Speaker A
Last week, diesel hit $6.53 a gallon. That's the highest it has ever been in this country, ever. A year ago, it was $3.71. Now, you probably don't buy diesel. Most of us don't. So, it's easy to look at that sign at the truck stop
Learn 10 essential groceries to stock up on now before rising diesel prices cause grocery costs to soar.
Key Takeaways
- Rising diesel prices will soon increase grocery prices significantly.
- Stock up on heavy, long-lasting staples now before prices rise.
- Focus on groceries you already eat to avoid waste.
- Refrigerated and fresh items will be hit hardest by diesel price hikes.
- Proper storage extends shelf life and saves money in the long run.
What the video covers
- Diesel prices have hit a record high of $6.53 per gallon, nearly doubling from last year, impacting grocery supply chains.
- Every grocery item is affected by diesel costs through planting, harvesting, processing, and multiple transport stages.
- Current grocery shelf prices lag behind diesel price increases due to old freight contracts; prices will rise soon.
- Top 10 groceries to stock up on include coffee, cooking oil, rice, dried beans, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, flour, powdered milk, canned/frozen vegetables, and meat.
- Coffee travels long distances and can be stored in the freezer to extend shelf life.
- Cooking oil competes with diesel production; lard is a good alternative with long shelf life.
- Heavy staples like rice and beans are cost-sensitive to freight increases and keep for years if stored properly.
- Canned tomatoes are affected by high transport costs from California; home canning is recommended.
- Refrigerated items like dairy and meat will see the highest price increases; powdered milk and frozen meat are good stock-up options.
- Buy only what your family consumes to avoid waste, and rotate stock to use older items first.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Diesel Price Impact on Groceries
- 00:49Why Stock Up Now: Shelf Prices Lag Behind Diesel Costs
- 01:43Groceries to Stock: Coffee and Cooking Oil
- 03:33Staple Foods: Rice, Beans, and Canned Tomatoes
- 05:49Stocking Strategy and Avoiding Waste
- 06:25Fuel Costs in Agriculture and Flour Buying Tips
- 07:18Powdered Milk and Refrigerated Goods
- 08:04Canned and Frozen Vegetables and Fruits
- 09:54Meat Storage and Final Recommendations
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
and think, "Well, that's the trucker's problem." It's not. It's yours. You just haven't paid for it yet. Every single thing on the shelf at your grocery store got there on diesel. The tractor that planted it, the combine that cut it, the
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truck that hauled it to the plant, the truck that hauled it to the warehouse, the truck that hauled it to the store three, four, five times over. And here's the part that matters this week. The price on the shelf hasn't caught up to
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the price at the pump. Not yet. Freight contracts were signed months ago at the old rate. The stores have been eating some of it to keep you walking in.
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That's about to stop. So, I'm going to give you 10 things to buy ahead right now, this week, while the shelf price is still lagging behind. Not a bunker, not a year of freeze-dried, whatever, just the ordinary groceries you already eat,
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where the diesel bill is going to land hardest, and that'll keep. Number one is the biggest line on your grocery bill, and it's the one most people get backwards. Let's go. Number 10, coffee.
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I'm starting here because I know you. You're not giving up coffee, and I'm not asking you to. But think about where it comes from. Nothing on your shelf travels farther. It comes across an ocean, sits in a port, goes on a train,
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goes on a truck, goes to a roaster, goes on another truck. Every one of those legs just got more expensive. And the shipping lane that most of the world's oil moves through has been shut down most of this year. That's the whole
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reason we're here. So, buy the big cans, three or four of them. Whole beans or ground. Either one. Keep what you're using on the counter and put the rest in the chest freezer. Coffee in the freezer sealed up keeps a good long while and
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you won't taste the difference. I've done it for years. It costs you nothing but a little freezer space. Number nine, cooking oil and lard. Here's one most people never put together. The same soybean oil in that jug on the shelf,
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they also turn it into diesel fuel. Renewable diesel they call it. So when diesel goes up, the refineries start buying up the oil that was supposed to go to your kitchen. Your cooking oil doesn't just ride the diesel price. It
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competes with it. A big jug of vegetable oil keeps a year in a dark cabinet. Buy two or three. And while you're at it, get a tub of lard, or render your own if you've got a butcher nearby. Lard keeps
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for ages in a cool place. It fries better than oil anyway, and nobody is turning it into truck fuel yet. Number eight, rice. Rice is heavy. That's the whole point. When you're paying by the mile to haul a load, the heavy cheap
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stuff is where the fuel bill shows up fastest because the fuel is most of what you're paying for. A 20 lb bag of rice that costs $12. There's not a lot of rice in that price. There's a lot of
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truck. Buy the 25 lb bag. Plain white rice keeps for years if you keep it dry and the bugs out. Pour it in a food grade bucket with a lid or in the big jars and it'll outlast this whole mess.
