Grocery Budget Calculator

It varies enormously by country, diet and where you shop, so a per-person-per-meal figure from your own spending is far more useful than any published average. What this gives you is a comparable number to track over time.

Because a toddler and a teenager eat very differently, and both differ from an adult. A straight headcount understates what adults cost and overstates what small children cost, making the per-person figure meaningless for comparison.

Because four weeks a month is 48 weeks a year, which undercounts by a month's shopping. It is a small error that compounds into a real one across a year of budgeting.

It falls as income rises — a well-documented pattern known as Engel's law. What matters for a household budget is whether the figure is stable and affordable, not how it compares to a national average.

Reduce waste first, since a third of the saving is usually there. Then plan meals against what is already in the house, shop the unit price rather than the shelf price, and buy fresh produce in season.

Keep them separate. Mixing them hides which one is actually rising, and eating out is a want while groceries are largely a need — which matters if you are checking a budget split.

Studies routinely find a large share of purchased food is thrown away, much of it edible when bought. Reducing waste is usually the largest available saving and requires no change in what you eat.

Consistently, because it converts a shop from browsing into a list. The saving comes from buying less that goes unused rather than from buying cheaper items.

Weekly generally, because fewer trips means fewer unplanned purchases. Daily shopping reduces waste for fresh items, so households with high waste sometimes do better shopping more often.

The delivery fee is offset for many households by removing impulse purchases, which are far higher in store. Substitutions and the inability to check reduced items are the real trade-offs.

Use per-person-per-week rather than household totals, so a comparison is not distorted by household size. National statistics agencies publish household food spending, though the categories may not match yours.

The observation that food takes a falling share of income as income rises. It is one of the oldest empirical regularities in economics and it holds across countries and time periods.