Buying Food in Bulk With A Food Buying Club

Save Money Buying Food In Bulk
by Hannah Walton aka The Cheapskate Mom

I have had lots of different grocery shopping phases in my adult life : at eighteen, I went out to eat all of the time, tipped well, and supplemented my empty refrigerator with donut shop donuts and corner store milk. At the age of twenty one, I shopped at the local co-op and bought only organic, fresh, “designer” food. At twenty five, I joined a wholesale club and tried that for a while – but found that buying brand name items in larger quantities wasn’t quite saving me as much as was buying generic in smaller quantities. At twenty eight, I found that by going to five different stores and buying things at the cheapest price possible was saving me money but was making me feel pretty hectic.

Now, at thirty one and with a baby in the mix, my husband and I have returned to shopping at our wholesale club and wal-mart.  We only buy the things we use, we buy the wholesale club’s line whenever possible, and we really question whether each purchase is a good deal or just looks like a good deal. Shopping at a wholesale club allows us to buy higher quality items than we could otherwise afford – namely many organic purchases.

I’d heard before about food buying clubs – a grass roots alternative to the big box wholesale club where we shop. Groups of people with similar culinary tastes band together to buy food in bulk for great prices. Seems like a great, and very cheapskate, idea to me. I was delighted to find an incredibly well-written article from Dawn over at Small Footprint Family – she makes food buying clubs easy to understand. She sold me on the concept and as soon as I have some free time, I’m going to try to figure out how to get this going where I live – and how on earth I can fit an extra freezer into my already cramped one bedroom apartment!

from How to Start an Organic Food Buying Club :

“In the first study of its kind to look into the benefits of buying in bulk, research conducted by Portland State University Food Industry Leadership Center for the Bulk is Green Council (BIG), revealed that Americans could save an average of 89 percent on costs by buying their organic foods in bulk.” - read more ….

*photograph and link both used with author’s one time permission