Find creative ways to incorporate ground beef into your meal planning while managing rising food costs.
Hello, fellow CBB readers. I’m Erin, and I live in Northern Ontario, home of the most out-of-control grocery prices you’ll see almost anywhere in Canada!
Even before the pandemic sent food costs skyrocketing, I learned how to stretch my grocery dollars until they screamed.
It was necessary for survival – first as a single mother of one in the 90s, then as a married mother of three living off one income in the decades since.
I’ve gone hungry to feed my kids, and it’s not something I ever want anyone else to go through.
My kids – any kids- going hungry is unthinkable to me, but sadly an everyday reality in Canada. 2.5 million children lived with food insecurity last year.
Doesn’t that break your heart?
From sheer stubbornness (and okay, occasional desperation), I have spent years trying every way I could think of to make more meals with less money.
Some were… well, let’s say that my husband and I ate them because food waste was not an option.
Many others have become a part of our everyday cooking, and boy, they are tasty.
Cost Of Groceries In Canada
I did some Googling before writing this, and the average cost of groceries for a family of 4 in Canada for 2025 is a whopping $16,833.67!
Breaking that down, it’s $323.72 every week.
The median income in Canada in 2023 (the most recent available) was $74,200. Divide that by 52 weeks; the grocery costs comprise 23% of your weekly income. Horrifying.
The economy is a disaster, and house prices are equally wild. BUT – and this is a key difference – we can, to a much larger extent, cut our grocery bills without sacrificing our quality of life, way more than if we somehow slashed our housing costs.
There are many tricks and tips I can show you, but for today, I will focus on five ways to stretch a pound of ground beef and get more meals out of it without causing a riot in your dining room.
Trust me, I have selective eaters here, too, and one of these (at a minimum) will work for you, too.
Related: 8 Ways To Save Money Buying Meat In Canada
1. Got a kid who can’t or won’t eat vegetables? Hide them.
Use a grater or your food processor to toss in so many veggies!
This time of year, you can get zucchini, onions, garlic, carrots, and potatoes for bargain prices, and in huge quantities.
This one works best if you add beef to a sauce and simmer it. Think Mr. CBB’s bolognese, in a slow cooker or for a few hours on your stovetop.
The grated veggies melt into it, and you can easily substitute up to half your meat.
Pro tip: Grate and freeze your on-sale veggies in ziploc bags when the kids aren’t around. Add them when they aren’t looking.
From frozen, they soften even better, and you don’t lose any veggies to food waste where the bottom of the bag goes bad.
Related: Chocolate Chip Beet Muffins
2. Ramp Up The Protein
A cheap bag of lentils can stretch a sloppy joe or a beef barley soup, and nobody will even notice, more likely than not.
Which kind really depends on you: in the sloppy joe, green lentils work just fine, but in a creamier soup or stew, you’d probably want to cook red lentils separately and blend them first to thicken everything up without changing the texture.
I throw a handful of red lentils into almost everything these days.
Related: Meatless Lentil Sloppy Joes
3. Super broke but need to get another meal out of it?
Add oats. You’ll need extra liquid, but oats add fibre and mimic the texture of your beef beautifully.
I like rolled oats for this because they stay a bit firmer.
They change the taste slightly, so this trick works best in flavourful meals like curries or garlic-heavy dishes. Saucy, yummy, and great for your digestive system.
4. Less meat, not meatless.
Have you ever heard of TVP? It’s a plant-based texturized vegetable protein, usually made with either soy or pea protein.
It comes in little dehydrated pieces and takes on the taste of whatever it’s cooking in.
The texture is very similar to ground beef, and it’s also a bargain at around $10 for a 300g bag (roughly 2.5 cups).
I can add half a cup to my (for example) chili and I swear: even my one grandson, who hates the idea of vegetables and would live solely on meat if he could, has never noticed.
That’s around $2 instead of the $11.99/lb for ground beef we pay here. TVP expands significantly as it cooks, so half a cup goes a long way.
5. use less Ground Beef
I know, it’s a blinding flash of the obvious, but sometimes we get into habits that become our usual. It’s good to shake things up.
In many instances, you can cut 1 lb of ground beef into four portions and use one per meal, and you won’t even think about it when you’re eating.
Obviously, this wouldn’t work for meatloaf! In so many other meals, though, you really can’t tell. Think about a hobo soup, a Korean beef and rice bowl, homemade Hamburger Helper, on top of a homemade pizza… You get the idea.
Try it with ¼ lb and see if anyone says anything. You can always try ⅓ lb next time until you find the sweet spot for your particular family.
It can’t hurt to try it.
I’d love to discuss more ways to lower the grocery budget with other readers here. Feel free to comment with your tips, or ask anything you like, and I’ll do my best to answer every one.
Thank you, Mr. CBB, for letting me share ideas that help my family.
P.S. We now live on a more comfortable income than our younger years, but we still apply all the thrifty ideas we’ve practiced for decades. The difference is that now we set aside what we didn’t spend on our groceries and donate each month to the local food bank or the school lunch program.
I urge you to do the same if you’re lucky enough to be in this position.
Thanks for reading,
Mr. CBB, and thanks to Erin for sharing her grocery shopping expertise.
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