We’ve all witnessed that scene. A mom, obviously not rich, waiting in line with her brood, at the checkout counter, her shopping cart overflowing with bottled water and sodas. Inspired by that image, I decided to take a look at some hard Nielsen data on U.S grocery sales, and came across some rather stunning numbers:
- La Marguerite Blog Compilation
Add it all up, and you’ve got the majority of households spending between a fourth and a third of their grocery budget on junk, and empty calories. That’s a lot of money, that could be used on other more nutritious groceries such as milk, fruit, vegetable, meat, and other non processed food. It’s also wasted precious dollars in increasingly dire economic times.
There are plenty of reasons why women – the primary grocery shoppers – persist with such deplorable spending habits. Ten, according to a recent report from US News & World Report, ‘10 Things the Food Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know’:
- Junk food makers spend billions advertising unhealthy foods to kids
- The studies that food producers support tend to minimize health concerns associated with their products
- Junk food makers donate large sums of money to professional nutrition associations
- More processing means more profits, but typically makes the food less healthy
- Less-processed foods are generally more satiating than their highly processed counterparts
- Many supposedly healthy replacement foods are hardly healthier than the foods they replace
- A health claim on the label doesn’t necessarily make a food healthy
- Food industry pressure has made nutritional guidelines confusing
- The food industry funds front groups that fight antiobesity public health initiatives
- The food industry works aggressively to discredit its critics
Will the stores take the relay and act as advocates for the shoppers? According to another study, this one from Bishop Consulting, ‘In-Store Nutritionists Will Be as Commonplace as Pharmacists within Ten Years‘, some encouraging trends are taking place in grocery retail, along with initiatives from some manufacturers.
La Marguerite 
Two bucks a week on fresh fruit and vegies? Another two on meat? What are people eating? What do they have for dinner? Their seven bucks a week of cheese or yoghurt or milk?
I find the opposite trait in me – the less money I have, the less junk I buy and the more I cook.
I love the idea of an in-store nutritionalist. I would talk to them before I would a doctor.
Both of us are science types so we went with a solid nutritionist. There are a lot of pseudoscience flakes around who do more harm that good … I think we got our money’s worth. The guy we went to is a researcher with a consulting practice and does a lot of sports nutrition work.
In my case I’m a vegetarian and have to be very careful about balancing nutrients.
The standard advice you get is avoid the center part of the store – to first order that is exactly what we do.
The sad thing is many people can’t afford to eat properly.
Steve:- bollocks! According to the USDA,
“USDA’s Low-Cost Food Plan shows what a family on a budget can spend on food and still achieve a nutritious diet […] the cost of the Low-Cost Food Plan for a family of four [… is] $167.70 per week. This compares to the $189.00 per week that the average four person household [actually] spent on food last year.
“Families could spend less and eat a healthier diet. This is supported by a comparison of the foods in the Low-Cost Food Plan to what people are actually eating. The Low-Cost Food Plan contains more fruits, vegetables, and milk products than people are currently eating and less sweets and sugars.”
What we’re talking about is not money, but effort and taste. When poor families get more money, it’s found that they buy more beef and frozen food, rather than more fresh fruit and vegetables. Poor people – as opposed to genuinely impoverished people, like the homeless – eat badly not because they can’t afford good food, but because they can’t be bothered cooking and they like things like burgers and fish fingers.
What concerns me is that 4 in 100 people aren’t buying ANY fresh produce! I guess I’m fortunate to have grown up in a house without many boxes or cans.
I try to eat locally/California sourced food when possible. So, in addition to improved nutritional labels, I’d love to see some kind of carbon footprint labeling. And more clear labeling on where ingredients come from, but I realize that’s a long way off if our nutritional labels are still sub par!
I think you have lead off on the wrong foot and have one very large mistake, wealth being related to what a moms buys.
I’m not wealthy but comfortable and I buy my fair share of junk but it is evenly purchased with fresh produce, fruit and healthy ingredients to make a well balanced home cooked meal.
