Where does your grocery money go?
Pick your household size, answer three quick questions, and the simulator builds an estimated weekly grocery bill from published Canadian data. Then toggle savings tactics and watch the total drop. Every figure is labeled: published data where it exists, clearly-marked illustrative assumptions everywhere else.
1 · Pick your household size
The average below is derived from Canada's Food Price Report 2026 — see sources at the bottom.
2 · Answer 3 quick questions
These adjust the average to your household. Adjustments are illustrative assumptions, not statistics.
How many people eat meat daily?
ILLUSTRATIVEMeat is the priciest part of the cart. Each daily meat eater adds +$15/week to the estimate vs. a mostly plant-based eater. The Food Price Report 2026 forecasts meat prices rising 5–7% — the steepest category.
Eat out or order in per week?
ILLUSTRATIVEEvery meal out replaces a home-cooked one, so this subtracts −$12/week per instance from the grocery estimate. Note: this models your grocery bill only — restaurant spending sits on top of it.
Do you meal-plan?
Your answer sets the starting state of the meal planning tactic below — you can toggle it yourself either way.
3 · Your estimate — and what happens when you toggle tactics
Toggle any tactic to see the total move. Tactics stack multiplicatively, and every % is an illustrative estimate — your results will differ.
How your estimate is built
Savings tactics
Each tactic shows the mechanism behind the illustrative saving.
How the numbers are built — every figure traced
- Household averages (sourced, dated): Canada's Food Price Report 2026 (Dalhousie Agri-Food Analytics Lab with 7 partner universities, released Dec 4, 2025) projects 2026 annual food expenditure: family of four $17,571.79; two people (ages 51–70) $8,319.24; two people (man 19–30, pregnant woman 19–30) $9,415.69; six people $22,982.64. The report's “food” includes restaurants and delivery, not just groceries.
- Grocery-only share (sourced, dated): Statistics Canada, Survey of Household Spending 2023 (The Daily, May 21, 2025): the average Canadian household spent $8,659 on food purchased from stores and $3,351 on food from restaurants — so 71.9% of food spending is groceries. We apply that share to the Food Price Report figures.
- Per-size adjustments (labeled assumptions, not statistics): 2-person base = the average of the report's two published two-person examples; 3–4 = the report's headline family-of-four figure; 5+ = the report's six-person example; 1-person = 65% of the 2-person figure (equivalence-scale assumption: less total, more per person).
- Question adjustments (illustrative): +$15/week per daily meat eater; −$12/week per eat-out instance; weekly floor of $15 (if you never cook, you're barely grocery shopping).
- Tactic %s (illustrative estimates with mechanisms): meal planning ~12% (fewer impulse buys, no duplicate staples, less thrown-out food — half strength at “sometimes”); store-brand swaps ~10% (modeled on the total bill since not every category has a good swap); seasonal + flyer buying ~8% (in-season produce costs less; staples bought on their flyer cycle beat full price); cutting food waste ~8% (food thrown out is money thrown out).