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The Good News About
Spice Prices
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| Eating Economically at the
Co-op series |
by Miriam Axel-Lute
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This column usually
explores the various subtle ways to approach Co-op shopping in order to
get the best value for your money in a world where industrially
produced food is still being sold at artificially low prices.
When it comes to spices, the situation is a little different, and a
little simpler: Want to save money on spices? Get them at the Co-op.
And tell your penny-pinching non- Co-op friends to come do so also.
They'll thank you.
Here's the dirty secret: Thanks to a near-monopoly, McCormick, the
largest purveyor of spices, has a virtual stranglehold on the spice
aisles of most grocery stores. Even though they were cited for illegal
practices by the FTC in 2000 for charging less to grocery stores that
agreed to give them upwards of 90% of their shelf space, little has
changed.
Thanks to limited grocery store competition and inelastic demand (which
means you can't really substitute something else for them), as well as
a high amount of packaging per product, the price of spices bears
little relation to their actual worth. As Daniel of the blog Casual
Kitchen says, "If you limit your spice purchases to your local grocery
store's spice aisle, the spice cabal simply has you over a barrel."
Instead, round up those old empty McCormick jars, film containers (does
anyone still have those?), or any other container that will hold the
amount of spice you'll use in a few months, load it up at the Coop, and
be assured that those small numbers on the register are not a typo.
I'll never forget the first time I got a film canister full of caraway
seeds for under 20 cents. It felt like a mistake, or some kind of
secret for those initiated.
The table below (see the PDF file)
gives a quick comparison of a few common spices between the Co-op and
McCormick at a major local grocery chain (grocery prices as of May
2009; Co-op prices as of March 2009): Most spices are at least five
times as expensive at the grocery store, up to 25 times as expensive
for basil! Even peppercorns, where the difference is small, are cheaper
at the Coop despite being organic. (It is worth noting that when
cooking, volumes of spices are more comparable than weights, making the
larger variation in grocery store prices more reasonable than it might
seem at first. However, it's still a variation among prices that are
all inflated.)
Co-op prices are equivalent per ounce to prices you get ordering online
in quantities of a pound or more, without the shipping charges, storage
space (imagine a pound each of every spice you use!), and worry about
fading flavor (it does take a long time, but I've had a few large
bottles of spices I don't use often last well beyond the three years or
so when it kicks in).
If you like your spice cupboard to be neatly organized, with the price
savings on just one ounce of each spice you use, you can afford to get
yourself a set of brand-new matching spice jars from the Co-op
($1.59–1.99 each).
A few tips for bulk spice shopping: Respect the request to use the red
scoops only in the organic spices to reduce cross contamination. Be
sure to label your jars somehow, or the next time you have a cold or
are in a rush you will mistake tarragon for oregano. Using old grocery
store jars is an easy way to do this. Labels held on with rubber bands
allow the jars to be put through the dishwasher and not be permanently
assigned to a given spice. So do small magnet labels on metal lids (we
have our basil and thyme in old canning jars, for example). If you're
stuck without enough jars, paper bags work well for temporary transport.
And remember: flavorful food is good for you, body and soul. Enjoy!
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