Grocery budget calculator
Roughly a third of the food bought in the average household never gets eaten. This works out what that is worth to you, and what a realistic share of it looks like recovered. Every assumption below is a slider, so you can disagree with ours.
Spent on groceries a year
$7,800
Thrown away
$2,340
Could be recovered
$351
about $29 a month
How this is worked out
Annual spend is your weekly figure times 52. The waste share is 30%, which is the USDA’s estimate for the proportion of the US food supply that goes uneaten. The recoverable share is the genuinely uncertain part, so it is a slider rather than a constant, and it defaults to a deliberately conservative 15%.
Nobody recovers all of it. Some waste is unavoidable — peelings, bones, the last of a jar — and habits change slowly. Treat the result as the size of the prize rather than a promise, and move the second slider down if you want a harsher number.
Common questions
- How much money does the average household waste on food?
- On a $150 weekly shop, roughly 30% uneaten works out near $2,340 a year. What is recoverable is a smaller number, which is why this page separates the two rather than quoting the scary one.
- What actually reduces the number?
- Knowing what you already have, mostly. The two biggest causes are forgetting something exists until it has gone off, and buying a second one because you could not remember. Both are tracking problems rather than willpower problems.
- Is this what SeePantry claims to save me?
- No. This is a model, not a measurement. The app reports what you actually used versus threw away, using the prices on your own items, and marks figures as confirmed or estimated so you can tell the difference.
Measure it instead of modelling it
SeePantry tracks the real figure from your own shopping: what you used, what you wasted, and what each was worth. Then it tries to shrink the second number.
Free to start. No account needed to try it.
How SeePantry tracks what you save