Saving money is now even more important that we are all dealing with the impact of Covid-19. In this post I show you that couponing for organic food is totally possible and share other tricks of how I save money on groceries.
Unless you are wealthy, you are probably dealing with the economic fallout from COVID-19. With unemployment skyrocketing and an impending recession, many people are looking to cut costs.
The good news is that extreme couponing for organic, healthy, nourishing food is possible! I’ll show you how.
I regularly save a ton of money on food. A while ago, before I started staying home because of Covid-19, I saved $76 on my trip to the grocery store. I bought mostly organic, natural food and still saved that much.
How did I do that?
You have to get pretty creative, but you can do this as well. Here are all my tips for grocery shopping for healthy food in the store.
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Couponing for Organic and Non-GMO Food
Let’s start with this: many people still don’t realize that 80% of the food in grocery stores is gene-manipulated (GMO) food.
After I learned the shocking truth about what GMO food can do to our body (it’s full of pesticides, for once) and what it will do to farming and our environment, I decided to only buy organic food for my family.
If that’s not possible, I buy food that is labeled as non-GMO, meaning it has at least not been gene manipulated.
Look for this logo to find products that have been verified by the Non GMO Project.
I am very frugal and love finding deals for anything: traveling, clothes, home decor. I was really into extreme couponing for a while and even went to a Coupon Mania class to learn more, but this new resolve to only buy organic and non-GMO food makes using coupons pretty challenging since most coupons are for junk food with hardly any nutritional value.
This is how I saved $76 on organic food:
- I recycled bottles and received about $2 in credit
- I used coupons I had downloaded from the websites of organic brands (Plum Organics, Stonyfield)
- I used the store’s rewards card
- I used coupons from coupons.com for organic and natural food
- I used the store app to find additional coupons
I used to pick up the Mambo Sprouts coupons in a little booklet at our local Mrs. Green’s Natural Food store, but they don’t offer them any longer. But they do still have coupons at the checkout you can take with you.
You can go to any of the organic and non-GMO brands you are interested in and see if they let you print out a coupon. Most do.
Here is one for Bob’s Red Mill products.
Extra tip: instead of using those coupons at the expensive health food store, I use them at Stop & Shop. I bet your local grocery store also has a whole section for organic food and drinks, and that’s where I mostly shop. Plus the grocery stores usually double coupons if they are under $1.
I know too much to venture into the other aisles, and honestly it disturbs me to see what other people have in their cart, not realizing that they are buying gene-manipulated, pesticide-laced food full of food dyes, sodium, hydrogenated oils, and empty carbs.
It’s actually not even food, because be definition food needs to nourish your body. Froot Loop cereal and Hungry Man frozen dinners do NOT nourish your body, believe me.
Let’s take a look at just one unhealthy food: Oreos
It becomes pretty easy to resist Oreos when you know what’s in them:
6 cookies with 370 empty calories have
- 12 grams of fat
- 2.5 grams of saturated fat40 carbs
- more than 50% of your daily carbohydrate allowance
The “natural flavors” in Oreos — and most other food in our grocery stores — are manufactured, caroinogenic chemicals to make Oreos taste like chocolate cookies.
Chocolate is actually the last ingredient in Oreos. And all that sugar depletes our immune system, creating inflammation and free radicals in our body.
There is no way I’ll feed those to my family.
I can’t control what my son eats when he’s at school — I’m sure he eats his fair share of dyed cookies other parents are bringing in to celebrate one of his classmate’s birthdays — but I’m in charge of the food I bring home.
If you can’t live without the occasional Oreos, I suggest to buy the organic ones.
At the checkout, I received more coupons. And I actually used them right away because I was only 15 points away from getting 30 cents off every gallon of gas.
At Shop & Stop they give you a point for every dollar you spend toward a credit on gas. So in I went in again after unloading the groceries to get a few more things to reach 300 points.
The next day (best to wait a day to make sure the new points of the latest trip have been added to the rewards card, I filled up my car and saved an additional $9 by using my Shop & Stop card rewards points.
As you can see, it takes some dedication to save on organic and natural food with coupons, but it can be done, and savings do add up.
The two hours it took me to cut coupons and shop really smart, taking into consideration what is on sale in the store plus a combination of recycling, reusing and couponing, saved me $76.
Find additional resources for coupons for organic and natural food on my Frugal Living page.
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