Grocery Budget - Gluten Free?

[GFNancy]

If you're gluten free, what's your average monthly grocery bill, and for how many people?

We're trying to tighten our belts one more notch, and want to see what a good goal would be. It's hard to tell what a good amount would be comparing to people on a regular diet because not only do they not have to worry about specialty foods, but they can eat really cheap foods like Top Ramen too.

We don't buy too many specialty foods on a regular basis, but do buy a couple different things like GF crackers and pasta, which we're going to cut way back on.

Also, do you figure your specialty foods as a different category in your budget, or do you keep it as part of your overall grocery budget?

Thanks,

Nancy

[redeme]

I leave it as a part of my grocery budget. I budget about $100 per person per month. So, $300 for the month. I'm the only one who's GF in our family and purchase regular wheat items for everyone else.

I make my own bread & pizza dough a couple times a month and I've found pasta I like and although it's more work I make both GF and regular pasta since GF costs so much more.

The big thing for me was finding a couple of places to buy that are cheaper and I like the products. I go once or twice a month to buy bulk flours and pasta. Rarely, do I buy crackers or cookies or pre-made items, they are way to much for my budget.

[my4littlebuffaloes]

I am not gluten free, but we do deal with food allergies and special foods. I spend $400 to $450 on food each month. Have you heard of the blog $5dinners.com? She feeds her kids a gluten free, soy free and casein free diet. It is a great blog.

[angelbumpkin]

For my son I average in about $100 a month.

[sunshine]

My dd has celiac type diseas -- we just avoid wheat products, and really don't try to make "fake" products. Occasionally we buy gf bread so she can have a sandwich, but at $7 for 1/2 loaf - it's out of our range for most meals. We decided it was easier and safer to have a gf household, rather than try to just buy specialty foods for her.

Instead of pasta - we do rice. . . so rice and cheese sauce (homemade with cornstarch), chicken and rice, etc. We do vegetable spaghetti, rather than gf spaghetti noodles, etc.

Pretty much everything is made at home, from scratch. We garden, hunt, and fish.

Our grocery budget for the 3 of us, is $300/month. Many months I spend less.

[pollypurebred39]

I find that the only way to accomadate the no wheat thing in our house is to live without those replacement grains. Our meals (Dinner)
are mostly 4 oz. of meat (under $ 1 a lb.) A white potato, a sweet potato, rice or barley, and a vegetable. Homemade salad dressings, ketchup, seafood sauce, etc.

For breakfast I buy gluten free oatmeal (for the gluten sensitive person) and regular oatmeal for the rest of us. Same will cold cereals. or eggs.

We have around $20-$30 to spend on a family of 4 a week. It is a real tight budget. Soup is an always at our house for lunches and sometimes dinner. I found a store called produce juction and it is wholesale produce in the Winter, in the summer I take a short drive and stop at an Amish farm a take an entire paper grocery bag full of produce for $5. I buy a 50lb. bag of potatoes for $15 dollars in Winter. I hunt down coupons for gluten free products and scour clearance and salvage food stores for gluten free products. I make cheesecakes( when I get cream cheese on sale & with double coupons), and peanut butter (Also on sale & Double coupon)cookies no grain at all, just peanut butter, eggs, sugar,Oatmeal cookies, no grain other then oatmeal. What we do not have is pizzas, rolls, breads, sandwiches, traditional cakes(except when I find a CHEAP gluten free mix) biscuits, etc. If we did our food bill would be crazy. We are blessed by our in-laws who always drop of a bag of food every week or 2. Just meat and produce, no breads, or chips and stuff. Our food bill would be higher if not for our in-laws. I hope this helped a little.

[GFNancy]

Thanks guys. That gives me a good idea of how far I can go. Which is better than I thought was possible.

We've been way more frugal than we used to be with our food budget, but still at the point where we just find good prices on whatever we decide we want. We don't eat out at all, and are frugal in other ways though

I've been looking at the $5 dinners blog. Love it. Thanks so much!! That's going to make it so much easier.

