What grocery items are always worth the extra $1-$5?
What grocery items are always worth the extra $1-$5?
Prices keep climbing, so I’m trying to pick my battles in the supermarket. Which items do you refuse to cheap out on, and why? Taste, health, longevity, peace of mind… I’d love to hear what’s worth the few extra dollars for you.
For me, it’s honey from local beekeepers—supermarket brands locally are known to sell fake or adulterated sugar syrup as honey.
Good ketchup Real butter, not reconstituted which should be illegal Good bread, fresh or at least not the cheapest stuff
For purely economic reasons, the less often I need to buy it, the more I allow myself to splurge.
So vegetables and my go to drink I consume everyday are bought the absolute cheapest, but that spice blend for those veggies lasts me months so I really don't care if there's a cheaper alternative.
Of course, expensiveness is measured per kg/litre, paying a bit more up front is always worth it if it means a lower price per kg (if you can consume it before it goes bad).
Paper Towels and Trash Bags - the cheap ones just don't hold up as well
Yeah, if we end up with cheap trash bags by mistake I find the rim always rips apart when I go to take out the trash and I end up using a second trash bag anyway.
Lube.
Local
Whatever the product is, I'll pay an extra dollar for domestic (and especially within the province)Coffee. It's something that I refuse to compromise on. It may be especially important to me because I like to drink it black. If it doesn't taste great without adding anything to it, it's not with drinking at all in my opinion.
I'm two ways about this.
In recent years I've become quite a coffee lover. I've experimented with a lot of brewing methods, and got into small batch beans from independent roasters, with interesting qualities like being aged in whisky barrels (that one tastes and smells sooo good)
At the same time though I grew up in a family where the only coffee my parents ever drank was instant - a teaspoon of granules with some hot water and milk and maybe sugar. When I go over there to visit that's what I'll get, and I'm not going to turn my nose up at it. In some ways it's got that taste of nostalgia lol.
Pasta. It takes pasta dishes from "eh, it's food" to "this is really good".
Mozzarella (talking about the balls of fresh mozzarella you get sealed in with their brine).
Can't do store brand anymore after having tried Galbani.
It's pretty easy to make those with some high fat milk, rennet, and cheese salt
I mean, yea. But it is also easy to buy them, they're everywhere and fairly cheap. The Galbani one is also just 1€ or so more expensive.
To be clear, making your own is fantastic, it's just not anything I'd want to do 2x/week
Farmer’s market tomatoes. I went through my whole life thinking I hated tomatoes. Turns out, I hate grainy tomatoes that taste like nothing, and real tomatoes grown nearby and picked ripe are wonderful.
Tomatoes are also quite easy to grow in the summer and are very prolific.
Also in season are strawberries. The ones I've got are small and don't look good, but the taste is superb.
Both can be grown potted, and the strawberries are quite hardy.
Yeah, this, but all the things, especially veggies.
The same plant can basically feel like an entirely different species.
Most of the time it just grew up properly (not maximising growth rate to lower the costs).
All of them really. Once I find a brand I like, I'll stick with it. I'm usually not paying attention to prices anyway. I'll even go to another country just so I can get the proper brand of tomato paste. (It's not that bad, just around 15km away).
Eggs. I bought the expensive ones once just for laughs and they taste great without the weird funk. Now I have my own chickens, and the eggs are better than anything in the store. It’s probably more expensive though!
Carrots and celery I always buy organic because they seem to take on the flavor of whatever they were watered with. It makes a difference there for me.
And tortillas, I get the local boutique ones instead of the national mass market ones. Big difference there.
+1 to eggs! I dream of having chickens but have heard it's a game of pros and cons
I used to have chickens. Between the cost of the coop, the feed, medicine, etc. I’d say each egg cost us about $5. 🙂
A little exaggeration, but not much. The eggs were really good though, and they make for cute stupid pets.
Butter, life is too damn short to cook with and eat shitty butter.
Also anything that goes between me and the ground, my bed, my shoes, and my tires.
