Meal Planning & Grocery Strategy

So I can be a bit of a nerd when it comes to this stuff, but honestly when I think of how much money & aggravation it saves me, it's worth it. It's how I pay to do things I enjoy doing like paying for my Boston Bruins tickets or going to visit my nephew in Maryland. So it's worth it and once I'm in the routine of doing it and keeping up with it, it doesn't take very long at all. There are fewer nights that the local pizza guy has to come out to our place because we don't feel like we have anything to eat (we always do) or we don't feel like putting anything together (there's a decent mix of easy to prep ingredients in my pantry most times) The grocery thing, well that's mostly just practice. It depends a lot on where you live to determine what a good price is for items, but I've got it down to the point where I routinely save 35-40% weekly at the store. I stock up when items are on sale, I won't buy meat unless it's at my "buy" price. I don't stack coupons, I don't clear shelves and I don't buy a lot of processed food. I match up sales and coupons and keep myself organized enough that it's not a part time job by any means. First and foremost - my circulars come on Wednesday or Thursday night. I have two local grocery stores that I get the flyers in the mail (Stop & Shop and Shaw's) and I get Roche Bros through my email. Since Stop & Shop is typically the store I have the most consistent pricing in for the items that I buy, I typically do my primary grocery shopping there. I check out deals at Shaw's & Roche Bros for good sales & match ups. I start my planning for the week when I receive my flyers. I typically just take a few minutes to run through them and see if anything pops out at me. For example, this week I noticed that Stop & Shop was having a sale on bone in country style pork ribs for $1.99/lb (3lbs or more) I put them on my list because I use them to make an amazing Italian Meat Gravy recipe. On Fridays I start a loose meal plan by looking at what I have in my freezer for meat and keeping in mind what's on sale for the week. What I have or will buy drives the meal plan always. If we are having people over and I just have to have something, I will just buy it for that occasion, but since I always stock up, my freezer is often full of portioned meat to start from. I usually take a peek Friday night or Saturday mornings to see what the coupon fairy will be bringing me on Sunday in the paper by checking out Sunday Coupon Preview and also I browse mygrocerydeals.com for any unadvertised sales or to compare grocery store pricing along with some local drug store chains (CVS, Walgreens & Rite-Aid) You would be surprised how many items I'm able to just match up coupons and sales with in a drug store. For example, I was able to get Special K for $1.67 a box a couple weeks ago, between matching sales & coupons and rewards programs. Meal plan is finalized over the weekend. When I make a meal plan, I also make an ingredient list. I check my pantry & my refrigerator and I check off what I have to get the weekly meal plan completed. The ingredient list goes in the front of my coupon binder and then I know what I'll need and that's paired up with my "sale" list from the flyer. In a typical week, I have 75% of my ingredients on hand, and the rest is typically on sale or produce.

If I need to wait for my coupons to come in, which I prefer to do, we go grocery shopping on Sunday. Guess what, so does everyone else....guess what else, everyone else is also trying to go before Pats kick off.

We bring the coupon binder & the lists into the grocery store along with our reusable bags (with .05 coupon for each used!) and head to Stop & Shop. We always get a coffee and just take our time. We also scan and bag at Stop & Shop as we go, which helps us keep an eye on the running total and gives us the opportunity to take advantage of additional savings. For example, Stop & Shop Butter is typically .35 off when we use a scanner. If the butter is 2/$5.00, I'll typically pick up a pound, because these days you can't get a pound of butter for less that $2.15/lb. So we take our time, check out all the sales & since my coupons are organized by category pretty close in the order the aisles are at the grocery store, it makes for an easy chance to see if there's any great match ups. If fresh produce is needed for later in the week - typically one of us will stop off after work to get it so that we don't waste any produce. Also, depending on what the day/week looks like we might head out to any secondary stores which we typically stick to what is on the list, while keeping an eye out for unadvertised sales and good match ups. I also keep an eye out for stuff we use all the time that we might have to pick up from time to time when it's not on sale. For example, the store brand of dijon mustard is at three different prices at each of my local stores. It's something I use a lot in my recipes, so it's good to know that if I'm running low and haven't been able to stock up on a sale or coupon I can pick up the store brand at Shaw's - because that's where I will get the best price (.20-.30 less than the other stores) We bring the groceries home and immediately start breaking down the meat for freezing and put away the rest of the groceries. Then I try to pull together some meal prep for the week. I try to plan one crockpot meal and one make ahead meal (think casserole) for the week, so I do any prep I can for that. Eventually I make Sunday's dinner and portion out lunch for the following week and we're good to start our week of working and commuting. Hopefully some of the tips and recipes will help someone else out there, it seems an awful shame to spend time on this to only keep it for myself.