With the cost of food so high, going grocery shopping can be stressful. Trae Bodge, a shopping expert with Truetrae.com, spoke with Cheddar News to provide some money-saving tips when stocking your pantry.

<div class="block">With the cost of food so high, going grocery shopping can be stressful. Trae Bodge, a shopping expert with Truetrae.com, spoke with Cheddar News to provide some money-saving tips when stocking your pantry.</div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: How to Save on Groceries Amid High Prices

So with the cost of food so high going to the grocery store can be stressful. But by stocking up on a few pantry staples, you can stretch your dollar and take the stress out of shopping. Recently. Our very own Michelle Castillo spoke with shopping expert, Rey Bo for her top money saving. Thank you so much for joining us, Trey, which items will give you the most bang for your buck in terms of value and nutrition. Well, thanks so much for having me. Now, I'm not a nutritionist, but I do consider myself to be a pretty healthy eater. And so if I were to pick one category that you should always have in your pantry, it would be lagoons. And what I mean by that are things like beans, lentils, chickpeas because you can buy them inexpensively. They have a very long shelf life. You can buy them dry and make so many healthy dishes like soups and chilies and also dips like hummus. Now, pantry items have to be non perishable, which normally means no fresh produce. So how do you get those veggies? How do you get those fruits? Yeah. So you want to make sure that you have some fresh fruits and veggies when you can. But it's also good to stock up your pantry or your freezer with some canned or frozen fruits and veggies. Depending on how they're prepared. They can often be as nutritious as fresh. So, it's always good to keep those on hand just in case. Now, Trey, is there a rule of thumb for how much food people should be stocking up on is too much. How, what is too much? Yeah. So, you know, this is one of those things that we all get wrong. I think I probably get it wrong as well. We have so much food in our pantry, but do we really need it? So I would say a few weeks on hand just in case because perhaps there's an unexpected illness or a natural disaster you can't get out. So it's always good to have a few weeks on hand, but not more than that because then sometimes food is past its best buy date it. So it may go bad and then you also have your cash tied up in too many groceries. I recently did a pantry rec clean and I definitely am guilty of that. Best Buy date. So, I agree. A few weeks is a great rule of thumb, but a lot of people save money by buying in bulk. Are there any downsides to stocking your pantry that way? Yeah. So this kind of ties in with your previous question. Right. Because if you're buying in bulk, you have a lot of something on hand. So I like to look at it this way. If you have a very small family, like two or three members, you only want to buy very select items in bulk, things like like pastas and canned goods, things that are very shelf stable. And of course, we talked about Dr Lagoon. So that's what I would look at. If you have a larger family, then you can kind of go to town when you buy in bulk because you're going to go through those fresher items more quickly. So you don't want to have too much, too many items on hand, taking up space and taking up cash in your pantry. Now, are there any other strategies you recommend for saving money on pantry staples? Yes, definitely. So I recently partnered up with a really cool app called flash food. It's an app based marketplace that helps shoppers find great deals on items like fresh produce, but also dry goods, dairy meat, fish, baked goods. And you basically go into the app. You see what the selection is, you place an order and then you pick it up at your local grocery store. And the way that this works is it uses items that are in surplus, nearing their best by date and then the grocery store uploads them into the app and makes them available to you at a discount, that's as close to 50% in some cases. So that's a really good way to save. And the other thing I would say is if you're more of an online shopper, there are ways to save on pantry staples online by installing, say a browser extension from a coupon site like coupon cabin sidekick. So I just took a look at it. You can save $30 off 100 at stop and shop or you can save $15 off at misfits market, which is actually another thing that I would recommend. Misfits is known for selling less than perfect fruits and veggies at a deep discount. So that's a really great discount to take advantage of at coupon cabin. Now, if you guys are storing stuff at home, what's best to know about how you can store these items. So they last as long as possible. Yeah. So this is a great question. You want to make sure that everything is kept clean dry. Cool. If you have an area in your home that's really hot. You don't want to store food there. It might even make sense to invest in some food, safe containers that keep the air out, keep things fresh. I like to do this with my rice, uh my flour, my sugars. Uh This is a good way to store food and give it the longest shelf life possible. Ok. This is probably a city dweller problem. But what if people don't have a lot of storage space. Is there a handful of essential items that every household should keep on hand? Yeah. And we, we don't always have, we don't all have large storage spaces in our homes. I mean, I have a small home if you live in an apartment, like you said, this is an al this is also an issue. So I would say lagoons like we talked about before a selection of pastas, uh maybe some cooking oil, rice and with those things, you can make a lot of meals and not take up too much space. Ok. What is your favorite recipe? When you use pantry staples? I would say homemade hummus because we go through hummus like water in our house and it's very expensive. And so we use dried chickpeas. We keep some tahini and olive oil on hand and lemon juice and you can make a really delicious hummus and go through it like water because it's very inexpensive. I would say my number two would be homemade granola. That's another thing that we use a lot at my house. And granola is really expensive when you buy store bought, but you can make your own granola in about 15 minutes with just some um oatmeal and then also nuts and dried fruits. And so you'll be shocked at how much less you spend on granola and um of course on hummus as well. All right. Thanks to Trey Bodge for her expert. Advice.