Snackuary 2025: Food Budget Challenge 🍜

[anomalily]

It’s the first monthly budget challenge of 2025!

This month we’re working on food costs for the sixth annual Snackuary

If thinking/talking about food isn’t a good fit for you right now, please check out the other challenges

If seeing food content isn’t good for you - You can click at the bottom to mute this thread you don’t see this category in the “latest posts”!

A note about content warnings

PLEASE put a spoiler over any content that mentions intentional weight loss or dieting for weight loss. And - please no negative commentary on other peoples’ bodies or food choices, that stuff never feels good! You can spoiler your comments using “hide details” under the little wheel. If you can’t figure out how to spoiler, just “flag” your own post and a mod can help you spoiler it.

Snackuary will run from January 1 to January 31.

The goal is to understand your food costs better. Many of us have a complicated relationship with food, and at the end of a day, it isn’t an expense we can make go away entirely because it’s fuel! For many households, it’s the 2nd highest expense in their overall budget (after housing).

I found that my food costs have gone up a lot for the past two years for inflation.

Your Snackuary goal could be as strict as a no-takeout-all-month ban or as simple as a goal as “track my food expenses this month”. Or making coffee at home or simply tracking what parts of your food budget went up since Snackuary last year.

Maybe your goal is to cook more - batch cook each week or bring a packed lunch to work (if you are going into work these days). Perhaps you want to focus on reducing food waste! Or maybe you want to set a cash weekly budget for groceries and not go over it. Maybe you just want to track your food costs for once.

Or maybe you want to go to the cheaper grocery store once during the month.

Whatever it is, make sure the goal is generally aimed towards understanding your food costs better.

Snackuary will have a special forum badge and even a STICKER for people that complete the whole month, that will (probably) be cat-themed.

Basic rules:

1. You must establish your own rules about how you are going to lower or track your food costs this month. State them in the first few days of the month to get us kicked off in the right direction.
2. Each weekend you will report how you did on your challenge for the week on this thread . You can report on where you’re at, and what your biggest challenge and victories of the week were. Then, you’ll put your predictions/goals down for the week ahead.
3. If you want, build in a celebration meal at the end of the month. It’s nice to have a reward!

Who This Challenge is For

Anyone who wants a little public accountability and discussion about reducing food costs. If you liked any of our previous challenges and want to keep it going, here we are!

This challenge pairs very well with Dry January and Uber Frugal January and maybe Veganuary.

What do you get out of participating?

• Lower food costs ideally!
• Lower environmental footprint than dining out and/or wasting food.
• (maybe) healthier food choices
• A community to support you as you resist getting takeaway for the 4th time this week
• A CUTE forum badge for participating in the weekly check-ins
• And if you do all 4 week check-ins, you get a STICKER mailed to you.

Resources

• Budgetbytes- Cheap recipes
• Meal Prep Reddit
• Supercook - lets you search for recipes by what you have
• whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com - exactly what it sounds like
• 6 Fun Ways to Lower Your Grocery Budget - Six Figures Under
• Resource for tracking grocery expenses - Leisure Guy
• USDA recommendations for “targets” for food costs https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-reports-monthly-reports

If you’re in to participate (or on the fence and need encouragement), comment below with your goals for Snackuary.

[anomalily]

I’m doing snackuary, and doing a thing I call “Pantry Survivor Island” -

we’ll be trying to eat down all our canned goods/dry goods before moving. We don’t have a ton but definitely have enough. So we need to use those up and not buy anything new in that category, even if it isn’t our favorite pasta/dry good/etc

Allowed to buy these things:

• fresh vegetables
• fresh tofu/tempeh
• soy milk/half and half

Otherwise, find something in the cabinet to use up!

[diapasoun]

I’m in for Snackuary this year! My goals:

• More fiber and protein for me due to Health Stuff and breastfeeding
• Minimize food waste, even if it means more packaged food

[krmit]

I’m in!

• defrost and inventory deep freeze
• prioritize cooking from deep freez
• track grocery spend

[BiblioFeroz]

I’m in!

In the past I have tried to get involved in grocery spending and make a price book and stuff but (a) I hate that and (b) I am not the grocery shopper.

Instead this year I am going to try 2 goals:

1. Learn 1-2 new recipe(s) that use beans
2. Cook something with beans every week

Beans are cheap and nutritious and I don’t think we get enough fiber.

[plainjane]

we are also eating down the freezer and pantry in preparation for moving out in a few months

I’m not sure what precisely the KPIs might be. Probably I should do an inventory of the freezer and aim to have fewer containers at the end of Jan than at the present.

