Taming the Grocery Shopping Beast: Here’s to Dinner on my Doorstep

Grocery shopping in my house is not  a game.  We can spend between $800 and $1,000 monthly on groceries for our family of five.  Plus, the constant menu planning and shopping trips are draining and there is never a convenient time to go to the store with three kids in tow.  {T-minus 1 week until school starts! yay!}

Last month, we went to a neighborhood festival that had food, entertainment for the kids and local vendors with booths showcasing their wares.  One of them caught my eye – it was a home food delivery service that promised all-natural foods and to reduce our grocery bill. I filled out their form and promptly forgot about it.  A couple of weeks later, we received a call asking when they could come out for a visit to tell us all about their service.  We thought: “why not?” and met with Brad, who – in a non-salesy way – sold us on Passanante’s Home Food Services.

Here’s the gist: they deliver 6-months of all-natural, frozen foods straight to your doorstep (in fact, they even pack it into your freezer for you), and to top it all off, they promise to save you hundreds off of your monthly grocery bills.  There’s no contract and they guarantee their products (i.e., they will replace anything at no cost if for some reason you’re not satisfied, even if you’ve opened the package). And since we’re, ahem, old pros at this meat deliver thing…we decided to give it a shot!  Brad left us a mini-cooler of sample foods – hamburger patty, pork chop, breakfast sausage, mixed veggies – it was all fresh-tasting and delicious.  A week later, we sat down with Brad and went through their entire food list and chose our menu.  He calculated everything and we would be saving about $200 – $300 per month. Nice!

Our first delivery showed up a week later, everything was nicely packaged, labeled and vacuum-sealed. And our freezer? Is stocked.

We have everything from roasting chickens to fresh pasta to premium cuts of beef to every vegetable under the sun.  It’s been about a month since we received our food and I’ve only been to the grocery once. Which has me doing cartwheels.  I should add that they also deliver dry goods like dishwasher detergent and ketchup and paper towels, which is an added bonus.  (I will say that the dry goods are less of a value for our family of 5 because the sizes are small).

Since we still get our milk, eggs and butter delivered to us from the farm, all we need to hit the store for these days is fresh produce, bread, snacks/cereal and a few household items.  So far, so good.

Here’s to dinner on my doorstep and finding even more strategies to simplify and streamline living.