Time to get into the data for our household collective grocery spending for 2025. These are some of the factors and variables that might set us aside from you:
- 4 Adults (no children)
- Primary shopping location is the Regional farmers market direct from source. Secondary sources are usually one of these three options for shelf items we can’t get at the farmers market(s): Syracuse Cooperative Food Market, Lyncourt Discount Grocery, Aldi’s or Wegman’s. We also will on occasion make a larger bulk food order from a regional distributor as part of a buying group.
- We garden and grow foods as part of a perennial landscape plan. Everyone in the house provides 2-hours garden and landscape labor weekly.
- We are an ingredients household, meaning we make as much as possible from scratch, and buy as little as possible pre-made or processed.
- We buy organic whenever possible, are plant-based in our kitchen and pantry (though not exclusively), and don’t skimp on quality products such as local maple syrup, olive oil, or fresh vegetables.
- Eating out costs are not included in this data, if you eat out you still pay your fair share of food bought for the kitchen and pantry like everyone else does, you just also have to pay for your eating out separately; this is to encourage and instill practice of our food mission to cook and eat at home with local and ethical ingredients.
Here’s a look at 2025 in months and categories per person, scroll down for some analyiss:
The Grand Total column shows how much we as a household spent for the whole month – you can see it varies a bit from a minimum of $456.73 in November, to a maximum of $735.25 back in January. The next two columns break that Grand Total down into per person amounts weekly and daily, and the next column shows the differential this year from last in that month – so for example, in December of 2024 our per-person per-week was only $22.89 but was at a $15.00 increase of $38.79 for December of this year 2025. The final column to the right shows a rolling 12-month average at any single point in time, and you can see how this monthly per-person per-week cost increased from $35.79 in December 2024 to $38.83 in December 2025.
So over the course of 12-months, with no changes to our shopping and food mission, we experienced an increase of $3.04 per-person per-week of inflation.
We’ve been monitoring and recording these costs for 77 months now. Our per-person per-week cost during that time has averaged $33.67. In comparison, for 2025, the total was $38.82 per-person per-week.
Are there any other variables that might have affected this year’s totals one way or the other? Here’s a few:
- We came into possession of an Almond Cow plant milk maker, and have used it about 10 quarts so far, at a cost of maybe .25 to .30 cents per bacth. QUarts of plant milk generally cost at least $3.00 or more at a grocery.
- We only had 3 people in the household for 2 months when we transitioned between housemates. This isn’t odd though, in that we’ve probably experienced the same thing more or less over the last 4-5 years.
- Part of our menu is foraged. This includes a large quantity of fruits such as apples and berries – we’re talking probably 20-30 pounds, which we freeze, make into jams and preserves, and eat fresh of course. It’s also generally a lock that we’ll find and forage a couple pounds of mushrooms every year. Both fruits and mushrooms are generally more costly items to purchase from a grocery or market.
So, far from being an exhaustive analysis, it’s possible to understand how we keep costs low with our shopping and cooking habits, and the other variables such as growing and foraging for instance. The USDA estimates that on average, a household of our composition would have experienced monthly food costs in 2025 of $1720 at the “liberal” plan rates – whereas we came in at an average of $640.77 monthly – well less than half. Even if we compare our costs to the “thrift” plan rates, which for our household would total out at $1,012, we’re still significantly under while maintaining a liberal style rate of food costs – supported by our shopping for ingredients and not packaged and processed foods, cooking from scratch at home with those ingredients, and by reducing eating out to the full extent we can and enjoying home made, home styled, and home eaten meals. Happy cooking and good eating to y’all.
Reference: https://www.fns.usda.gov/research/cnpp/usda-food-plans/cost-food-monthly-reports
