When Paying Less Ends Up Costing You More….

It’s kind of difficult to stop and do math in the middle of grocery shopping (unless you are a geek like me 😊 !), but maybe this will help you make better choices when purchasing products that have yields different than their gross weight.

Today I want to talk about ground beef. Just the other day, at my local store, the non-organic ground beef (80% lean x 20% fat) was $4.99/lb. and the organic lean ground beef (93% lean x 7% fat) was $5.99/lb.

So at first, it is easy to make the choice of purchasing the lower-priced one, but once you cook it, you are actually getting less meat than the higher-priced one, which means you get less bang for your buck.

The math is actually quite simple: the fat content will be the loss of product weight once you cook it, so the net amount of meat will be lower than the gross weight shown on the package.

The non-organic product will lose 20% of its weight to fat, which means once you cook you will end up with around 12.8 oz (16 oz. x 80%), which brings the cost per oz to $0.39/oz. ($4.99/12.8oz.)

As for the organic one, the product will only lose 8% of its weight once you cook it, so you will end up with 14.72 oz of meat (16 x 92%), which brings the cost per oz to $0.40/oz. ($5.99/14.72)


Conclusion: for 1 cent difference, you get extra 2oz. of meat, and organic to top it off. Suddenly, the initial choice does not seem like the best one, does it? Note: the product will also lose some weight to water evaporation, but it will be similar in both type of meats, so for this exercise’s sake I did not consider it.


(If you have any questions about this cost calculation, or any other for that matter, feel free to message me separately).