Take Control of your Food Budget by Doing Inventory
While Restaurants regularly take a total inventory of what they’ve got “on hand” for obvious cost-control and product-ordering purposes, most families do nothing more than keep a “To Buy” list posted somewhere.
Well drastic times call for drastic measures. For us, long gone are the “To Buy” checklists where we add something to the list simply because it comes to mind. Now, we work with a food inventory, weekly menus, and a specific “To Order” type list. The benefits? Cost-Control, of course! We are forced to keep careful tabs on every aspects of our expenses in order to survive. So we adapt and we employ a weekly food inventory.
Using this strategy ensures we “eat well” while staying within our very tight food budget. We can accomplish this because we are longer wasting anything. Everything is right out in front of us due to having taken our inventory - and so, we’re “using up” what we have ans ticking to the rule “Last In, Last Out / First In, First Out” - example would be, say you have 10 potatoes all going soft and sprouting eyes. In days past I might have thrown them out and replaced them with a shiny new bag of potatoes. Not anymore. Yesterday during inventory I discovered 18 medium red potatoes in the bin - all going soft and sprouting eyes. By all accounts, they’re still plenty good-enough to cook. But soon! So guess what I get to do today after posting to my blog? I get to shred and cook the 18 potatoes and store them in the freezer. Why? Because we cannot afford to waste anything! I just saved a few bucks by not going out and buying potatoes. (Well, in our case we did buy more potatoes, they are a bargain this week, we’ll just be eating a LOT of potatoes!)
How to take Food Inventory
First of all, it helps a great deal if there’s 2 people working together on this. Either have your laptop with you in the kitchen and run a list on Notepad or other word processing software, or carry a clipboard where you write everything down. Have the second person go through each of the following areas, noting each product and the amount you have on-hand:
pantry / dry food storage (packages and canned goods)
pantry baking items (sugar, flour, spices etc.)
Dry produce storage (potatoes, onions, etc.)
Oils and beverages (can of coffee, box of tea bags, drink mix, olive oil, etc.)
Refrigerator - break this down into fresh item, condiments and leftovers
Freezer - break this down into meats, leftovers, and other items.
Note on your list how “much” of each thing you’ve got. For example - we have a 5 lb. sack of sugar, but only a little bit in the bag - we estimate we have “1 pound” of sugar.