There are many “wealthy” and “poor” families and all of us in the middle that eat like crap and it isn’t related to dollars but nutritional habits, time for cooking and eating healthy, time for figuring out what the heck is or isn’t healthy in the stores and then trying to decide what to cook with all of it because maybe we don’t know what to do with Kale. I agree with Kiashu.
I’m not a number person and don’t believe they really reflect what is happening for the general public. My advice, go to Wal-Mart and see what people are buying, ask them questions, observe and you might be very surprised. Many poor people that I have seen have bags of oranges, apples, milk, cheese and eggs. They have government help for food and that includes boxed items and processed cheese. Maybe we should be helping them to learn how to cook with food and stretch their budget? Just yesterday I saw a on older lady who looked like she had a million to throw down and her cart was full of crap and lots of Lean Pockets, Pizza rolls and frozen goods.
I don’t have a Whole Foods but I do have a local health food store and I shop there but I don’t see a person struggling for money shopping there. To me, that is an issue. Emeril has cooking shows at Whole Foods and teaches people how to cook with organic food but shouldn’t everyone learn how cook healthy even if they can’t buy organic and make it to Whole Foods?
Sorry, I’ll step off my soap box but the idea that money is tied to eating healthy bothers me and it bothers me that those without money are judged when in fact they might not have the choices that some of us have to shop at an expensive health food store. Nor are they always educated on other things to eat, buy or cook.
I don’t think your numbers are correct.
http://www.evd.nl/business/zoeken/showbouwsteen.asp?bstnum=163872&location=&highlight=
shows > 230 kg meat consumption per household per year, for 2006 at least.
Now I’m virtually always eating vegetarian, so I don’t have a clue about the price of the absolute cheapest meat, but 112 USD / 230kg = less then 0.50USD per kg seems extremely low to me.
It’d be nice if you’d referenced public data, instead of a general reference to Nielsen.
Let me qualify the data in this post. I obtained these numbers directly from Nielsen, hence they are not public data. I should have mentioned, these numbers cover Manufacturer prepackaged items with UPC code, that are sold in Food/Drug/Mass Merchandiser Stores, with the exception of Wal-Mart. Hence, they do not represent the entire annual consumption of the average household. For that, you would need to include Wal-Mart, and other non covered outlets, along with non UPC coded items. But they do give a good indication of certain trends.
Second, this post is not a indictment of poor mothers, rather of a system that brainwashes citizens into buying items that are actually detrimental to their family’s health, and in the case of cash-strapped households – which are becoming more and more in the current economy – pushes them into spending money unwisely. I only brought up the image of the poor mom, because to me, it illustrates the absurdity of where we are, collectively, on this issue.
As a holistic health counselor and healthy lifestyle expert I have learned, from working with clients, that most people make their food choices based on habits learned as children. One of the reasons food manufacturers advertise so heavily in children’s TV programs is that not only they’re influencing kids to influence what groceries parents shop for but they’re also shaping the minds and habits of future consumers.
While it is true that many people, from all economic levels, eat junk food despite the fact that they know it’s junk food and bad for them, most people don’t truly understand what healthy food really is or what processed foods are. They know fruits, vegetables, beans and grains are healthy but don’t know how to create complete meals with them.
Those who change their habits as adults, usually do becasue they generally become aware, at some point in life, about the connection between food and health.
Healthy eating it’s a choice but not much of a choice for those who simply lack the knowledge, awareness and clear understanding about healthy cooking. The industrial food manufacturers are good at making cheap calorie food and they’re even better at brainwashing consumers who simply don’t know any better.
Amira Elgan, CHHC
http://www.YourWholesomeLife.com
http://www.VegetarianOrganicBlog.com
i am a new mother…and, although we are not on food stamps at the moment, i have been in the past, and may have to use them again, if our economic crisis continues. What surprises me is that there seems to be no stipulation on what food is (meaning “nutritious”) – for food stamps, so a person can spend their whole lot on chips, soda, cookies if they want to…
These non-foods fill us up, give immediate gratification and require little to no prep, so they are an attractive option but, in my opinion, they should not be an option at all. Food stamps should only be good for food that has substantial nutritive value. How would the FDA/Social Services work this? I don’t know. Possibly many people use their food stamps wisely but I have definitely witnessed the opposite and i have often wondered if there were restrictions, if we wouldn’t have a healthier populace…
“Manufacturer prepackaged items with UPC code”.
