Raw food shopping on a TIGHT budget!

Here's something we haven't done for awhile- shopping hauls! Instead of shopping for makeup or clothes, however, we're doing a series of raw food shopping haul blogs that will provide enough food for me to eat for an entire week! I shop twice a week. On Wednesdays I go to my usual stores and snag deals, and on Saturdays I go to my local farmer's market and fill in the gaps with local produce.

I love to share my tricks for stocking up on food, but I can't necessarily guarantee you'll be able to do exactly what I do unless you live near me. However, if you're trying to make a raw food diet affordable, you can absolutely learn from this post, even if you can't copy it word for word. What matters is finding your local tricks, and that might take some time. I first started on my raw food journey in 2008, so this is a couple of years worth of experimentation.

Tip #1: Grocery chains actually do discount overripe fruits.  I've heard this repeated a lot on raw food forums, and it isn't true for ALL grocery chains, or even all stores within a chain, but somewhere near you, there may be one that does. I've found two, and both of them are Save Marts. We used to have Albertsons, but a few years ago they were bought out by Save Mart, and ever since then I've been getting ripe fruit at a great discount. It's not reliable, since they bag up the fruit when it's overripe, which is difficult to schedule. Going twice a week can yield awesome results, but some weeks I come up empty. It's hit or miss, but largely hit, and I can come away with something like this.

99 cent bags of ready to eat ORGANIC bananas! I snagged five of these the other day. I also regularly get bags of pre-washed lettuce, berries, and tomatoes. Every week it's something different, but the bananas are the most commonly available this way. Once, I got a perfectly ripe giant papaya for a buck!

I've got a ton of fruit shopping pics and info to share with you all, so don't forget to subscribe or check back with Twitter or Facebook! And if you haven't yet, there's still 3 days left to enter my 100th post free giveaway!