Eight Cheap Gadgets That Will Lower Your Grocery Bills
Since we seem to be living in an era of ever-increasing food prices, we’re all looking for ways to lower our food bills . Considering the average grocery spend is over $500 per month, I’m open to suggestions. Extreme coupons? Tell me more. Intermittent fasting? Sounds doable. Ugly products ? Let’s!
Spending money to save? How does this work?
Kitchen tools like bread makers or chest freezers tend to pay for themselves over time, but often require a hefty upfront cost. However, there are a few inexpensive gadgets that don’t require a big investment but can significantly reduce your grocery bills. Here are eight of them.
Bottle connectors
There’s nothing more frustrating than paying for a bottle of something and leaving a bunch of it in the bottle because physics refuses to let it out . But if you throw away bottles of anything—whether it’s condiments, shampoo, or anything else you buy at the grocery store—with the product still stuck in there, you’re throwing away money. Instead, get a bottle connector (which will allow you to transfer the remains of an old bottle into a new one), a zero-waste cap (which will use gravity to help you use every drop of anything in the bottle), or some kind of bottle scraper to get everything left out of the bottle. It’s hard to calculate how much money you can save by doing all these things, but it’s no small thing.
Food Vacuum Sealer
A food vacuum sealer is not the cheapest option; While you can find sealants for around $10, this can definitely be a stupid decision. But an initial investment of $ 40 to $ 100 will save you money in several ways:
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Reduce waste. Vacuum sealing leftovers and overflowing ingredients will keep them fresh for much longer.
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Pay for bulk purchases. Buying in bulk usually lowers your per-unit costs, but only if you can actually use what you’re buying. Vacuum sealing makes it easy to buy meat or fish in bulk and keep it fresh long enough to eat. Plus, if you happen to come across an amazing sale on something perishable, you can make an unusually large purchase economical by sealing and freezing most of it.
Guardians of the herbs
If you’re cooking with a lot of fresh herbs , a herb keeper can help keep them fresh for over a week longer than if you just put them in a crisper (or a plastic bag where all the herbs wilt). This means you can use them across multiple meals and buy less overall.
Produce depositors
Buying fresh produce often leads to costly disappointment. You pay for a bunch of apples and some of them are apparently already rotting before you even get them home from the store, and the rest don’t do very well no matter where you store them. You may be one of those people who likes to turn black bananas into banana bread and soft apples into pies, but it would be better if things lasted longer. This is where products like GreenBags and BlueApple Produce Saver come in. Both extend the shelf life of fresh food by several days, giving you extra time to use what you buy while also improving the taste and overall experience of the food you eat. Over time, they’ll pay for themselves in fresher fruits and vegetables and lower grocery bills.
Cheese grater
You may not think of a cheese grater as a gadget, but tell that to the people who lived before it was invented. Buying pre-shredded cheese will definitely save you money (and give you a better cheese experience, since pre-shredded cheese is usually coated with lots of stabilizers and preservatives to keep it from sticking). Block cheese will almost always be cheaper than pre-grated cheese, so aside from the convenience of eating and preparing, grating your own cheese will pay for the grater over time and then some.
Silicone elastic lids
If you regularly use foil or plastic wrap to cover bowls, old plastic storage containers that have lost their lids, or pans taken straight from the stove (later in the evening, use a spoon to break up food straight from the pan), you’re paying money every time you tear off a sheet. Instead, use flexible silicone lids . They’ll fit in just about any bowl or tub you have, and keep their contents nice and fresh with an airtight seal that’s almost certainly better than that mangled piece of aluminum foil you were planning on using. One note: you should not use them to leave extra canned food in the jar. Yes, the lid will effectively close and seal the jar, but once it is opened, your food will begin to react to the metal of the jar, which can reduce the taste and cause bacterial growth.
Reusable paper towels
If you use a lot of disposable items from the grocery store, a great way to save money is to switch to reusable items that can be washed. Makeup remover pads and paper towels (which can also be used as everyday wipes) are two easy switches. Made from bamboo, rayon paper towels are eco-friendly and can be reused about 50 times. Meanwhile, if you don’t buy a new supply every week or so, you’ll definitely save some money—have you seen what Target wants for paper towels these days?
Drying balls
If you use dryer sheets in your laundry, you can probably cut down on your shopping costs by switching to wool dryer balls . Dryer sheets range in price from about four cents per sheet on the low end to about ten cents per sheet (mostly for specialty sheets, such as those designed for homes with a lot of pet hair). Wool dryer balls help reduce drying time, wrinkling and static cling, and are reusable (up to approximately 1,000 times). So a six-pack of dryer balls will get you at least 6,000 loads of laundry for about $10, rather than $240 for dryer sheets. Even if you wash a large amount of laundry and use 2-3 balls per load, you will still notice significant savings compared to dryer sheets.