How to Grocery Shop for Success (even with school!)

I don’t know about you, but when walking in to the big box grocery stores these days, the endless amounts of food products available is enough to overwhelm even the best intentioned. In order to grocery shop for success this school year, visiting smaller local markets and health food stores, paying a visit to natural food sections, and finding 1-2 key healthy recipe’s will not only improve your desire to meal prep, it’ll benefit you and your family’s health and happiness multiple times over.

If you think about it, on average, life demands that you make at least 3 meals per day. When adding in school lunches and snacks, and multiple meals for multiple food preferences , the usual 3 square meals per day exponentially increases. At the root of it all, if you have the right foods on hand, combined with the balance of convenience, life in the land of ‘meal prep’ can be a whole lot simpler. So how can we make sure this happens? With a few key steps to grocery shop for success this school year.

Despite extra travel time and having to make more than one stop at a single grocery store, finding time to visit your local health food store or market will only do you good. Local shops not only provide niche meals or foods, they have the ability to offer food options that many of the big box stores don’t. And I don’t know about you, but when I visit my local health food stores and markets, I not only spend less, I buy more quality food, find more food options, and my kids are happier from the usual change in the otherwise repetitive snacks or school foods.

I have to be honest, one reason I shop at big box grocers is because food can tend to be slightly less expensive than niche markets or shops. That being said, I came to realize long ago that quality food is worth my family’s health. I tend to do most of my shopping in the natural health food section. Not only is it less overwhelming, the quality of food is much better, food and snack options are similar to the rest of the store options, and when it comes to satisfying my kids’ school snack needs, it’s rare they can’t be met.

As parents (or students alike), we’ve all literally prepped thousands upon thousands of meals over the course of our lifetime. For some, the love of food prep lives on. For others, the dread of trying to come up with the next meal is a constant plague. By finding and following 1-2 online, social media or physical recipe book guru’s, life as you once knew it will become so much easier. Because the food shift is now geared toward quick, convenient and healthy food, meal options and preps are limitless. That being said, isn’t it so much better when you can let someone else do the thinking, and all you have to do is see what looks good, grab what you need, put it together, and all within minutes?