How much should you spend on groceries? The Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion frequently publishes information about cost of food for average American. Their reports include four different price levels ranging from thrifty to liberal. So we have made this Grocery list cost estimator.
So, there isn’t one “right” number to spend on food for your family. However, this is an item on every household’s budget that can be reduced easily.
Grocery List Cost Calculator
To accomplish this goal, people often use coupons, buy bulk food, and create the meal plans. But those tactics come with problems. Coupons and food bought in bulk often expire soon. And meal planning is not only time consuming in itself, but can also lead to waste – those vegetables bought from the farmer’s market on Saturday afternoon are not so fresh on Friday evening. If you want another strategy to help you reduce food costs, try using a grocery list cost calculator.
This tool will help you create grocery list and find the best value for each item at stores you visit. Then you will always know which grocery store (or stores) you need to stop at. You can also see how much you are going to spend, so that you create a reasonable grocery budget for your household.
Grocery List Price Estimator
If you’re ready to create your own grocery list cost estimator, this customizable Excel template can help. The download includes three different worksheets that can help you calculate cost per unit for each of the items you purchase regularly:
Cost Summary Worksheet – Create your personalized shopping list and automatically see which of your stores has best deal.
Grocery Cost Table – Enter pricing information for groceries you purchase at the stores you shop at.
Setup Worksheet – Configure template to meet your grocery list needs. Create your stores, brands, units, and categories list. Also, Then make a master shopping list of the groceries you want to purchase.
These three worksheets are designed to work in unison. You need information from setup worksheet to make the formulas work on the others. Together, they will help you save money and find good deals at the grocery store. Preparing Grocery List Cost Estimator
The first thing you need to do is to prepare your own spreadsheet. This will help you reduce amount of typing you need to do in the next step. When you open the template, navigate to the Setup worksheet.
Setup
The setup worksheet looks like this:
Grocery List Cost Estimator Setup
The goal of this worksheet is to enter in several pieces of information for your grocery-shopping habits.
Category
To begin, think about categories of items you purchase at the grocery store. There is a prepopulated list there to help you.
Item Name
Now that you have your categories in place, one can create your master shopping list. In the Item Name section on left side of the template, go ahead and enter the grocery items you purchase regularly.
When you enter an item, take a moment to assign category. You do this by clicking on the dropdown menu and selecting the appropriate category, like this:
Grocery List Cost Estimator Category
Once again, there is a prepopulated list of common grocery list items to help you speed up this process. Use this list as a starting point and update it to reflect what you purchase. You can delete ingredients you never eat and add the ones you do.
Brand
Now you need to update Brands List to reflect the brands of food that you purchase. Your list can include generic brand names like Great Value, or brand names like Trader Joe’s.
Grocery List Cost Estimator Brand
Unit
When you’re done entering the brands you purchase, take time to review the Unit List. These also reflect the way that you purchase items on your list. For instance, you might buy fresh fruits and vegetables by the pound and pick up a bag of breakfast cereal. This means you’d want lbs. and bags on your list.
Many common units are prepopulated as per your convenience, but you should double check that everything you need is entered.
Store
Next, update Store List to include the grocery stores you visit. Simply delete the prepopulated numbered “Marts” and replace each with a store where you shop. Think about all the stores you have loyalty cards with, and make sure to add all these.
If there are any generic marts left over, go ahead and delete them and shift cells up.
Grocery List Cost Estimator Store
At this point, you have finished entering the information you need for Setup Worksheet. It’s time to move onto the Grocery List.
Grocery Cost Table
This worksheet is most time-intensive part of creating your grocery list cost estimator. Before you can figure out how much you need to spend at the grocery store, you must gather data to complete your grocery cost table, and to enter grocery prices.
