Grocery Shopping and Meal Planning in a Time of Pandemic

Today I received the following email from Harmon's, my favorite local grocery store. 

"During a time when we have been literally forced apart by social distancing, we’re seeing a wealth of people who understand exactly what it means to be part of this tight-knit Utah community. With that in mind, we wanted to remind you of a few things which will help us keep you—and our associates—safe while we continue to serve you.

• Try to cut down on grocery shopping trips by making a two-week meal plan and creating your list from that. In addition, only shop for a two-week supply of those items, leaving enough for everyone else. Fewer shopping trips means less people in the store and aisles, and better social distancing.
• Item shortages were and are caused by panic buying, and there is not a break in the supply chain. We continue to get shipments daily and will restock our shelves every night. Only take what you need for two weeks and leave enough for others.
• Try to maintain a six-foot distance from other customers and associates while in the store. If you are less than six feet away from someone else, you are in their “breathing zone,” inhaling and exhaling the same air.
• If you’re not feeling well, please stay home.
• Please wear a mask or face-covering when you are in the store. Masks function as a barrier to prevent germs from spreading as customers shop the same space within minutes of each other. To keep everyone safe, we’ll also be encouraging our associates to wear masks.
• Please do not pay with cash, and instead use another form of payment. Hands off payment systems like Google Pay and Apple Pay are ideal, but a credit or debit card is the next best thing.
• Whenever possible, please send only one family member to do your shopping, and two at the most.
• Please do not pick up and handle items you do not intend to purchase. With the knowledge the coronavirus can live on surfaces for days and possibly weeks, we need to keep our hands to ourselves.

We would also like to remind you that we will be closed on Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020, so our employees can have a much-needed day of rest. Make sure to pick up your Easter essentials in advance and enjoy the day with your close family. 

Best wishes,

Bob Harmon

Chairman for the Customer

First of all, huge hats-off to Harmon's for educating their customers and also for closing on Easter. My husband used to be a full-time employee of Harmon's and still works occasional shifts there just because he loves it. We love everything about Harmon's, except that they're open on Sundays. We celebrate any time a grocery store closes on a Sunday, especially Harmon's. This email also caused me to think about the ways that we've cut down on our grocery shopping trips and some of the ways that we could do better at this. For my husband, Doug, exploring a grocery store is one of his favorite hobbies. One of our first adventures on our honeymoon in Camas, Washington was to the local grocery store. So to ask Doug to stop going to grocery stores, especially at a time when it's one of the last places open and available to explore, that is a difficult thing. But we're working on it. We are grateful for the grocery store workers and we want to do what we can to help protect them and our community.

We have started creating a two week meal plan that lets us do one big shopping trip every other week and then a small trip for milk and bananas on the other weeks. About a month ago I started using a meal planning app called Plan to Eat that I love. I'm somewhat hesitant to share about it because it isn't a free service. I paid $38.99 for a year's subscription after I tried it for free for a month. I used my 'Fun Money' to pay for it, because that's what it is for me. It's fun!

Plan to Eat does Recipe Tracking, Meal Planning, and Grocery List creation. Here's how it works:

1. Add your recipes. Recipes can be added to your account from websites, cookbooks, recipe cards, or anywhere else.
2. Decide when you would like to eat your recipes by placing them on your calendar. (You can see my meal plan for this week in the image above.)
3. Your shopping list will be made for you automatically based on the recipes on your planner. Select the range of recipes that you would like to shop for and either cross items off your list using the app, or print your list.

Here are the pros and cons of Plan to Eat as I see them.

Pros

• The drag-and-drop planning system is super simple and user friendly. If something happens and we don't eat the meal we planned, I can just drag the recipe to the next week.
• The "Prep for Freezer" function is awesome. It lets me double a meal and it doubles the ingredients on my shopping list. Then it tracks what I've got in my freezer and I can add meals from my freezer to my meal plan. 
• I love that you can add recipes from anywhere. For example, before I started using Plan to Eat, I would tend to forget about the recipes my husband loves that are all in the Warner Family Recipe Book. Now that I've added them to the app, I cook them more often, which makes both of us happy, because they're great recipes.
• If I have a lot of a particular ingredient on hand, like leftover ham from Easter, I can search my recipes for the word "ham" and it will pull up all of my recipes that use ham and I can add those to my meal plan.
• I've started using the app to keep track of ingredients in my freezer, like frozen vegetables and meats, etc. so that they get used up before they get too freezer burnt.
• I cook a lot of recipes from cooking blogs. Some of my favorite recipes are shared by rather verbose bloggers. When I add a recipe from a blog to Plan to Eat, it cuts out the life story and just saves the recipe. (I feel a bit like the kettle calling the pot black when I say things like that, but there it is. Ha!)
• Plan to Eat keeps track of how many times I've planned a recipe and lets me know if I've planned it recently, which helps me add variety to our meals.
• The app does a great job of creating a grocery list. I never forget an ingredient for a recipe now. It's nice to have a running grocery list so that when I realize that we're running low on ketchup, I just pull up the app on my phone and add it to the shopping list.
• Doug and I both have the app on our phone, so when Doug is working a shift at Harmon's, he can just pull up the app and grab the groceries that we need before he comes home. 

Cons

• It's a subscription service. I hate subscriptions. After a 30-day free trial, the charge is $38.99 for an annual subscription or $4.95/month. At a time when money is so tight for so many people, I hate to recommend any service that costs more money.
• It's kind of a pain to add all of your recipes to the app. Even though it's really easy to add recipes from a website, it does take some time. Adding recipes from a cookbook takes much longer. even with the "Bulk Input" feature for the ingredients. It's an investment. (However, if you join and add me as a friend, I'll share any of my recipes with you so you don't duplicate the work I already did. If you don't join, I'm happy to share a printed version of any recipe you want. More people with good recipes = a happier world.)
• Once you've invested the time into adding your recipes, it's super hard to quit using the app after a 30-day trial.
• When I first started using the app, I went way over-budget on groceries. I was so excited about seeing recipes that I hadn't cooked in ages that I just added things to my meal plan without thinking how much they would cost. Shrimp Burgers! French Dip! It can be so fun to just drag and drop recipes that you don't realize how much they are going to cost.

On the whole, I'd have to say that the Pros very much outweigh the Cons for me. It doesn't have to be hard, but for me putting together a two-week meal plan sort of feels like putting together a puzzle, in a good way. I try to balance variety with cost. I also try to plan only one or two moderately labor intensive meals in any given week. I've tried a few different meal planning systems and Plan to Eat is the one that works the best for me. 

I can't stress enough the importance of meal planning right now. If money is tight, use paper and pencil to make your two week meal plan. Doug and I pray every night, not only for the healthcare workers, but also for the grocery store workers and other people providing essential services. We are so grateful to them and we can best show our gratitude by doing things that will keep them safe - like meal planning so we can reduce our visits to grocery stores.