Nancy

[Grainlady]

My mother had celiac disease and I did a lot of gluten-free baking for her back when there wasn't much GF foods and mixes available. I now develop GF recipes for a mill outside of town that mills GF white sorghum flour - so we have a lot of GF experiments in the baked goods department coming out of the kitchen, and we consume them on a regular basis. Some of our favorite cookie recipes are GF ones I developed with white sorghum flour.

The way to save money is to make your own GF flours, mixes, and baked-goods, rather than purchasing the pre-made things. Whole grains are almost always less expensive than commercially prepared foods. They also keep longer than already-milled ingredients.

I keep one grain mill and one coffee/spice mill just for GF milling. You'll also guarantee the freshnest GF flours when you mill at home, as well as all the nutrition. Once any grain is milled, the oils are exposed to oxygen which causes them to degrade and go rancid, as well as the degredation of the nutrition. FRESH IS BEST - when you work with flours milled from a large variety of grains/seeds/beans.

Many of the GF grains/seeds can be milled in a coffee/spice mill. Rice flour is a good example of one you can easily make at home. That way you know what kind of rice is used, where you don't when you purchase commercial rice flour. Sorghum flour can also be milled in a coffee/spice mill and many of the other soft GF grains.

When using rice flour in baked goods, you want to mill short- or medium-grain rice. Long-grain rice is only good for dredging or as a thickener; while short- and medium-grain rice can be used for everything - baking as well as dredging and thickening. It makes a difference in the texture of the finished product which one you use.

So back to the budget.... I have a $50/week budget for groceries for 2 adults (food only). That also includes purchases of ALL grains/seeds/beans (which I have hundreds of pounds in storage)- including the GF ones. ALL foods are purchased within that budget. We can have anything we want to eat - it just has to fit in that $50 budget. I've also built 6-12-months (some even more) of food in storage on this budget, so I mainly "shop" at home for meal preparation.

I have purchased Bob's Red Mill GF Baking Mix (substitute for Bisquick), and I have made my own GF baking mix, and have used both in budget-friendly Bisquick Impossible Pie recipes - casseroles AND desserts.

The one flour I purchase for GF baking that I can't mill at home is coconut flour. That's a particular favorite around here, so I purchase it in large quantities, and store in the freezer, to keep the price down.

I'd say most people who are having budget problems need to:

-Look at all the commercially prepared foods they eat, instead of whole foods and cooking from scratch. When someone else processes food from it's natural state, you pay for every pair of hands that it takes... You can even make your own GF pasta and dry it in the dehydrator or store it fresh-made in the freezer.

-How much meat they use. We have at least 3 dinners per week that are low-meat (stir-fry) or meat-free, and only consume 2 servings of meat or meat-substitute (eggs, cheese, peanut butter, etc.) each day (a serving of meat is 3-oz.). I try to keep to a $2/pound meat limit OR no more than 1/5 of my budget, which would be $10/week.

-Check how much food they waste. Wasted food is our most expensive. Forgotten fruit and veggies in the crisper drawer, or lost food in freezers covered with ice crystals and freezer burn because it wasn't packaged properly (think FoodSaver) and gets expensive really fast when we have to pitch it in the trash!

-How many single-serving foods they purchase. If you use juice boxes for instance, figure the unit price for an ounce of juice compared to what it will cost for frozen juice reconstituted with water. A large jar of applesauce is much cheaper per serving than individual snack-pack servings. I make applesauce from free apples I dehydrate at home - to prove how inexpensive homemade is.

-How much snack foods do you normally purchase. Snack food around here are dehydrated apples, nuts, fresh/frozen fruit, instead of "junk-food" chips we use dehydrated zucchini out of the garden.

-SERVING SIZES: Most people don't have any idea how much food they consume or how much they actually need.

Hope that gives you some new ideas.

[peanut]

GFNancy: We aren't gluten free BUT we have a lot of diet restrictions and end up buying special grains, meats, organic. We're in Canada and we budget $150CAD/mth. each for DH and I. That would work out to roughly $120US.