Erin and I love food. We make it a priority to eat healthy, good tasting food of high quality. Grocery stores such as Kroger, Giant, Weis, Safeway, etc. typically have pretty decent “middle” areas, but can kind of be terrible for produce.
In CA and AZ there is a brand of stores called “Sprouts”, which focuses mainly on produce, with limited offerings otherwise. Their limited selection of household items must have been chosen by someone who doesn’t use those items… It’s bad. Whole foods, aka “whole paycheck” offers good produce and high quality food with a good selection, but at a price that makes it impossible to do all of our shopping there…or so we thought!
Erin and I mainly shop at Sprouts, due to the fact that we estimated that the quality of the food was about the same as Whole Foods, but the price seemed lower. It’s a good middle ground for us.
We never actually tested our hypothesis, though. So that’s what we did for the past 2 weeks. We bought the same exact food and made the same exact meals and compared the two stores. We shopped and ate as we typically would, so your results may vary if you eat different food than us.
Sprouts cost us $91.24 for our food for the week, special drinks, and one nice “date night” meal consisting of some wild caught rockfish. I use Monterey Bay aquarium’s guide to choosing seafood which is how I stumbled upon rockfish- which is delicious by the way. I cooked it up on the flat top insert on the grill with some creole seasoning! Boo – Yah!
Whole foods cost $102.78. That means Sprouts costs only 89% of what Whole foods does. That’s a pretty steep price difference. Time to see what made the difference in price! Turns out that the “whole foods effect” of getting fun drinks worth $6.29 played a significant role. At sprouts our fun drink section was far more limited and we only spent $2.67. A similar effect happened in the seitan section. Although we could have purchased the same exact brand, whole foods has a much better selection, with higher end choices. Erin decided to upgrade our seitan selection at whole foods, as compared to sticking with basics at sprouts. It was much more tasty, and worth it in my opinion. The specialty drinks and the premium seitan made the bulk of the difference in cost. We could have skipped both of those, but that’s the whole foods effect for you.
So at the end of the day it’s really a matter of if I think that the added price for the whole foods experience is worth it. We live closer to whole foods, and I prefer shopping at whole foods due to the selection, but I probably still wont be going there every week. I’ll stick to shopping at Sprouts for most of my food for now. They absolutely SHRED the competition as compared to larger chains like Safeway, while simultaneously being very affordable. Plus, Erin and I couldn’t taste a difference in the quality of the produce. Erin even noted that some of our items, like the beets, were exactly the same brand and came from the same place.
Now, those of you with knowledge of cooking and nutrition will notice that we really don’t have sufficient calories here. That is because we buy rice and potatoes in bulk from Costco. A 20lb bag of rice costs 16 bucks. A freaking massive 10lb bag of the biggest potatoes known to man costs only a few bucks. Most of our calories come from rice and potatoes.
Throughout the week I ate yogurt and cereal for breakfast while making our lunch: a salad. I haven’t eaten breakfast in years, instead opting to fast ’till lunch. But, before the first week of this little experiment I had been on a 5 day fast, so that’s where my mindset was while formulating the idea for this post. Plus, yogurt and cereal is awesome. Erin stuck to skipping breakfast like we usually do.
For lunch, I put together some salad blend, potatoes, beets, green beans, and eggs. For dinner, Erin made a stir fry! The stir fry consisted of all the rest of our veggies and mushrooms, the seitan, and love. Put this on top of a cup of steaming sticky rice and it’s fantastic.
Sprout’s had the better stir fry sauce, although we did technically purchase a “marinade” sauce from whole foods which may have been why it wasn’t so good for stir frying.
So, in a BLOG POST FIRST please vote on, based on what you see here, which store you would shop at. VOTE HERE
or copy/paste this link into your browser to vote: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FBTNZH7
Interesting post! Erin, I see mushrooms?!? 😆
And, Whole Foods doesn’t have artificial ingredients and better fat choices in crackers etc. I care what I eat and try not to be wasteful. Breads are better too.
I get most of my groceries from a traditional super market. But there are a few thing that I like to get from Whole Foods that sprouts dose not have.
Beef tallow
Croissants made with butter (not margarine.)
Puff pastries made with butter (not margarine)
Focaccia made with olive oil not (palm oil)
Duck fat
Sprouts never has any of this ever. Whole Foods always does.