

If eggs are on sale, boil a large batch of hard boiled eggs. If you have a ton of oats to use, it would be a great week to make oat balls or granola. As always, shop your pantry/fridge first. Instead choose just a few options for the week to keep cost down. We can choose cheap healthy snacks all day long, but if you have ten of them as an option for the week, your family will eat all ten and your grocery bill will inevitably be very high. This is an important reminder when buying or making snacks. Go ahead and cut up some carrot sticks, cut that pineapple, make that one homemade snack, and you are good to go for the week armed with your own convenience food. So get used to prepping your own convenience food on the weekend. I don't know about you, but I am much more likely to eat well if the hard work is already done for me and I just have to grab and eat. With packaged snacks, if I buy them in bulk, I do find that I have to put the extras away somewhere and ration them so we don't eat them too quickly.īy prepping snacks on your own, you are saving money and filling your family with healthier options.

Bonus if you can stack them with a coupon. Then when I am shopping, I look for items that are on sale that fit those categories.įor packaged items that you frequently purchase, look for when they go on sale and buy several at a time to stock up. A practice that I find helpful in my own home, is to put on my grocery list a generic listing for "fruit" or "snack veggies" or packaged snacks. Berries in the spring and summer are almost always on sale so we go crazy on them during those seasons. Check the salesīerries in the winter are very pricey, so we don't buy them during that time. Most of the time, snacks around here are a piece of fruit, popcorn, a hard boiled egg, applesauce, jerky, or another one ingredient item that can be easily grabbed by my kids. I simply don't have the energy or time to put towards fancy or cutesy. Don't get me wrong, I still frequently buy a bag of plain chips or tortilla chips to satisfy that salty crunchy craving from time to time, but I find every eats much better if we don't make it a habit to graze on them all day long.Įlaborate snacks don't happen in this house. This is a bit harsh, but if there is a constant supply of highly palatable junk food available throughout the day to keep their caloric needs met, why should we be surprised that they don't eat dinner? It's no surprise that they don't have a taste for more well-balanced foods.

Cheap healthy food how to#
How to save on snacks Limit snackingįirst, my advice is to limit snacking to once or maybe twice a day if you want your children to be hungry at meal times. In my experience, if there's anything that can jack up your grocery bill quickly, it is convenience snacks, especially fancy "healthy" packaged snacks. The number one thing parents ask my advice on when they subscribe to my blog is for ideas for cheap healthy snacks. Cheap healthy snack ideas for your busy family! A nice mix of no-prep snacks and make-ahead options as well as tips for saving money on snacks.