Not being a retail expert, I’m not really sure what this qualification entails, but with this qualification included, I don’t think these numbers say much about actual consumer spending anymore. That is, consumers spend at least this amount on the categories, but maybe much more on any (or all) of them.
This means that the dollar amount spend on junk relative to healthy foods could be much lower.
I think the table as it is now is a little misleading. May I suggest you update your post mentioning the limitations of the data?
Wait – $77 per YEAR on candy? I spend that much in a quarter, easy – ok, so I buy $7 single source organic chocolate bars but… hey, I’m a vegan so I can skip the empty calories in milk, eggs and meat for the antioxidants in chocolate. 🙂
Dang, is that why my ass is so fat?
[…] Mom does not always know best […]
I wish this conversation would focus on the middle-income peopel who do the bulk of food buying in this country.
That said – 79.6% of the frozen spending is not ice cream or novelties. That means the bulk of it is frozen vegetables, premade products (pizzas, frozen lunch entrees) and whatnot. Frozen vegetables aren’t necessarily worse than fresh ones, especially in a busy household that may not cook as planned every night- there’s a lot less wastage on the consumer end with frozen vegetables. Also, a pound of ice cream is about $4, a cheap frozen pizza $4.50, and a pound of frozen spinach was 87 cents at our local grocery yesterday – I could buy almost 5 pounds of spinach, one pizza, and one box of ice cream for my family, and have the spending be about even in each category.
I think the cost per calorie really skews these numbers, as well as the fact that vegetables & fruits come from a variety of sources (backyards, community gardens, school giveaways, farmer’s markets) while meat, milk and dry goods are mostly from the grocery store. For instance, since I grow & preserve a lot of fruit and vegetables, get more informally and from the farmer’s market, I bet an analysis of our grocery-store spending would tell you my family mostly eats cheese, canned salmon, milk, and chocolate ice cream. That’s not at all true.
The beverage front is definitely worth fighting –
16% of total spending in that list is on beverages, which is pretty crazy, but given the fear campaign against municipal water I think it’s understandable (a lot of my neighbors are from Mexico. They move here, locals tell them “don’t drink the water!”, they believe it and buy bottled water in gallon jugs, just like at home.) We can fight that one with information & social pressure, and I think a shift is starting already.
The other issue I see is that if this excludes Wal-Mart, you’re excluding a huge chunk (what is it, almost 50%?) of total retail grocery spending, and that’s weighted toward lower-income households. So actually you probably are talking about middle-income people with this data, not the poor mother you opened with.
How about cereal? Surprising I did not see it in the list. I spend a LOT on cereal – can have it at any time.
Also, what category does OJ (orange juice – Tropicana, etc – no sugar added versions as well as the sugar added (made from concentrate) fruit juices) go into? Also, lots of families with kids buy those small 6-packs of fruit juices. Surely all this does not fall into the $20 (soft drinks – non carbonated) category. That seems like a very low number for a annual figure; especially when compared to $153 for carbonated drinks.
# for meat also seemed low to me but that’s been brought up by someone anyways. Also, the % of total $s spent on snacks/candy/cookies surprised me but I agree that its quite possible.
I realized from this that my wife and I spend a bit more than the average on ice-cream…but thats OK 🙂
Marguerite: I do not mean to pick on the data as the underlying message you are making is good and I believe in it. All the more reason then to nit-pick on the data and be our own devil’s advocate — not to pick on the message or on you but to make the argument hole-proof so that nay-sayers cannot dismiss your entire argument by questioning the data supporting it.
Very Helpful, Thanks!
[…] Mom does not always know best […]
[…] inspired blog post I read recently, shows that U.S. households spend a higher percentage of their dollars on cheap […]
[…] By Stephanie ShareI came across a very interesting article by Marguerite Manteau-Rao about what families spend their money on at the grocery store. The data came from Nielsen Research, and if you’ve ever looked inside other people’s […]