By Harold Phillips | April 25, 2026
Last verified: June 2026
Last November I spent $87 at No Frills for what I'd have spent $55 on two years earlier. Same items, roughly. Chicken thighs, eggs, Greek yogurt, some vegetables, lentils. I stood at the self-checkout doing the math in my head, and the math wasn't comforting.
Here's my position: home cooking is still the right call in Toronto. The gap between cooking at home and eating out is real and it's significant. But I'm tired of hearing "just cook at home" delivered like it's a revelation, like groceries haven't gone up 25% in three years, and like most people aren't already trying.
The Numbers Have Shifted
Let me be specific. In 2023, my partner and I averaged about $95 a week on groceries. We shop at No Frills, sometimes Freshco if there's a better deal on protein. We're not buying organic everything, we're not buying pre-cut vegetables or fancy snacks. High protein, whole foods, Sunday meal prep. We eat well but we eat deliberately.
By late 2025, the same shopping pattern was running closer to $130. That's a 37% increase over roughly two years on what I'd describe as a fairly optimized grocery cart. I wasn't buying more. I wasn't shopping differently.
Chicken thighs went from about $7/kg to over $11. Eggs went from $3.99 to $5.49 on a normal week, higher during the avian flu periods. Greek yogurt (the big tub at Kirkland from Costco) is up almost a dollar. I'm not saying anything here that any Canadian with a grocery receipt doesn't already know. But I want to put actual numbers to it because "just cook at home" gets thrown around like it's still 2018. As of mid-2026, the tariff uncertainty affecting imported produce and some packaged goods has added another layer of unpredictability to the weekly shop — prices that seemed to stabilize earlier this year have started creeping again at the shelf level.
Here's the Thing
The advice is still correct. Cooking at home in Toronto is still significantly cheaper than eating out. A restaurant lunch in this city is $18-22 now if you're eating somewhere that isn't a food court. Dinner for two at a casual sit-down place (not fine dining, just a normal Tuesday dinner) is $80-100 after tip and drinks. That's a week of groceries for my partner and me. The math still works.
But "it's cheaper to cook at home" has started to function as a conversation-stopper. Someone says grocery prices are brutal and someone else says "well, eating out is even worse." That's technically true. It also flattens the real question, which is: how do you actually eat affordably at home in 2026 Toronto — not in theory, but in practice?
My answer is that you have to be specific. Not just "cook more" but which meals, which proteins, which stores. The generic advice doesn't hold up anymore. The margin used to be wide enough to absorb casual grocery shopping. It isn't now.
What I Actually Do
I meal prep on Sundays. Not because I read a fitness article about it, but because without it I make bad decisions on Tuesday night when I'm tired and every instinct says to order something.
My weekly shop hits No Frills and occasionally Costco for things that make sense in bulk: olive oil, canned tomatoes, Greek yogurt, oats. Protein is the biggest cost lever in my cart. I train four times a week and I've done the actual math on hitting ~180g protein daily through food. At current Toronto prices, that's roughly $9-11 a day in protein alone: chicken, eggs, cottage cheese, legumes. If I were leaning on protein powder, it'd be significantly more. Protein powder is just expensive food. Eggs are cheaper per gram. I've run this comparison many times and the conclusion hasn't changed.
My total food spend, including the Costco trip, runs about $500-550/month for two people. That's roughly $8-9/person/day.
A lunch at a Queen Street restaurant is $20 before tax.
What I've Noticed at No Frills
The discount grocery model has held up better than I expected. Loblaws (No Frills' parent company, which I still have feelings about after the pricing scrutiny in 2023) charges noticeably more for identical items. I've done spot comparisons. The difference on a full cart is not trivial: usually $15-25 less at No Frills on an equivalent shop. I haven't re-run this comparison recently, so I can't say whether their commitments on pricing have changed things, but historically, consistently, No Frills wins.
The trade-offs are real. Produce quality is inconsistent. You're going to hit a week where they're out of the thing you specifically needed. The hours aren't always convenient. I accept all of that.
One thing that actually helped, for a stretch: Goodfood. My family (through the cottage in the Eastern Townships) had been using it for years before I tried it. The value case isn't what I expected. It's not cheaper than groceries. But the waste reduction matters. When I was buying full bunches of cilantro for one recipe and throwing out three-quarters, I was losing money I wasn't counting. The portioned ingredients fixed that. I used it for about four months, found it genuinely useful for breaking out of my rotation ruts, then drifted back to straight grocery shopping because the volume didn't work for my training diet. I don't think it's a ripoff. I think the framing matters a lot.
The Other Side
I've heard the argument that cooking at home is only "cheap" if you don't value your time. The prep, the grocery run, the dishes: if you're billing out at some professional hourly rate, spending that time cooking is supposedly irrational.
Honestly, I think this argument mostly exists to justify expensive habits. Most people are not actually billing out their Tuesday evenings. And even if time has real value, the alternative isn't "order something efficient and nutritious." The alternative is usually a $22 bowl of pasta from an app, plus a $6 delivery fee, plus a 20% tip, for something that took someone ten minutes to prepare. The time math doesn't close.
The stronger version of the argument is about mental load: planning meals, tracking what's in the fridge, making decisions about food when you're already depleted. That's real. My Sunday prep habit exists specifically to reduce how many decisions I have to make during the week. If you're in a season where bandwidth is genuinely scarce, I'm not going to tell you to cook from scratch every night.
But the solution to decision fatigue isn't "just order everything." It's reducing the number of decisions. A short rotation of reliable meals, a consistent grocery list, batch cooking on a day you have the energy. That's how you get the cost benefit without the daily overhead.
Where This Leaves Us
I eat out. My partner and I have two or three places in Leslieville we rotate through, and we go when we want to without guilt-tripping ourselves. Beans has no opinion on this.
What I push back on is the idea that home cooking is automatically the smart financial move, that you can just "start cooking more" and watch your grocery bill settle under $200 a month. In Toronto in 2026, it doesn't work that way. You have to know where to shop. You have to have a rough plan. You have to be willing to eat the same lunch three days running.
The $500-550/month my partner and I spend is something I think about and track. I've run the comparison against what we'd spend eating out even some of the time. The savings over a year are in the thousands of dollars.
But it takes something to achieve. I'd rather be honest about that than pretend meal prep is effortless and groceries are cheap.
They're cheaper. Not cheap.
This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research.