Grocery Shopping Secrets - Save Your Family Hundreds

Are rising grocery bills putting pressure on your family budget? 

In this episode of the Parenting Collective Podcast, Donna Moala sits down with Carol Ann Kates, award-winning author and grocery shopping expert, to uncover the grocery shopping secrets that can help families save money, reduce food waste, and make every dollar go further.

Drawing on decades of experience as a former grocery store owner, Carol Ann shares practical tips on how to shop smarter, choose the freshest produce, store food correctly, and plan meals that stretch your grocery budget, without sacrificing healthy family meals.

Whether you're a busy mum, looking to cut your grocery bill, or simply want to make smarter shopping decisions during the cost of living crisis, this episode is packed with simple, actionable advice you can start using today.

✨ In this episode, you'll learn:

• How to save money on your weekly grocery shop

• Why seasonal produce is better for your budget

• Grocery shopping habits that waste money

• Simple ways to reduce food waste at home

• How meal planning can help busy families save time and money

If this episode helped you, don't forget to Like, Subscribe, and Share it with another parent who could use these grocery shopping tips.

Follow Carol Ann Kates:

Website: https://www.carolannkates.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Carol-Ann-Kates-Kitchen-100069557423361/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolannkates/

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@carolannkates

X/Twitter: https://x.com/carolannkates

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carol-ann-kates-0aa5123

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/carolannkates/

Buy Carol Ann’s Books here: https://www.carolannkates.com/books

I would appreciate it greatly if you could please LIKE and FOLLOW this podcast and if you are not following me over on instagram, head over there for all of my top tips and advice around sleep and parenting @parentingcollective.au.  I also offer a free 15 minute phone chat to run through all your questions CLICK here to book your FREE 15 minute chat

Much Love 💞

Donna Moala 
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, hello, and welcome back to this week's episode on the Parenting Collective. If you have ever stood at that checkout and watched the Total Climb and quietly wonder, how on earth did it get to that? Well, this conversation is for you. Because right now, so many of us are feeling the squeeze of the cost of living, and the grocery shop is just where the lot of that pressure lands. My guest today understands the grocery world from the inside out. Carol Ann Cates is an award-winning author, a former grocery store owner, and a true grocery shopping expert, all the way from America. After decades in the grocery industry, Carol Ann now helps families cut their grocery bills without sacrificing good nutrition. And in this episode, we get really practical. Carol Ann shows how to plan affordable, family-friendly meals, how to reduce food waste at home, and common sense habits that stretch your food dollars that little bit further. So we get into the questions we've all quietly wondered about, like whether food is really off the moment it hits that sell by date. And yes, can we actually freeze milk? You might be surprised by what the answer is. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Carol Ann as much as I did. And please let me know, or even leave a review, because I love hearing from you all. And remember till next time, remember to try to be kind to yourself just a little bit more each day, and that you are doing the best you can for you and your family, and that your family loves you. Good morning, Carol Ann, and welcome to the Parenting Collective.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Good morning, Donna, or good evening from what I am.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

You are all the way in North Colorado. Yes. We are determined to get this episode done. I was just talking in the previous take before we disappeared something happened with our computers that we had a fantastic chat for our podcast episode, and we didn't record it. So we have to redo it again. So this is gonna be even better, is what I think. So let's try and let's try and remember all the little glimmers that we were talking about. But firstly, I really loved the story and the journey about where you began way back when your parents owned a deli and what happened through your life to get to the place that you are now. I'd love for you to repeat that story for me.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Yes, I grew up in a corner market. My father was a grocer. He taught me how to select superior perishables, much like other parents teach their children the alphabet. He taught me my most important lesson about cooking. It's the quality of the ingredients you use is more important than the recipe. After my parents died, I inherited co-ownership in the business my father founded. My family and I moved from Denver to Fort Collins to help run our stores. When we moved to Fort Collins, we had two grocery stores. When we closed, we had six grocery stores, a bakery production facility that was selected in-store bakery of the year in 1991 by Retail Bakers of America, and we had nine pharmacy locations.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

We opened a 63,000 square foot store, which isn't big by today's standards, but was big by standards of those years. We opened it in December of 1998, two months after we opened it, the city closed the road in front of it. Our sales dropped from 390,000 a year to 190,000 a year. The road was closed for six months. We got behind with our supplier. They promised that when the road opened, they would turn it into a short-term note and we could pay it off over five years. But the day the road opened, they sent this lovely man whom I called Jack the Ripper. And he said, give us a million dollars or give us your keys today.

