First time posting--hi everybody!
This is a problem for us too. We have a huge garden, and produce almost all of our own veggies, fruit, eggs, potatoes, and even some meat. We cook almost everything from scratch, eat lots of vegetarian meals, have a Costco membership, buy a 1/2 pig once a year and stock up on other seasonal foods to freeze, along with preserving our own produce. So in theory, our grocery bill should be next to nothing, right?! NOT. Somehow we still manage to spend $400/mo + for two adults!! (We do live in a high cost part of Canada, but still!)
We've done all the obvious stuff, so I'm taking things to the next level. First, I've realized that our foods fall into some basic categories: produce, starches/grains, dairy, protein, and snacks. The produce is mostly "free" (apart from infrastructure costs, which are elsewhere in the budget :) ). In the protein category, we have some very cheap stuff (our eggs, the meat in the freezer), and some more expensive items like nuts. In starches/grains, we buy a fair bit of pasta, bread, as well as rice and our own potatoes. In dairy, we eat a lot of cheese, some yogurt and some soymilk. Snacks are nuts, granola bars, yogurt (bulk Greek-style), some fruit. So we're basically buying grains, dairy, nuts, and a few other things like juice, etc.,
Then I've done a rough outline of what typical meals and snacks would be and what the *cost per serving* looks like. This was eye-opening! We have lots of options for practically free meals from our homestead. But we've used the "too busy" excuse to be buying good local bread, which DH eats for breakfast each morning. When I do the math, his toast and pb costs more than $1, while my oatmeal with milk and fruit costs less than $.50!
While dinners come in between $.75 and $1.50/serving, our snacks average to another $1-$1.50/day; that doesn't seem like good value either.
So, pulling this all together, I'm going to do a few things: where possible, eat more of the cheaper items from each category more often than the expensive ones. Where that's not possible (DH won't switch to oatmeal, for instance), figure out if there's a way to get the cost down--we'll be getting back to baking our own bread, maybe our own yogurt. And get those snack costs down--most likely by doing more baking from the practically free stuff in the pantry--muffins instead of purchased granola bars. Cheaper seeds (sunflower, pumpkin) to stretch the more expensive almonds and cashews. And then make sure we're buying those things for the least expensive $.
I also think we have a small leak in the small amount of grocery store produce that I buy occaisionally. A couple of avocados here, a few lemons or limes there...These things are WAY cheaper at Costco than the grocery store, so we'll try to plan ahead a little better.
I'm also going to itemize the grocery purchases for a month to check my assumptions and see just what we're spending in each category.
My goal is to get us below $350, but with a little work, we might be able to do better than that!
Sorry for the long first post--hope it's helpful!