[PinkTutu]

I’m in. I have a pantry inventory from November. I’ll still technically be in recovery from surgery in January, so I’m going to try and keep it simple.

• eat down the freezers and pantry,
• less that $75 CAD/week on groceries (food only, for 2 adults),
• more protein; less carb.

In order to pull this off, Hubby is going to have to help, or cook himself. I can go with him grocery shopping, but he has to lift things into and out of the cart and car.

[kenner]

Interested, will add ‘figure out exactly what I’m doing’ to my Get It Done December challenge…

[LadyElizabeth]

I’m in and can’t wait to start! I will attempt a veganuary for 2025. I already eat a plant-based diet like 70% of the time, so it’s not going to be that hard, but I found that the animal products that I tend to buy are part of what makes my grocery bill go up.

To reduce the costs, I’m also going to rely less on vegan meats from the grocery store and make my own, same for vegan cheese. I’ve been making seitan in various forms for a couple of years now, but I’m a bit intimidated by the vegan cheese. I bought a recipe book for vegan cheese two years ago but haven’t tried any of the recipes yet.

[anomalily]

I have been vegan for >25 years and I used to manage a large vegan commercial kitchen and I am still so intimidated by making vegan cheese(cheese sauce I am great at, the fermented stuff is hard). I got a kit from work awhile ago and am also gonna try to use it

[LadyElizabeth]

I’ll post my experiments!

[plainjane]

freezer inventory

Summary

Commercial bags
frozen blueberries x3
frozen mango x2 + partial
frozen peaches x1
frozen mixed fruit x1

frozen kale (partial)
brussel sprouts (partial)
frozen corn
frozen cauliflower
frozen green beans 2 x1

Ziplocs
roasted peppers (small)
roasted cauliflower (medium)
roasted tomato (large)
melon pops (medium)

Meats
pork belly x 4
pork tenderloin pieces x 3
steak x1
bacon 1kg x2
bacon 375g x1
ground beef 1lb x3
shrimp (partial)

2 cup meal prep
cauliflower coconut x3
cauliflower coconut red lentil x2
onion soup x2 x1
butter chicken sauce x2
carrot red lentil x1
curried tomato soup x1

1 cup meal prep
shredded pork shoulder x4
butter chicken sauce x3
white beans x2
beef curry x2
beef rendang x1
curried tomato soup x1

1 cup ingredients
stock x2
coconut x1
blood orange juice x1
roasted pears x1

random ingredients
hot peppers
pomegranate seeds
chipotle paste
chopped celery
ginger
chopped lemongrass
tomato paste

I started the green beans before I had gotten to the containers. Obviously I should have waited and defrosted some cauliflower for lunches instead.

[ElleP]

I’m in!
Track grocery spend for the whole month.

No drinks out for me unless with friends.

@LadyElizabeth the cheeses in doesn’t taste like chicken (blog) are the only ones I’ve succeeded at.

[diapasoun]

To make this actionable:

• Track fiber and protein intake (and water too)
• Track what food we’re throwing out

[jacqui_z]

I’m in! My goal for this Snackuary is to spend less than $450 dollars on food for the month. (cringing at how high that budget is, but that’s where I’m at)

Here are some mini-goals to keep me on track:

• use Leisure Guy’s food spending tracker to log what I spend on groceries, farm share, and takeout
• using my paper financial planner to track overall totals for takeout vs. grocery/farm share purchases
• no food delivery allowed in January except for my bi-weekly farm share, but I am allowed to pick-up takeout orders from restaurants within a walkable distance from my home or work

See y’all in 2025!

[Economista]

I’m in! My goal is to track how much we spend on gf alternatives for gluten containing foods. Bonus points for comparing the price of the gf alternative to the price of normal gluten containing food.

One that stood out to me with this week’s grocery list was egg noodles. Normal egg noodles: $1.69 for 16 oz. GF egg noodles: $5.49 for 9 oz (on sale!!).

I know that I can sub other kinds of noodles/pasta but for this dish (beef stroganoff) nothing else feels right.

Also, if it were just me, or even just me and DH, we would just avoid foods that traditionally contain gluten and eat foods that are naturally gluten free. But having 2 children in the mix makes it harder, especially after meeting with D2’s doctors. Children with celiac disease have much higher rates of depression and anxiety and they cautioned us to NOT just switch our diet straight to foods that don’t naturally contain gluten. We are slowly trying to weed out some things but also making sure we don’t make a drastic change.