SPEAKER_00 3:51

Wow. That's terrible.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Yeah, we negotiated with them until midnight that day. Every time they would beat us down and we'd accept their offer, they'd call the CEO and he would rescind it and make a worse offer. So when an offer had not been made, they went back to their corporate offices. We regrouped and decided to fight them. We fought them in federal court. The case was dismissed because they had RICO violations, but it cost us a million dollars. We had to sell one of our locations back. Yeah, we're going to do that.

SPEAKER_00 4:30

We had to give the lawyers to that dodgy Jack the Ripper.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yes. Yeah, we had to sell one of our locations and lease it back in order to pay our legal bills, but it put us into a downward spiral. We also had a very trusted employee that embezzled over a half a million dollars right at that same time.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

It's terrible.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

So we did file for chapter 11 in February of 2001. We had our plan approved in August, and then 9-11 happened, and people changed their buying habits. And then Super Walmart. I don't know that you have Walmart, but it's like Costco.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Yeah, we have Costco, which I love. I love Costco. Love it. But we it's only quite new here. So that sort of bulk purchasing things quite new here in Australia.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Yeah, so Super Walmart opened, and it takes three months to get your sales back when a new grocery store opens. So our creditors forced us into bankruptcy.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Oh wow, gosh, that was a tough time.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

It was a tough time. Our bankruptcy made the front page of our local paper 11 out of 14 days. So everyone we knew.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Everyone knew about it.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Yeah. And I thought the story of the mom and pop fighting the big corporations would be a good memoir, which I've been working on and I'm gonna finish this year.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

And what was that called again? You did you have a title for it? Yeah, I can't remember. Busted but not broken. That's right. I think that's a great one because that's life. That's a really great meme for life, isn't it? You know, when life gets tough. But you've had you had a big, what was that, 10 odd years of financial stress with that? That's really really, really sad, Jim.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Yeah. So uh I drove my husband crazy. Um, my favorite job at the supermarket was to create recipes for our ads. So if we had chicken breasts on sale, I did a chicken recipe. Oh, great. He said, You have all these wonderful recipes. Why don't you do a cookbook? I put them together. I put my recipes. There's 367 recipes in my cookbook, Secret Recipes from the Corner Market. Uh, it was selected as a top 10 favorite by the Denver Post food staff and has won three national awards. Uh to set myself apart, I included grocery insider wisdom on how to select and store perishables.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah, that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

I am I am the only award-winning grocery store owner that I know of that is a former grocer.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Yeah, amazing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah. And I I hadn't done uh social media, so I started doing it in 2021.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Yeah, it's a funny thing, isn't it, to start doing where as you get older and you it's such it's it's like I saw think about with social media, someone told me it's like your store front. So you've got to get over yourself, you know, like getting out on Instagram and stuff like that. I don't know. Have you showed do you show your face a lot? I didn't see um on Instagram if you did or not.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Uh I have a few recordings. Uh I just went on TikTok.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Oh, well done.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

And I have uh something I'm gonna put on TikTok.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Well done. But I need that when you start going to do TikTok, don't think of the oh my gosh, my family's gonna see me and my children or whatever. Uh just think it's someone walking into your deli, someone walking into your storefront, and that changed how I could do my Instagram because I don't think of all the people that know me, I just think about someone's walked into my store. It worked.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

All right, I'll try that.

