How much can you save by canning your own vegetables?
Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I鈥檓 going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.
Jacqui writes in: Canning. I鈥檝e been told it can be really cheap, but from what I can tell unless you are growing your own, it isn鈥檛 worth it.
Sarah and I do a small amount of canning, mostly tomato-based things in a water bath. We can things like tomato sauce, salsa, pasta sauce, and so on. However, beyond that, we actually don鈥檛 can very much. We find it more cost-efficient to freeze vegetables in the fall and use them in the winter instead.
So, what are the comparative costs here?
Canning requires jars, lids, and rings. You鈥檒l also need a large pot (for acidic items) and/or a pressure cooker (for other items). I won鈥檛 include the pots in this calculation because they鈥檙e easily used for other purposes. I鈥檒l also only count 1/10th of the cost of the jars because they can be reused quite a few times.
You can get for about $1.40 apiece new. If you reuse them ten times, that鈥檚 $0.14 per jar. You can also get for about $0.70 per set, and since you鈥檙e able to reuse the bands, you can also get for about $0.40 apiece. Thus, your cost per canned jar for the materials is about $0.54 with some additional startup costs.
Canned goods You can buy a pint can of many canned vegetables at the store for $0.89 or $0.99. Many other items will cost substantially more than that. Thus, it鈥檚 pretty clear that if you have a source for fresh vegetables, you can save significant money by canning yourself.
Flash frozen goods You can get about a quart of flash frozen vegetables at the store for $1.39. Obviously, as with canned goods, the selection at that price is fairly limited.
Freezing requires containers and a freezer. We鈥檝e had a standalone deep freezer for years. As I calculated before, of maintaining and using a deep freezer is about $130 a year.
On average, we freeze an item for six months and it takes up about 1/2% of the freezer, so our cost for that individual item in the freezer is $0.32. We use freezer containers over and over again to freeze items, so the cost for the container is $0.01 or $0.02. This gives us a total cost of roughly $0.34 to freeze a quart of vegetables ourselves if we use it in six months.
Simply put, the raw cost of freezing or canning is cheaper if you do it yourself, but only if you have a source of free or extremely inexpensive vegetables and fruits.
The cost of even deeply discounted fruits and vegetables easily pushes the cost of freezing and canning yourself up into the range of 鈥渘o longer a bargain鈥� and 鈥渕ost likely a loss.鈥� Freezing and canning yourself has startup costs, too.
You can save dollars, not pennies by canning (or freezing) if you have an abundant garden. Otherwise, it鈥檚 not worth it.
