Bulk food

[ahenderson]

So I have recently discovered this website and wanted to throw a question out there in case anyone has tried it.

My wife and I have five awesome kiddos from 12-3 years old.  Currently mama is spending 600 a month on food which breaks down to $.95 per person per meal.  We eat whole grains, fresh fruit and veggies and lean meat...majority of home-cooked-from-scratch meals and I take sack lunches to work.

I work in manufacturing and recently noticed a 55 gallon drum of organic extra-virgin olive oil at work.  This got me thinking...could I form an Llc, buy bulk wholesale shelf stable foods, split costs with friends and family and further cut our food budget?

I've found websites of bulk wholesale foods ranging from nuts to oils to spices and grains.  They come in 50 lb bags and 55 gallon drums.  The catch is, you can't see the prices until you set up a commercial account with them.

Has anyone looked into this or given it a try?

[abhe8]

No, but I get great prices on 25 to 50# bags of dry good from country life natural foods. Free delivery to my door as well. It really helps my food budget.

[horsepoor]

You might be able to tap into a similar co-op already in existence.  If you aren't already buying in bulk, wiht a family of7 it would probably be worthwhile to go for the big tubs of oil, 25# sacks of rice and so on.  I just bought coconut oil from Bulk Apothecary in 1 gallon buckets, but they offer bigger buckets to apparently anyone.  I'm sure there are suppliers for other stuff like that, maybe not all in 55 gallon sizes, but definitely bulk compared to grocery stores.  Also, if you have a grocery store that sells in bulk, they'll often give you a discount if you buy stuff in whatever size they stock their bulk bins with.  I've bought 25# bags of flax seed at WinCo that way when it was cheaper than the feed store for a while.

[serpentstooth]

Why not look int a restaurant supply store in the area? Here we have Restaurant Depot, which seems to best Costco prices. With seven mouths to feed, you can easily go through food quantities that justify that, and they sell more reasonable put-ups than 55 gallon drums of olive oil.

[2ndTimer]

I just made an informal deal with a neighbor to split a five dozen pkg. of eggs, the next time we both need some.  I definitely recommend restaurant supply stores.  Things like potatoes, onions, masa, and pizza sauce are way cheaper at ours.  It's a Cash'n Carry if that matters.

[backyardfeast]

It might well be worth it to do the LLC; it can also make sense to set up a co-op with others to take advantage of these sorts of deals.  But ditto on seeing if there's already something like this in your area; you might look for "bulk buying clubs".  In our case, there's a bulk, natural food store nearby that lets it's customers piggy back on it's wholesale orders once a year.  We've gotten some amazing deals that way.  There's also a community farm store in our area that also lets customers (members) do large orders at wholesale (or just above) throughout the year.  We're lucky that way; does make a dent in our food budget even though there's only 2 of us.  Back when we lived in a bigger city, we would also have no qualms going straight to the local warehouse distributor or manufacturer and asking if they sold to the public.  We got incredibly cheap bread from the local warehouse for a long time that way, for instance.