on Yahoo!Sage Rich, a grocery shopping coach, cases the aisles of a Real Canadian Superstore in Nanaimo, B.C., with the zeal of a drug-sniffing police hound. Her mission is helping families buy nutritious food while saving themselves up to $400 a month on food bills. She zooms past a refrigerated section of cottage cheese. "Waste of time." She passes the sour cream and chip dip-"Doesn't matter." At the sight of cold fresh juice, she makes a sweeping dismissive gesture. "Waste of money! Buy the Tetra Pak of juice instead. One litre." Rich collects flyers and coupons from all the big grocery stores. Experience tells her "Safeway sometimes has juice Tetra Paks four for five dollars. They're way, way less expensive. Fresh juice has a shelf life. Your kids don't drink it, it goes down the drain."
When Rich arrives in the frozen meat section, she's like one of the Arctic diamond miners she once cooked for. Here is the motherlode of savings. "In the Arctic, I didn't have fresh so I relied heavily on frozen meats and vegetables and that educated me on what were good products and what weren't. You don't lose any nutrient value in frozen meats. They're cheaper and, if anything, beef breaks down a bit more when it's frozen and it comes out a more tender product."
To prove her price point, she counts up the number of fresh skinless chicken breasts in a package. "Air-chilled la-la-la," she says, ridiculing the brand's fancy advertising slogan, as she runs a tabulating finger down the outside plastic wrap. "Count the chicken breasts. I think this is outrageous. There are seven breasts. Twenty dollars. That's almost three dollars a chicken breast. No."
In the frozen section, she hoists a large cardboard box of breasts like it's the Stanley Cup. "Here. Beautiful skinless boneless chicken breasts. $26.20. For sure there's 20 of them in here. Instead of three dollars each, they're a dollar each and they're huge!"
To those who wish to stick with fresh, free-range meat, Rich, who was raised on a farm in Prince George, B.C., suggests doing what her sister did. "Get together with your friends. Go for a drive in the country. Make a deal with a farmer, or put a notice at a feed store: 'Four people looking to buy 100 fryer chickens. Please phone.' "
"Then a farmer phones you and he goes and buys 100 chicks for three dollars each." The farmer raises and feeds your birds. "You communicate with the farmer a little bit" while the chicks mature, but not too much, she says. "You don't need to phone every month and ask, 'How are my birds doing?' " And you don't need to offer to help slaughter or bag or pluck feathers. "Farmers don't need someone crying or screaming if you're not from the farming world." Rich's sister paid eight dollars a bird for her custom-ordered, "fully bagged" free-range fryer chickens. "For a fryer chick, you'll get a nice little plump five- or six-pound chicken and that bird is going to be absolutely delicious."
"I'm in the same boat as everyone else," she says, explaining why she believes her grocery coaching services are needed right now. "I don't want to be spending $100 every time I go shopping. I think a hundred a week for one person is high, I really do." Since last year's market crash, Rich has watched beef prices soar 30 per cent. Pork is the only decent deal on fresh meat, she says, "because of the swine scare. If you eat pork, go for it."
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