Faster Food Saves Cash

Let’s think a little bit about the waste in your life. How often do you clean out the refrigerator? If you are like my family this activity generally coincides with either a shopping trip (pushing fridge capacity to the limit) or an attempt to find “that smell”. During one of these purges, we tend to throw away a lot of food. The discarded items fall into several categories: leftovers, overbought and under used items, and things that got pushed to the back and lost or hidden in a drawer and forgotten. Nearly all of these losses are related to lead time. Lead time is the time between purchase and use of a consumable product. When you drop something into your cart at the grocery store a clock begins counting down. If you have not eaten your purchase within the time window for that item, you might as well have thrown the money you spent on it out the window on the way to the store. You cannot return the unused portion. Leftovers result from overproduction. You have cooked more than you needed and unless you plan to finish off the rest in the vey near future, the time window of all of the ingredients used just got a lot shorter. The key to avoiding these traps is to understand exactly what you need and when you need it. This principle is well known in business but is not well understood in the wider world. If these two things are understood, and all spending falls into line with them waste can be significantly reduced. To put this into practice for food expenditures requires:

1. Make a menu and stick to it. Plan for the shortest interval you can comfortably deal with. The absolute best case would be a daily trip to the store to buy only what you need for that day. This is difficult for some people based on time and transportation constraints. Start with one week then begin reducing the interval until you reach your own minimum.

2. Make a grocery list. Be exact in the required portions and do not buy one ounce more than needed. DO NOT BUY LARGE QUANTITIES TO SAVE MONEY!!! You often pay less per some quantity, then throw away all your savings at some point in the future. Meanwhile you could have held onto all that you overspent and had a cash reserve.