8 steak over a destroyed $25 ribeye every time.

3. Stop Paying Someone Else to Cut Your Fruit

This one drives me crazy. Look at the price per pound of a whole pineapple or watermelon. Then look at the little plastic container of somebody else’s chopped pineapple or watermelon. You’re paying a huge premium for a few minutes of knife work. The same goes for chopped onions, sliced peppers, and a lot of pre-cut vegetables.

Certainly, convenience has value. If buying chopped vegetables means you’ll actually cook instead of ordering $70 worth of DoorDash, buy the chopped vegetables, but understand what you’re paying for. It’s usually not better food, it’s overpriced labor.

4. Buy the Ugly Produce

A crooked carrot tastes exactly like a straight carrot — a bruised tomato might not belong on a beautiful Caprese salad, but it can make a fantastic tomato sauce or pico. Overripe bananas are perfect for pancakes, smoothies, or banana bread (and no, that podcast rumor about bananas ruining your smoothie is not true).

Look for markdowns on produce that needs to be used quickly. This is where knowing how to cook becomes a financial superpower.

5. Stop Being Afraid of the Freezer Aisle

Frozen doesn’t mean inferior — most frozen food is frozen at peak ripeness. Frozen peas, corn, spinach, broccoli, berries, and other fruits and vegetables are fantastic values. Use exactly what you need and put the rest back in the freezer; then you won’t have to deal with CNN math, where they assume you throw away what you don’t use in a recipe.

Compare that with the $6 container of fresh spinach you had great intentions for on Monday and discovered turning into green soup in the back of your refrigerator Friday.

Always remember — food you throw away is the most expensive food you buy.

And check the seafood section. Plenty of seafood sold as “fresh” at the grocery store was previously frozen. Sometimes buying it frozen lets you get essentially the same product, keep it longer, and thaw it when you actually need it. Read the labels and compare the price per pound.

6. Don’t Get Married to One Ground Meat

Everyone reaches for ground beef out of habit, or because they don’t want to be shamed on X (just see my recent post on turkey burgers). Look around first. Depending on what’s on sale, ground turkey, chicken, or pork might be considerably cheaper and more flavorful. Ground meat is basically a blank canvas anyway. The trick with leaner meat is technique: Get your pan hot, don’t crowd it, brown the meat hard, season aggressively, and add some fat if it needs richness. Onion, garlic, spices, and a little butter or good olive oil can turn inexpensive ground meat into tacos, meatballs, burgers, pasta sauce, or a rice bowl.

Buy the protein that’s the best value that week, not the one you always buy.

7. Stop Buying Tiny Packages of Cheap Food

Rice is one of the world’s great budget foods. So why are we buying it in tiny designer packages? Pretty soon you will be buying it inside a mini Gucci purse. If your family eats rice regularly, compare the unit price on a larger bag. Also, use a rice cooker; this is one of the cheapest, most effective tools in the kitchen.

Do the same thing with dried beans, oats, flour, and other pantry staples you actually use. But there’s an important caveat: Buying in bulk only saves money if you actually eat it. A 25-pound bag of something isn’t a bargain if 17 pounds of it are still sitting in your garage three years from now. Bulk-buy the staples your family burns through and buy everything else in reasonable quantities.

8. Eggs Are Still One of the Great Meal Hacks

People see the price of eggs and compare it with what eggs cost five or ten years ago.

I look at them differently, comparing eggs with the price of other proteins. Two or three eggs, some potatoes, leftover vegetables, and a little cheese can make an inexpensive meal that actually fills you up. Make an omelet, a frittata, put fried eggs over rice, make breakfast tacos. Heck, throw a sunny-side-up egg over roasted potatoes, and suddenly yesterday’s side looks like something you’d pay $17 for at brunch ($27 in Los Angeles).

Breakfast for dinner remains undefeated.

9. Stop Shopping for Recipes

This may be the biggest change you can make. Most people decide what they’re going to cook, find five recipes online, and then go to the grocery store with a list of 37 specific ingredients. I always reverse the process. Shop first. Cook second.

I ask these questions: What’s on sale? What’s in season? What protein is the best value? What’s already sitting in your pantry?

If chicken thighs are cheap, maybe it’s roasted chicken Monday, tacos Tuesday, and chicken soup Wednesday. Restaurants survive by cross-utilizing ingredients; home kitchens should, too.

Your refrigerator shouldn’t contain twelve specialty ingredients you bought for twelve different recipes and never touched again (but if they do, at least turn them into soup).

Learn to cook with what you have instead of constantly buying what a recipe tells you to have.

10. Stop Paying for Water

Once you start noticing this, you’ll see it everywhere. Take chicken stock for example, a big carton of chicken stock is convenient, but you’re essentially buying seasoned water and paying someone to package it. Compare the cost with a concentrated stock base, bouillon cubes, or making stock yourself from bones you’ve already bought.

You can get dozens of uses out of a small container of concentrated base. The principle applies throughout the grocery store. Sometimes dried beans make more financial sense than canned. A block of cheese can be cheaper than the same cheese shredded and packaged. Whole vegetables can be cheaper than chopped vegetables sealed in plastic. None of these convenience products are inherently bad, but they will always be more expensive.

The Bigger Point

Saving money on groceries doesn’t mean living on instant noodles. Becoming a smarter and more flexible cook will take you to another level beyond noodles.

Buying ingredients instead of products will force you to learn, but the beauty of cooking is that when you learn a few techniques and understand heat, it becomes easy very quickly. So easy, I am still wondering how I haven’t educated people enough to lose my own career.

Shop based on value instead of recipes and learn how to cook cheaper cuts. Use your freezer. Compare price per pound instead of package price. Pay for convenience when convenience actually helps you but recognize when you’re paying a premium for something you could easily do yourself.

And of course, learn a handful of basic techniques that allow you to walk into a grocery store without needing a rigid shopping list. The person who can look at chicken thighs, potatoes, eggs, onions, and whatever vegetables happen to be on sale and figure out dinner has a massive advantage over the person shopping ingredient-by-ingredient for a recipe.

This article was adapted from an article originally published on the author’s Substack.

Andrew Gruel, a graduate of Johnson & Wales University, is a food entrepreneur and television personality. He is the Founder of Slapfish Restaurant Group (27 locations), the award-winning food truck-turned-international brick and mortar, based out of Huntington Beach, California, and currently CEO and founder of American Gravy Restaurant Group.