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.
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.
What grocery items are always worth the extra
butter … my bed, my shoes, and my tires
Hello, fellow Costco shopper.
Costco has sub par service at their tire center, but good prices. Recommend using their prices to price match at a regular store with better service to get the best of both worlds.
Maybe your warehouse has issues but Costco tire center is top tier
it’s just a bit slow. i’ve waited 20 minutes just to buy a battery before
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
Kerrygold
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.
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.
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.
WF sells real canadian syrup too.
Costco sells real Canadian maple syrup at a fair price (cost plus a few percent).
Even as a Canadian, I honestly prefer the cheap butter flavored syrup. I grew up on that stuff and I fucking love it so much. Real maple syrup is still delicious but I’ll always choose some good old butter flavored syrup.
There’s nothing wrong with new england maple syrup, but yes, real maple syrup not “pancake syrup” with maple flavoring.
That’s me, I don’t really care where the maple syrup came from as long as it’s real
It’s all run by a cartel!
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.
bummer…i see berry and asparagus prices down now…
Also melons, super on sale.
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.
Have to disagree on the last point. I greatly prefer Aldi Cheese Curls and Market Basket Cheese Crunches. Except the jalapeño cheddar flavor. Those slap.
Trader Joes are so much better than the Aldi ones IMO
But the parent company owns both of those brands though?
Yep! Very different product though. So much less greasy feeling, better crunch, less cheetoh fingers. i think the trader joes version is about $2 for a bag?
Aldi is two different companies, North and South. One owns Aldi America, the other bought Trader Jones.
This sounds like the beginning of a math story problem.
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.
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.
Yep. Read “Extra Virginity” and you’ll likely never buy imported EVO again.
I feel like that title calls for a joke but I’m too tired
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
We just got chickens, im not sure they’re cheaper then buying but certainly more available.
I do have a constant fight with hawks though trying to eat them
Hawks, snakes stealing eggs, and then a fox finally did mine in :(
We live somewhere with a ton of hawks and coyotes. Our coop was our quarantine project so we kind of overdid it. It’s 8-by-16-feet, surrounded on the sides and bottom with heavy gauge hardware cloth and a metal roof. Nothing can get into it.
The run, on the other hand, is about 30 feet along one side, chicken wire and covered with bird netting. We lost two of our girls when someone made a mistake and locked them outside in the run. A fox dug under and took them. I added a skirt along the ground to stop anything digging in but it’s not as good as the coop itself
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.
The difference in eggs is a placebo at best.
I can tuck homemade tortillas though, definitely worth it.
That probably depends on how you’re cooking them. Runny yolk from good eggs is an order of magnitude better than the cheap eggs.
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.
I grew up eating garden tomatoes. Went to college, for the first time bought a grocery store tomato. Cut into it, tasted it… turned to my friend, what the fuck is this shit?
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, even just growing them are better. I thought I hated Cherry Tomatoes, but then I had some off my own plant and they taste so good.
Oh, home grown fruits will always taste better because you can let them ripen on the plant, allowing for full flavor development. There are cultivar variations too.
Seasonings are another crop that you can pot and even have on a windowsill in a tiny apartment. Parsley, basil, and oregano grow well in the same pot. Scallions / chives and Rosemary also pot well together.
Home grown cherry tomatoes were my favorite summer snack as a kid. Pop pop pop they go! Amazing!
strawberries are quite hardy.
They’re insane. We didn’t weatherize our beds for winter but the strawbees didn’t care. They took over nearly the entirety of both beds. They also try to escape the beds occasionally.
Hank buying food from a co-op instead of megalo mart https://youtu.be/OBLqzGrq8T0
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).
Absolutely. I was the same way then my mom make a margherita pizza mostly from scratch with tomatoes she grew herself and it was life changing
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.
Coffee seems to be one of those things supermarkets regularly price cycle.
If i buy 4x 1kg bags when it’s 30% off, i rarely have to buy any at full price.
This doesn’t work for artisan’s coffee you buy direct from the roaster obviously.
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. ;)
It is. What makes it worth it for me is the combination of extremely high quality and very low price. If I could buy deli meat of that quality, I probably would, but I haven’t encountered it.
There is also a potential health difference. Lunch meat tends to be loaded with preservatives and falls into the category of “processed meat”.
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
How long does it keep once you make it?
I’ve never managed to keep it for more than day. Presumably it’s pretty shelf stable in its brine for a while
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).
Canned tomatoes. Get the good ones if you can!
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.
If I can find it, I will edit it in.
There was a great America’s Test Kitchen episode where they did just this, and they talked about the oils that suface in the different cans, etc
Love this!!!
Try with coffee and butter n stuff?
I think butter would be a very interesting one! Especially for the spreadable kind.
The only other item I’ve done this with was beer. We had about 10 of our college friends all bring one or two kinds of beer each in a paper bag, smuggling in to the designated “staging” room. I wasn’t super into beer so I just did the facilitating on this one - I randomized the order and handed out samples of the beer in small cups to everyone, and everyone gave a ranking and some thoughts, as well as trying to guess what the beer was. At the end, I entered everything into excel and had a little presentation of the results. It was a fun night.
The most memorable part was when our friend who LOVES this one particular (somewhat pricey) craft beer gave it like a 3/10. He spent the entire night ranking everything quite low and waiting for his fav to come up, expecting to immediately recognize it and give it an 11 - to the point where he accused me of missing his contribution completely - just to discover it was beer #4 and he had already made disparaging comments about it.
lol :D
Thank you great story
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.
Pasta. It takes pasta dishes from “eh, it’s food” to “this is really good”.
Whole Foods, oddly enough, is the place I find the cheapest good pasta. Their store brand is less than most places and really good.
it is, even thier pasta sauce cheap, and at least your getting organic as well. thier more bougie ones are usually what people buy, Raos. i also have discounts for wf. i buy the egg wraps they sell now, but there are other places that sells it for somewhat cheaper, but its out of the way and inconvient to get to those other stores.
Cream cheese. The store brand might be okay for maybe baking with, but you can’t spread that excuse for caulk on a bagel and say it’s anything near as good as the Philadelphia brand.
Philly used to be reliable for not having gums added. Sadly they started using them, too, a year or two ago. Now I buy a local brand with nothing more than milk, cream, and salt for twice the price.
Seriously?! I need to go check some ingredients, brb.
Gotta check ingredients every so often. They love changing things without telling you.
The store brand might be okay for maybe baking with
False. The store brands don’t blend well, and you end up with little balls of raw cream cheese in your cheesecake.
Kirkland’s is the only store brand I’ve tried that’s OK, but Costco store brand stuff is all miles ahead of the other stores.
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.