SPEAKER_00 8:20

Yeah, works. But anyway, keep going.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Well, I started doing social media. Our worst year for inflation in the United States was 2022. That is when Putin invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. And when Putin invaded Ukraine, uh wheat prices soared 34% per metric ton. So in our country, we believe that it was uh disruptions in the supply chains, uh COVID fears, the avian flu, and uh crazy weather conditions that drove our inflation up. So I pulled my shopping information out of my cookbook and I spent a year expanding it to create grocery shopping secrets, which has won 10 national awards. And when I did my Kindle campaign, it was number one in the US, Australia and France. So there are some copies of my book in France.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Oh my gosh, that's amazing. I really want to deep dive a little bit into the book a bit because you've you're obviously a wealth of knowledge. You've been doing this your whole life. And what happens in a busy, fast-paced AI world, you know, um, people are forgetting or yeah, basically forgetting that, you know, we're humans, we're not robots. And going back to your basics, like you said, the perishables, choosing the right vegetables that aren't going to go to waste. And, you know, the biggest thing that I really loved when I saw your bio that we talked about is cutting grocery costs. So I think I was saying this before is that in our fast-paced world, we're just wanting to get something really quickly and get something on the table, right? And what it sounds like you've created, and I want to ask a little bit about the book, is having something there that they can refer to all the time to maybe do the shopping on the weekend, go back to doing that, to saving the money, to having healthy food and preparing meals. Can you talk into your book a little bit more about the thoughts process of creating that? Is it along those lines for families?

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Yes. And so I believe that the book really focuses, it has information on everything you can buy in a supermarket that's perishable. Yes, on what to look for to get the freshest.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Do you mean just just fruit and veg, or do you mean other things like bread and milk and stuff?

SPEAKER_01 10:49

It doesn't cover bread, but it covers meats, cheese, meat, chicken, pork, fish, lamb, eggs, dairy, and cheese. Fruit and vegetables and fruit and veggies. Our produce, the quality of it has really deteriorated. Yeah, totally since COVID. And I don't know if it has in your country, but for example, uh cauliflower. And I went grocery shopping and all of the cauliflower had brown spots on it.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Really?

SPEAKER_01 11:28

And what would you think that is? Well, I asked the clerk, I said, Don't you have any cauliflower that doesn't have brown spots? And she said, This is all we have, it just came off the truck.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

So where's it coming from? Another country?

SPEAKER_01 11:42

No, I don't know. But I had to buy it. And but my week got di disrupted, my cooking schedule got disrupted, so I didn't make it for five days. So by the time I made it, the brown had already gone down into the interior and I lost it.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Crazy, isn't it? Well, like here in Australia. Well, I'm in Perth, Western Australia, so we're like a city, but a country town. I love living here, and we have farmer markets really close to the edge of the city, you know, so stuff is super, super fresh. And even in our grocery stores, it's still fresh. But I'm sure as time goes on and our country gets bigger, that might end up happening a bit more. But at the moment we're pretty lucky.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Yeah, well, that's yeah. And one thing that's important is to cook seasonally because seasonal produce is going to be cheaper. So one way to really learn what's seasonal is to shop at your farmers' markets because they will have what's seasonal.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

Yeah, I love it. And you know, I think about every all my mums that I talk to and work with, and I think about myself when I was a young mum. You would think that you had more time back then, but I felt busier. So not that I didn't, I still cooked fresh and stuff, but not as fresh as what we're talking about here, like seasonal and things like that. But I can see working with so many families, like I said, there some mums are just working full-time five days a week, and they just think it's too hard to be able to do what we're talking about, but it actually isn't. It's actually, I find it easier to do a little bit of a recipe, um, you know, a menu for the week and then have all the stuff prepared. And you're not only saving money, you know exactly what you're doing when you're coming home home from work. And I think, yeah, being organized like that with not being too strict to put extra pressure on us actually helps save time.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

I think it does, and I think it saves money. And I think we talked about before that my research showed that your supermarkets come out with their ad on Monday online.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

