I am a constant proponent of clean budgets and grocery budgets. I think that meal prep is a vital part of living within your means and saving money on one of the largest budget items for many families and I frequently discuss my family’s $350 per month grocery budget.

I hope that I’ve been pretty clear that we paper envelope budget $350 per month for groceries, but when we do our quarterly meal preps we generally spend around $700. This money 100% comes from our envelope budget and is not extra money. I’ll post all of our receipts in this post, and then in the next few posts, I’ll cover what we made with all this food.

Also for clarity, I will break down some of the spending on this meal prep that actually came from my mother-in-law, because she wanted my wife to make meals for them and we did all the shopping at one time. Also, food does not have sales tax in Ohio.

This first receipt is from a new store to us called Gordon Foods Service, a restaurant supply store. Almost all of our bulk meat came from them as they were priced even better than Sam’s Club. The chicken was boneless skinless breasts with four 10-pound bags in each case. We bought two cases, so 80 pounds of chicken. The pork loins are usually cut into chops and roasts. We also picked up 40 pounds of ground beef.

Total 1: $334.24

Before I cover the second receipt, I would also like to caveat that our household goods envelope budget was brought and used specifically for the non-food items on this list.

Let’s break this down to just the tax-free food portion:

• Three rotisserie chickens ($14.94)
• Two frozen broccoli floret bags, with a total of eight 16-oz portion bags ($15.34)
• Box of tomato sauce cans ($9.68)
• Five cream cheese four packs ($23.20)
• One package of 16 sticks of salted butter ($10.96)
• Two packages of boneless, skinless thighs for mother-in-law ($31.14)
• Bag of meatballs ($22.97)
• Five pounds of shredded cheese ($12.32)
• Two reduced price beef roasts ($58.00)
• Two-pack of uncooked whole chickens ($17.02)

Total 2: $215.57 ($549.81)

Walmart is usually our last stop, in case Aldi is out of something, but I’m covering this one next. We got five bags of frozen mixed vegetables, two bags of frozen hash browns, three bags of frozen broccoli, four bags of stir fry mix, four boxes of beefy onion soup mix, four boxes of Lipton onion soup mix, six boxes of linguine noodles, and one lemon concentrate. The $7.47 sandwich was paid for by my mother-in-law and was not part of the grocery money.

Total 3: $52.55 ($602.36)

The Aldi receipt is so long it took three images:

This is where my wife calculated that the meat and other ingredients for my mother-in-law’s portions were around $150. It was easier to just run her card at one store than break down each store into separate checkout windows. I’ll run two totals here because I do want to cover the meal count that was produced for my in-laws as well.

Total 4: $87.20 ($689.56). If we include the portions for MIL, it comes to $839.56.

Honestly, it felt a lot worse buying it than looking at it this way. A normal meal prep for us lasts about three months, but we made way more than we usually do on this one so we’re estimating about five months.

~~Miniwing~~
Stoic, Parent, Investor