Kerrygold
Not grocery but my opinion is anything that interacts with the world around you. Glasses, shoes, gloves, headphones should all be top quality for comfort and their respective task
I agree with every part of this.
A while back I was standing in the butter section, waiting for a couple to move so I could grab my pricey-but-worth-it butter, and overheard them talking about how butter is a scam and it all tastes the same no matter what. I had to hold back a chuckle. They of course grabbed the cheapest option and went about their lives in complete ignorance of the glory of high quality butter.
I still wonder if I should have said something to encourage them to try a better butter, but they talked about it with such blind confidence that I didn’t feel right about it at the time.
Ever double blinded yourself with Kerrygold (or w/e) vs. regular stuff? Always try to do this and surprise myself with some products
Canadian maple syrup.
It's all run by a cartel!
While I agree, the price difference between "maple syrup" (maple flavoured corn syrup) and maple syrup is way more than $5. A bottle of genuine maple syrup is $20+.
It's not called maple syrup if it's not real maple syrup. They'll call it maple flavored syrup, pancake syrup, but never maple syrup.
Costco sells real Canadian maple syrup at a fair price (cost plus a few percent).
You can get real maple syrup in the states for around $15 (and that's honestly NYC pricing). It's not corn syrup, but it's also not Canadian maple syrup.
But one of my favorite things about Canada absolutely is the abundance of maple syrup here. Maple syrup candies are my favs.
Second this. I even put it in coffee instead of just sugar. It's so good!
I always make cold brew so I can't say how it is with "regular" hot coffee lol
I'm going to sound like a hater, but the food in season and local is what you should be eating, and that will always be the cheapest. If you're talking processed food brands and shit in boxes in the middle of the store, I'd argue none of it is worth the extra money, its all bad for you, stop. That said, the frozen arby's curley fries are bomb, and no one does cheesey things like cheetos or smartfood.
I've seen a few people saying that it's cheaper to buy stuff that's in season over the years but I've never seen prices drop on in season stuff before. Idk if it's just a thing where I am but the supermarkets seem to just pocket the difference and leave the prices the same year round.
You'll still probably get better flavors when things are in season locally. Also, you'll need to check, but often the frozen version of produce is cheaper when the fresh version is in season, and frozen is easy to stock up on.
I've never seen prices drop on in season stuff
That means you forgot the 'local' part. Cheapest supermarket get their stuff from the cheapest sources worldwide.
You really have to look if you want to buy local, but then it's worth it.
bummer...i see berry and asparagus prices down now...
Canned tomatoes. Get the good ones if you can!
Yes, very much worth it, can make a big difference. Even though i turned to buy my local store's brand, I saw that they were rated very highly in a canned tomatoes test and they really taste good.
My husband and I got curious about the variance in canned tomatoes one day, so we got one can from every brand we could find. We had a blind tasting session where we tried each one without knowing what brand it was (palate cleansers in between) and ranked them all out of 10 with some comments. We didn't share our rankings or thoughts with each other until the Big Reveal at the end when we found out which tomatoes were which.
Turned out we actually preferred some of the cheaper brands, and the most expensive ones got worse ratings. There wasn't a direct relationship between price and preference, but it was interesting.
It was a fun day. We also did the same thing with soda water.
Olive oil, although it's not really 1-5 extra where I am. There's a lot of advice to buy cheap oil for cooking, but that's not really true. The truth is that a lot of 'extra virgin' oil is sold in an old, rancid state, and you have to upgrade into the mid tiers to get away from that.
Buy the best olive oil you're willing to spend money on, even for cooking.
Yes, very much this (and the big price differences, and how cheap oils are also sold as expressive ones). Smol producers of extra virgin (= cold pressed with low yields) olive oils usually offer good price/performance, at least until they become a brand & sell out.
Other oils also have a ton of specifics ("oil" is a very broad term), like how fast flax oil degrades in quality & the 'use by' date are useless.
(Tho it's still important to understand how heat affects divergent & differently prepared oils - and especially for what you absolutely do need refined oil, regardless of plant.)