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Brown rice goes rancid. So if you want brown, buy less and keep it cold. By the way, buying ahead like this, the bucket of rice, the oil, the freezer coffee, that's how I run this whole house for
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less. And I finally wrote all of it down in one book. Every method, one place.
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It's on my website. The link's right below the video. Go grab it. I won't mention it again. Number seven, dried beans. Beans are rice's partner for the same reason. Heavy, cheap, and shipped a long way. But beans do one more thing
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rice doesn't. They stand in for meat. And meat is where this is going to hurt, which I'll get to. A pound of dried beans is a dollar and change right now.
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That's four or five meals worth once they're cooked. Pintos, navy beans, black beans, whatever your family actually eats. I keep 20 pounds in the pantry all the time, and I'm doubling that this month. They keep for years.
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The old ones take a little longer to cook, that's all. A pinch of baking soda in the pot and they soften right up.
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Number six, canned tomatoes. Now, this one's got a story. Almost every can of tomatoes in that store came out of California. The crops in, it's canned, it's sitting in a warehouse right now.
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And the cost of running a truck out of California this fall is up somewhere between 40% and double what it was last year. Double. The tomatoes didn't get more expensive. The ride did. Canned tomatoes are the base of half of what I
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cook. Chili, soup, sauce, stew. Buy a case of the big cans when they're on sale, which they are right now because the store bought them at the old freight rate. Next time they restock, they won't be. And if you've still got tomatoes on
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the vine, can them now. That's free tomatoes that never saw a truck. All right, that's six. Six cheap, heavy, keeps forever things that are about to cost you more because of what it takes to move them. Now, we get into the part
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of the grocery bill that actually hurts. The stuff that rides in a refrigerated truck, because that's where the diesel bill is going to land hardest, and it's the stuff you can't just stack in a closet. There's a way around that, and
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that's the last four. But first, since we're talking about keeping things, let me say this plainly. The enemy of a stocked pantry isn't the price, it's waste. Don't buy a thing you don't already eat. Don't buy 50 pounds of
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something because a video told you to. Buy what your family goes through. Buy more of it than usual. And put the new stuff behind the old stuff so the old gets used first. That's it. That's the whole system. If you let it go bad, you
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didn't save a dime. You just paid early. Number five, peanut butter. Peanut butter is fat and protein in a jar that keeps a year or more without a refrigerator. In a month where meat and milk are going to go up, that's worth a
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lot more than it looks like. The big jars are on sale about every six weeks.
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Buy four. Keep them in the cabinet. And get the plain kind, the one with the oil on top, if you can stand stirring it because it keeps longer and there's less junk in it. If a kid in your house eats
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peanut butter sandwiches, you already know how fast this goes. Number four, flour, cornmeal, and oats. Right now, this week, there's a man in a combine somewhere in Iowa burning 300 gallons of diesel to bring in corn. Some of those
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fellows are spending $1,500 a day on fuel a day. That's double what they paid last fall. Here's what you need to understand. He doesn't get to pass that on to you tomorrow. That cost sits in his books and it comes out in the price
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of grain next year and in the price of seed and fertilizer next spring and then in the flour on your shelf a year from now. The harvest you're paying for today was cut with cheap diesel. The harvest you'll pay for next year is being cut
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right now with the most expensive diesel in history. So buy the 25 lb bag of flour. Freeze it for 3 days first to kill anything that's in it. Then into a bucket with a lid. White flour keeps a
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year easy. Same with cornmeal and rolled oats. Whole wheat flour goes off faster. Keep that one cold. Between the flour, the oil, and the beans, you've got bread, and you've got a meal for pennies, no matter what the shelf says.
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Number three, powdered milk and canned milk. Now, we're in the refrigerated truck. Dairy, produce, and meat. Those are the three the grocery trade itself says will go up first and go up most because they ride in trucks that burn
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diesel to go down the road and burn more diesel to stay cold the whole way. Milk goes to your store every day or two.
