Reduce Grocery Bill by 50% — Angel Food Ministries

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

I have not had great success with grocery coupons as a way to save money. We tend to eat whole foods and never buy cereal or chips or any of the processed foods that always have a plethora of coupons available. We eat fruit, veggies, and meat, things that never seem to go on sale.

In addition, our area has limited grocery store competition. We’re down to one chain store and a handful of discount retailers. This lack of competition, in my experience, has driven our food costs up. Especially considering my nephew tells me he can get milk and other staples cheaper in Phoenix Arizona,which, in case you didn’t know, is a desert and the land of perpetually expensive gasoline. I can’t believe that my Midwestern farm belt location in any way justifies the higher food prices I see. It has to be a market driven anomaly, one I have no control over.

So I’ve been looking for other options to reduce our food bill. Someone somewhere mentioned Angel Food Ministries which is a non-profit that makes food available at a drastic discount. There’s no paperwork to fill out (other than your order) or requirement to prove financial need. You just place an order and pick up your food once a month at a local church.

Angel Food Ministries sells ‘boxes’ of food. The ’signature box’ costs $30 and changes every month. Right now it features a selection of seven different beef and pork items along with some veggies (including lima beans), milk, and eggs. On average, the $30 signature box would cost $65 at a grocery store, so it’s a significant savings even with the lima beans that no one will eat factored in.

They also have gluten free items in bulk (a great buy for families dealing with food allergies), a chicken box with 20lbs of chicken for $20 and a senior frozen meal box with 14 meals for $28 which could be used for lunch at work. Nothing costs more than $30.

Further, the more people that buy food from Angel Food Ministries, the more they can do as an organization to provide food at a reduced cost. The churches win too as Angel Food Ministries donates a portion of their sales to the churches acting as pick-up locations. According to the AFM website, they’ve donated over $12 million dollars to local churches through their food program.

We’ll be picking up our first order this December, the first of what I hope will be a sustainable way to reduce our food budget.

Check out the Angel Food Ministries website and see if they have a pick-up location near you.

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