Better in bulk: Buy staples in large quantities to save money

When you get into the routine of cooking at home, you’ll eventually find yourself falling back on certain staples. Some of them are things that go into almost everything you cook, like a dash of salt or some black pepper.

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Others are simply key ingredients in a lot of the recipes that you actually make. These things vary a lot from person to person, but for us they tend to include pasta, dried beans, dried rice, tomato sauce, dried oregano, flour, and flash frozen vegetables of a lot of different varieties.

There are also other things that have multiple uses in the home beyond just cooking, like baking soda and vinegar, and there are household supplies such as toilet paper.

All of the things mentioned here are things that we buy in bulk. Anything that doesn’t have a quick expiration date, can be easily stored, and is something that we use on a regular basis is a target for bulk buying.

Not only are items bought in bulk less expensive per pound, but they also shorten your grocery list and can help you squeeze out a few more meals at home before you have to return to the store. That saves on the travel cost and time of shopping, as well.

I’ll use a real example from our own pantry. We use extra long grain rice in a lot of the dishes we prepare, as my wife and I love curry and stir fry. Dried rice can easily be stored in the home, so when we get a chance we stock up on rice in abundance.

At our local grocery store, we can buy very similar rice in a two pound container for $3.99 or a ten pound container for $10.99. Obviously, the ten pound container is cheaper, as you’re getting near a dollar a pound. Sometimes, we’ll see sales that drop the price even lower, but those are irregular and hard to plan around.

For comparison’s sake, at our local warehouse club, we can buy a fifty pound bag of long grain rice for $17.67. That’s about 38 cents a pound.

Now, assuming we can get through even half of that rice over a reasonable period of time, we’ll save money buying in bulk. If we can get through that entire bag, we’re saving a lot of money.

The same phenomenon holds true for almost every item I mentioned at the start of this post. A large bag of frozen vegetables is less expensive per pound than a small one. A large sack of flour is far cheaper per pound than a small one. A case of tomato sauce is less expensive per jar than a single jar.

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We even buy baking soda in bulk. You can buy a 13.5 pound bag of baking soda for $6.68 in our local warehouse club. Put some in a plastic cup in the back of your refrigerator and use it as needed and you’ll do fine. Compare that to a typical price for an eight ounce box in the store, which is usually in the ballpark of $0.89. Buying that much baking soda per box would add up to about $25.

The key to saving money this way is sticking to stuff that you’re sure you’ll use before it expires. If you don’t know that you’ll use up that much rice or if you don’t think you’ll use the baking soda before the expiration date, don’t buy it. Focus on things you use all the time so that you’re sure you’ll use it.

You’ll also want to be sure you have adequate storage space for the stuff. We store a lot of the non-food items in our garage when we’re not using them, plus we have a pretty large pantry. At our previous residence, we didn’t have much storage space at all, so we couldn’t really take advantage of bulk buying. If you can’t store it, it’s going to be wasted.

If you can handle those caveats with ease, buying key items in bulk can really cut back on your food and household budget. It’s one of those things that, once you’re in the routine of it, you can’t believe you ever got by without it.

We’ve all heard that shopping from bulk bins can eliminate a lot of unnecessary plastic and waste. And you’ve probably heard that you can save a lot of money that way too. But how much money, exactly? How will shopping in bulk actually impact your grocery budget?

I went on a mission to find out. I visited Whole Foods Market to compare the cost of rice, beans, oats, nuts, cereal, and beyond when purchased from bulk bins compared to their packaged form. 

I found that many products were nearly twice as expensive (most often between .50 cents and 2 dollars more per pound) when purchased pre-packaged compared to the bulk bins. 

The Most Shocking Price Differentials:

• Nutritional Yeast
• Oats (especially when compared to single-serving oatmeal containers—yikes!)
• Raisins
• Chia Seeds 

Items That Regularly Cost Less In Bulk Bins:

• Beans
• Lentils
• Nuts
• Seeds
• Cereal

Pantry Staples That Surprisingly Cost LESS Packaged (On This Shopping Trip)

• Brown Rice
• Sushi Rice
• Cane Sugar
• Flour 
• Peanut Butter

If you’re buying a lot of these staple whole foods at the grocery store (which you really should be doing because they are among the healthiest foods on the planet and very important for optimal wellness and nutrition), the savings can really add up over time. If you’re really savvy, you can find the best credit cards to get cash back for even more savings. Just make sure you use your credit card responsibly as debt is counterintuitive to the overall mission here.

Plus, you’ll also be helping our planet by reducing plastic waste when you bring your own reusable shopping bags! And when you get home, you can store your bulk items in glass mason jars that last a lifetime (I recommend these wide-mouth quart-sized mason jars because you can fit your hand in them so they are super-easy to clean). 

The other neat thing about buying in bulk is the ability to start shopping organic without increasing your overall grocery budget. If you’re used to buying non-organic pantry staples in their packaged form and have resisted choosing organic because of the additional cost, consider shopping for organic in the bulk section and the savings you’ll see from shopping in bulk should balance out the additional cost of choosing the organic option. 

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