Food Budget Tracker Advice?

[TabbyCat]

How do you track your food budget?  I've had a lot of false starts trying to track it because of my drive to track each line item vs the amount of time I actually have to put towards tracking. I also haven't found a good way to differentiate between purchases for the next week or two and purchases that will last years like spices and oils and things.

[sisto]

I use MINT

[Dancing Fool]

I just track expenses as they happen, lumping together grocery store purchases plus any money spent at restaurants for food that I wasn't consuming with friends (I count meals with friends as "entertainment" instead). I built a Google sheet with a couple category options, spend ~0.5 hours / week updating transactions in it. I use it for all budgeting, there was no way to train mint on how I allocate my food expenses. I'm sure there are more sophisticated systems out there, but it gets the job done.

[TabbyCat]

Ok, it somehow did not occur to me that there was a full range between "Safeway - $32" and "cucumbers - $1.20, cheese - $7.52" etc. Totally better to track by department instead of item. My husband and I are just setting up our first home after moving from a 600 square foot apartment so we have been buying a lot of long term items (not to excess, but I can finally have more than 3 spices and more than one oil, and buy the Costco sized rice, etc.). I guess it does still even out over time but the last few months have seemed pretty skewed.

[Cranky]

I actually just have a notebook, with a page for each month. I break it down into "food" and "wine" and "household goods".

At the end of the month I add everything up and transfer it to a "year" page, and at the end of the year I add it all up and divide by 52 and get my weekly grocery spending.

I have about 25 years worth of grocery notebooks, because I'm weird, and it's interesting to see my trends.

[slappy]

Are you trying to track how much you spend on each food? Or just food in general?