Your family’s grocery budget seems to be getting tighter and tighter these days. The kids are growing, and so are their appetites. Food prices have been steadily creeping up for a while, too. You want to be able to feed your family plenty of good food, but you don’t want to break the bank either. If you look at grocery store receipts from past shopping trips, you may notice that snack foods make up a bigger portion of your grocery bill than you thought.
The good thing about this is that you do not have to stop snacking, nor do you have to tell the kids to do that either. There are a few snacking strategies that can help you save money. Some of these tips are even good for the planet, and for your health. One smart snacking tip is to swap whole pieces of fresh fruit for the canned fruit, apple sauce, dried fruit, or other “fruit snacks” that you have been buying. While produce can be expensive, it is not as expensive as individually packaged snack foods and it is healthier and better for the planet too. Save money by choosing fruits that are in season and on sale, and by buying only as much as your family will eat. If you overbuy and you notice that the fruit is starting to get overripe, cut it up and freeze it. Use the frozen fruit to make smoothies, another tasty snack.
Snacking smart does not mean having to forego putting things like pretzels, chips, or nuts in your family’s lunch boxes. Simply skip the individually packaged versions and buy big bags of chips and pretzels and large cans or jars of nuts. Use plastic food storage containers or cute, reusable cloth snack bags to pack up individual portions for your family’s lunches. Save even more by skipping name brand chips, pretzels, and nuts and choosing the store brand instead. Since you are repackaging the snacks yourself, no one outside of your home is likely to notice that the store-brand cheese flavored tortilla chips in your child’s lunch box are not Doritos.
A third smart snacking strategy involves desserts. Sweet treats don’t need to eat up a lot of your grocery budget. Many of the cookies, granola bars, and snack cakes that you pick up at the grocery store are loaded with preservatives and high fructose corn syrup. Even if you are not much of a baker, you can find a few simple recipes and bake up some treats on the weekend for the following week’s lunches. Save time by making a double or triple batch and freezing some to use later on. You could even find recipes that use natural sweeteners like maple syrup or agave nectar in place of refined sugar, and recipes that incorporate fruits and even vegetables into tasty cookies, bars, and cupcakes.
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