Butter, life is too damn short to cook with and eat shitty butter.
Also anything that goes between me and the ground, my bed, my shoes, and my tires.
What grocery items are always worth the extra
butter ... my bed, my shoes, and my tires
Hello, fellow Costco shopper.
Costco has sub par service at their tire center, but good prices. Recommend using their prices to price match at a regular store with better service to get the best of both worlds.
Not grocery but my opinion is anything that interacts with the world around you. Glasses, shoes, gloves, headphones should all be top quality for comfort and their respective task
Kerrygold
I agree with every part of this.
A while back I was standing in the butter section, waiting for a couple to move so I could grab my pricey-but-worth-it butter, and overheard them talking about how butter is a scam and it all tastes the same no matter what. I had to hold back a chuckle. They of course grabbed the cheapest option and went about their lives in complete ignorance of the glory of high quality butter.
I still wonder if I should have said something to encourage them to try a better butter, but they talked about it with such blind confidence that I didn’t feel right about it at the time.
Canadian maple syrup.
While I agree, the price difference between "maple syrup" (maple flavoured corn syrup) and maple syrup is way more than $5. A bottle of genuine maple syrup is $20+.
It's not called maple syrup if it's not real maple syrup. They'll call it maple flavored syrup, pancake syrup, but never maple syrup.
I'm going to sound like a hater, but the food in season and local is what you should be eating, and that will always be the cheapest. If you're talking processed food brands and shit in boxes in the middle of the store, I'd argue none of it is worth the extra money, its all bad for you, stop. That said, the frozen arby's curley fries are bomb, and no one does cheesey things like cheetos or smartfood.
I've seen a few people saying that it's cheaper to buy stuff that's in season over the years but I've never seen prices drop on in season stuff before. Idk if it's just a thing where I am but the supermarkets seem to just pocket the difference and leave the prices the same year round.
Olive oil, although it's not really 1-5 extra where I am. There's a lot of advice to buy cheap oil for cooking, but that's not really true. The truth is that a lot of 'extra virgin' oil is sold in an old, rancid state, and you have to upgrade into the mid tiers to get away from that.
Buy the best olive oil you're willing to spend money on, even for cooking.
i was hoping someone would say this as well! heaps of evidence out there about tonnes of adulterated olive oils. usually with cheap hyper-processed seed oils
Farmer’s market tomatoes. I went through my whole life thinking I hated tomatoes. Turns out, I hate grainy tomatoes that taste like nothing, and real tomatoes grown nearby and picked ripe are wonderful.
Eggs. I bought the expensive ones once just for laughs and they taste great without the weird funk. Now I have my own chickens, and the eggs are better than anything in the store. It’s probably more expensive though!
Carrots and celery I always buy organic because they seem to take on the flavor of whatever they were watered with. It makes a difference there for me.
And tortillas, I get the local boutique ones instead of the national mass market ones. Big difference there.
+1 to eggs! I dream of having chickens but have heard it's a game of pros and cons
We just got chickens, im not sure they're cheaper then buying but certainly more available.
I do have a constant fight with hawks though trying to eat them
Coffee. It's something that I refuse to compromise on. It may be especially important to me because I like to drink it black. If it doesn't taste great without adding anything to it, it's not with drinking at all in my opinion.
I'm two ways about this.
In recent years I've become quite a coffee lover. I've experimented with a lot of brewing methods, and got into small batch beans from independent roasters, with interesting qualities like being aged in whisky barrels (that one tastes and smells sooo good)
At the same time though I grew up in a family where the only coffee my parents ever drank was instant - a teaspoon of granules with some hot water and milk and maybe sugar. When I go over there to visit that's what I'll get, and I'm not going to turn my nose up at it. In some ways it's got that taste of nostalgia lol.
Lunch meat. I eat sandwiches every day for lunch and I have tried all the discount store brands for various types of ham, turkey, and chicken, and it's all pretty shit, so I'm quite happy to pay the buck for the Hillshire Farms stuff cause it's the best.