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There's no stocking up on milk, but there's a box of powdered milk on the bottom shelf that nobody looks at and that's your answer. I'll be honest with you, it doesn't drink like fresh milk.
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Mix it the night be
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a year. Canned evaporated milk, same idea. a case of it. Soups, sauces, coffee. It was what people used before there was a refrigerated truck and it still works. Number two, canned and frozen vegetables and fruit. The lettuce, the berries, the grapes, the
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stuff in the produce section. That's the most diesel heavy food in the whole store. Most of it comes from California or Mexico in a cold truck every week year round. And the freight rates out of California are the ones that have
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already gone up the most. That price is coming to the produce aisle and it's coming first. You can't stock fresh, so you stock the next thing. A case of canned green beans, canned corn, canned peaches, bought now at the old price,
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and the frozen bags. Frozen picked and frozen the same day, usually closer to home than the fresh ones, and they keep a year in the chest freezer. I'd take a bag of frozen peas over a bag of fresh
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peas that spent five days in a truck any day of the week, and I'd pay less for it. And if you had a garden this summer, this is the year to put up every last thing. Freeze the peppers, can the
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beans, that's food that never saw a truck at all. Number one, meat for the freezer. Bought now, bought local. Meat is the biggest line on most grocery bills, and it gets hit by diesel from every direction at once. The feed is
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grain that got cut with expensive fuel. The animal gets hauled to the plant. The meat gets hauled from the plant cold in a truck that's burning fuel to stay cold. And the farmer himself is paying double for the diesel in his own
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tractor. All of that lands in the price of a package of ground beef, and it hasn't landed yet. Here's what I'd do and what I'm doing. Find a farmer near you who sells beef by the quarter or the
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half, or a hog by the half. Most of them set their price once a year, and most of them set it before this happened. Pay him now at this year's price and fill a chest freezer. A quarter beef works out
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to a fair bit less per pound than the store and it's better meat. And it never rode a truck across the country. And if you can't swing a quarter, and a lot of folks can't, do it the small way. Every
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time the family packs go on sale, buy two instead of one. Split them into meal size, wrap them tight, and freeze them.
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A chest freezer full of sail meat is the single biggest thing you can do about your grocery bill this winter. No freezer, canned chicken, canned tuna, canned salmon, same move on a shelf. So that's the 10. Coffee, oil, rice, beans,
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tomatoes, peanut butter, flour, powdered milk, canned and frozen vegetables, and meat for the freezer. Not one of them is exotic. You already eat all of them.
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You're just buying them a little ahead of the price instead of a little behind it. Now, let me tell you who makes money when you don't. Nobody is hiding what diesel costs. It's on the news every night. But think about how a grocery
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store makes its money. It makes it on you coming in every week and paying whatever the price is that week. A store does not profit from a customer with a full pantry. It profits from a customer who's out of everything on Thursday. And
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watch what happens with the price. Diesel goes up and in a few months the shelf price goes up to match. That's fair enough. But when diesel comes back down, and it will someday, watch how long that shelf price stays right where
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it is. Watch how long the fuel search charge stays on the delivery bill after the fuel is cheap again. They're quick on the way up and slow on the way down.
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Every single time, that gap, the months between fuel getting cheaper and your food getting cheaper, that's money.
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Somebody keeps it. It isn't you. A family with a bucket of rice, a case of tomatoes, and a freezer full of beef bought at last year's price doesn't care what the sign says on Thursday. That's not prepping. That's not paranoia.
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That's just how my grandmother bought groceries because she didn't have a choice and it turns out she had it right. So, here's the one thing to do this week. Don't try to buy all 10. Pick the two your family goes through
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fastest. For most of you, that's going to be meat and milk. Buy ahead on those two before the next price change and put them where you can see them. Next paycheck, pick two more. And tell me in the comments, what's diesel at where you
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are. And what's the one thing on your receipt that's already jumped? I read every one of them. And honestly, I learn more from you all than you do from me.
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Next time, I'm going to show you how to put up 10 lbs of ground beef so it doesn't go gray in the freezer and how long you can actually keep it, which is longer than the package says. Until
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then, buy ahead. Not behind.
Topics:diesel pricesgrocery stock upfood storageinflationpantry essentialsfuel costsgrocery inflationfood preservationbudget groceriessupply chain