I wrote that down and um I forgot about that. So it comes out on Monday, the sales and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Yeah, and it the sales start on Wednesday. So rather here, I see a lot of people in the United States go to the supermarket and grab the flyer and then buy what's on sale. But if you're going online and seeing what's on sale and then planning your meals around that, then then I think you will save money. And yeah, I think, yeah, I think the other thing I think is really important to do is to keep your pantry and your fridge organized, especially your fridge. It's easier said than done.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

I know I laugh about this because I did clean mine out after we had our first interview, but I have a family of five and boyfriends and girlfriends in and out, so it's like hard. But the having the pantry and fridges clean is really important, but it gets really messy really quickly. Okay, so we got into talking about how important it is to have uh organized fridge and pantry.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yes, and I think you know, your your supermarket rotates the perishables in and out, so they're using the oldest first and they're selling it before it goes badly. So we want to do that in our fridge. We want to we want to use our perishables up before they go badly. And we talked about the pantry because the and it's hard, and it doesn't always happen in my house. But for example, if you need a can of tomatoes for a recipe and you have one hidden behind a box of cereal and you put it on the list, then you're spending money. You really don't need to spend.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

You've reminded me again. I where do I go went yesterday? I went the other day, and my youngest daughter was with me, and I went to get something. She goes, that's in the pantry, you know. And I'm like, Oh, yes, that's what I mean. I need to clean it out. Because that's so so the truth, isn't it? Is like, you know, that's you add two, three, four dollars per can. Yeah, it's money that can be in our banks.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

And I think also you go.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

No, what I was also saying to the younger generation, my children, and not younger being you people I work with, but it's really getting back to the again, life is expensive, and we're everyone's talking about the cost of living. And yes, I get that. But you know, when we were younger, it was mum went shopping once a week, meat and veg, no treats, no takeaway, maybe takeaway once a month, no one's getting their nails done, going out for breakfast, having, you know, all that like all of that money adds up, and people don't understand that fast food. If they just added up per week and month how much they could save, then the cost of living wouldn't be as bad for them, you know, and that's what having all of these three dollar cans extra and stuff, you think, oh, three dollars that's nothing, but you add them all up in your cupboard, could be a hundred dollars of tins that you can over there, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Yes, and I think we talked about too that my research showed that if you're buying uh fruits and vegetables, meats, chicken, fish, dairy, that there's no tax. But if you're buying snacks and drinks in Australia, there's a 10% tax.

SPEAKER_00 17:05

I know one thing about that.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

So if we're buying more fresh food and reducing that type of food, it will save 10% 10%. And with inflation, 10% is you know, a lot.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

It is. Oh, I get it. I get it. Now, so we'll have all everything, how people can contact you to get your books and everything like that in all the show notes. But where is the best way for people to find your books and things like that?

SPEAKER_01 17:35

On Amazon. My cookbook and my grocery shopping secrets is on Amazon. Right. And I do have an ebook version of my grocery shopping secrets on Amazon, which is it's only I think it's $7.99, and you can download it on your smartphone. So if you want to take me shopping, you can.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

I'm gonna take you shopping with me, Caroline, and I'm gonna laugh every time I do.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

And uh everything is on my website, uh CarolynCates.com. And grocery shopping secrets is also available in uh stores that sell books through Ingram.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Yeah, amazing. Well, thank you for all your time. We just had a bit of a laugh then because I've had to dash to the door that no one's answering the doorbell at my house, and I was saying that I've got to not get stressed about these things. So, you know, less stress is best, isn't it? You know, so being organized with our food and having Carol Ann and grocery shopping secrets, we'll have less stress with money and healthy food.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Thank you so much for your time again. Okay, alrighty. Bye-bye, have a great day. Bye-bye, thank you. So if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave me a rating and review. I love reading all of your messages. So shoot me a DM over on Instagram. It is parentingcollective.au. I also offer a free 15 minute, no obligation phone chat. If you'd like to book one, head over to my website, www.parentingcollective.com.au, and request one there. So try to remember to be kind to yourself and always know you're doing the best you can every day, no matter what your day is looking like. Until next time, much love.