If you really want to step up your game, try buying raw meat, cooking it, and slicing it for sandwiches. I do this with chicken and it's served me really well at very low cost.
That sounds like a big increase in pain-in-the-ass for not that big an increase in savings. I'm happy to trade money for convenience on this one. ;)
Mozzarella (talking about the balls of fresh mozzarella you get sealed in with their brine).
Can't do store brand anymore after having tried Galbani.
All of them really. Once I find a brand I like, I'll stick with it. I'm usually not paying attention to prices anyway. I'll even go to another country just so I can get the proper brand of tomato paste. (It's not that bad, just around 15km away).
Canned tomatoes. Get the good ones if you can!
My husband and I got curious about the variance in canned tomatoes one day, so we got one can from every brand we could find. We had a blind tasting session where we tried each one without knowing what brand it was (palate cleansers in between) and ranked them all out of 10 with some comments. We didn't share our rankings or thoughts with each other until the Big Reveal at the end when we found out which tomatoes were which.
Turned out we actually preferred some of the cheaper brands, and the most expensive ones got worse ratings. There wasn't a direct relationship between price and preference, but it was interesting.
It was a fun day. We also did the same thing with soda water.
Pasta. It takes pasta dishes from "eh, it's food" to "this is really good".
Cream cheese. The store brand might be okay for maybe baking with, but you can't spread that excuse for caulk on a bagel and say it's anything near as good as the Philadelphia brand.
Philly used to be reliable for not having gums added. Sadly they started using them, too, a year or two ago. Now I buy a local brand with nothing more than milk, cream, and salt for twice the price.
Seriously?! I need to go check some ingredients, brb.
Gotta check ingredients every so often. They love changing things without telling you.
Believe it or not, top-shelf bacon. It's got more bacon in it. Less water. You're not paying nearly as much more per ounce of actual meat as it looks at first.
Lots of "organic" produce has a significantly longer shelf life than the basic stuff too. Never mind whether it's any healthier or tastier, I'm not saving any money if I pay a dollar less and it starts molding before I can eat half of it.
Huy Fong Sriracha. Just don't even bother buying any other bottle of "sriracha" sauce. It's not worth it. Your disappointment will be immeasurable and your day will be ruined.
That used to be the case because the peppers were specifically grown just for Huy Fong. However, Huy Fong screwed over their exclusive pepper grower to increase profits. The peppers they get now don't taste the same.
While I also like Huy Fong Sriracha and was delighted when I first ran into it, I believe I remember reading about them changing the recipe at some point.
EDIT: Oh, sounds like they didn't change the recipe intentionally, but at least the first batch they had after they had a fight with their pepper supplier tasted somewhat differently. I assume that they're aiming to keep the flavor the same.
Local
Whatever the product is, I'll pay an extra dollar for domestic (and especially within the province)
Nice try, Kroger.
Silverware
The cheap metals taste like a magnet, have rough edges, and lose their appearance after a few washes
Kerrygold
Paper Towels and Trash Bags - the cheap ones just don't hold up as well
I will add that I’ve yet to find a decent tasting store brand soda or sparkling water. I have no idea why it’s so difficult for them to get the flavoring right.
Real parm instead of the canned stuff.
Chicken breasts - you can get massive pumped up chicken breast for the same price as "normal" chicken breasts. The problem is when you cook the big ones, they just leech out all their liquid.
Just had some of the worst “store brand” honey mustard. How do you mess that up? Tasted like they watered it down by adding extra vinegar. Watery. Gross tasting. Lesson Learned.
Good ketchup Real butter, not reconstituted which should be illegal Good bread, fresh or at least not the cheapest stuff
Fresh corn tortillas.
Tequila.
Haircare stuff
Husband bought "the good eggs" once and has not looked back since. I used to keep chickens and the bougie store eggs are much closer to those than they are to the factory farmed thin shelled light yolked ones.
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