Good ev olive oil is something else. Once you try you can never go back to.
I lived most my life using and tasting the highest quality cause my dad works in the agricolutural field, writing contracts for farmers and etc. and, while not so good paid, the job comes with the upside of the presents from said farmers. Liters and liters of the highest quality oil italy can produce. I think we never (since he had this job) boight a can of oil, and its a pretty big save too considering that kind of oil easily goes for 20€/L.
When i was out for university, my tight budget meant i had to resort to just "Olive oil". Not EV. Not 100% local. I though "how bad can it be, its still pressed olives!" Bad, very bad.
i was hoping someone would say this as well! heaps of evidence out there about tonnes of adulterated olive oils. usually with cheap hyper-processed seed oils
I like buying local California olive oils, then I know it's real.
I will add that I’ve yet to find a decent tasting store brand soda or sparkling water. I have no idea why it’s so difficult for them to get the flavoring right.
Kroger diet cola. It's better than diet coke. Always fucking out of stock though around me.
Kerrygold
Lunch meat. I eat sandwiches every day for lunch and I have tried all the discount store brands for various types of ham, turkey, and chicken, and it's all pretty shit, so I'm quite happy to pay the buck for the Hillshire Farms stuff cause it's the best.
If you really want to step up your game, try buying raw meat, cooking it, and slicing it for sandwiches. I do this with chicken and it's served me really well at very low cost.
That sounds like a big increase in pain-in-the-ass for not that big an increase in savings. I'm happy to trade money for convenience on this one. ;)
Silverware
The cheap metals taste like a magnet, have rough edges, and lose their appearance after a few washes
There’s plenty of good used stainless flatware out there. Older stuff found at estate sales is frequently better quality and cheaper than buying new at department stores.
Nice try, Kroger.
Believe it or not, top-shelf bacon. It's got more bacon in it. Less water. You're not paying nearly as much more per ounce of actual meat as it looks at first.
Lots of "organic" produce has a significantly longer shelf life than the basic stuff too. Never mind whether it's any healthier or tastier, I'm not saving any money if I pay a dollar less and it starts molding before I can eat half of it.
Yeah, the secret to getting good bacon is buying it at the
butcherdeli counter. You can request your preferred thickness, it's much leaner, and it's more flavorful. Unless you've got a local artisan cured meat hookup available, it's the way to go.
Huy Fong Sriracha. Just don't even bother buying any other bottle of "sriracha" sauce. It's not worth it. Your disappointment will be immeasurable and your day will be ruined.
That used to be the case because the peppers were specifically grown just for Huy Fong. However, Huy Fong screwed over their exclusive pepper grower to increase profits. The peppers they get now don't taste the same.
This is it. The old Huy Fong is completely gone now, unless you have a connection to someone who's been hoarding.
There's a different sauce brand now that is produced by Huy Fong's old pepper farm using the same peppers. But I've been told that's not exactly the same either.
While I also like Huy Fong Sriracha and was delighted when I first ran into it, I believe I remember reading about them changing the recipe at some point.
EDIT: Oh, sounds like they didn't change the recipe intentionally, but at least the first batch they had after they had a fight with their pepper supplier tasted somewhat differently. I assume that they're aiming to keep the flavor the same.
I've had a Sriracha from Yellow Bird that was absolutely amazing, they added in a little bit of agave, probably my top pick now.
Just had some of the worst “store brand” honey mustard. How do you mess that up? Tasted like they watered it down by adding extra vinegar. Watery. Gross tasting. Lesson Learned.
La Tourangelle Extra Virgin Olive Oil. It’s my favorite.
Pasta made in Italy. (A recent ex-girlfriend converted me)
If you absolutely positively have to have a bottle of soda, then probably go with the Mexican Coke over anything made in America.
Theres a lot of craft soda or smaller soda worth your time. Also Fever Tree is fantastic for mixers/fizzy drinks
Forgot about this. Empire soda from Bristol, RI is the bomb.