An at-home salad bar, $1,200 weekly Costco hauls and snack runs at Aldi: How 3 moms with big families are feeding their kids right now

Yahoo

19-05-2025

You may not know Melanie Cade. But you've probably seen her salad bar.
Last summer, Cade, a mom of nine kids ranging in age from 1 to 19, went viral after posting a video of her restocking the professional salad bar — the kind you might find at a steakhouse or a Chuck E. Cheese — she has in her Birmingham, Ala., home. The Cade kids can be seen piling their (chilled) plates with cold cuts, fruit, greens and hard-boiled eggs, but the bar isn't strictly for salads; it's also used to prep sandwiches and other meals.
'I always try to think of things to make my life easier,' says Cade, whose home also features side-by-side fridges, two washers and dryers, a movie theater-style popcorn maker and a dessert freezer. This is actually her second salad bar; the first one died a couple of days after she bought it off Facebook Marketplace and stocked it full of food. 'Our whole house just reeked.'
Undeterred, Cade found a replacement at a restaurant supply company about two years ago. ('That's a first,' the store worker responded when Cade explained that she'd like it delivered to her home, and not a restaurant, revealing that he had seven kids himself and had never thought to get his own salad bar.) 'They brought it out, we cleaned it up, hooked it up and it's been happily ever after ever since,' Cade says of her purchase.
The salad bar makes it easier for her kids to grab prepped fruits and vegetables instead of a bag of chips. It's also helped Cade streamline some of her household responsibilities; she's got her weekly, hour-long stocking routine down pat ('I can peel two dozen eggs in seven minutes,' she brags). But all that produce can add up, and keeping a family of 11 fed costs a lot. Cade estimates that she's currently spending about $2,500 on groceries every month. 'I used to be able to say $2,000 a month easily,' Cade says of her budget. 'But honestly, with the prices of everything going up…'
In a Yahoo News/YouGov survey of 1,597 U.S. adults conducted last month, 71% of respondents reported experiencing rising grocery prices and 73% said they were very or somewhat concerned about being able to afford their regular food shops. But what happens when you have a large family (complete with picky eaters and growing teens with seemingly bottomless appetites) and are already dropping four figures at the grocery checkout? We spoke to three moms (with 20+ kids between them) about feeling the pinch, cutting costs as they feed the masses and spending three hours at Costco.
After breastfeeding her first five kids, TikToker Sammie Head just bought her first can of infant formula. 'It was like, $40,' Head, who is due with her sixth baby (and first boy) at the end of the month, tells Yahoo Life.
As it is, the Kentucky content creator and mom — whose daughters are 8, 6, 5, 4 and 1-and-a half — is spending about $700 to $800 when she goes to either Costco or Sam's Club every three weeks for a big bulk-item haul. 'I'm not a cook-from-scratch person, so I get prepackaged frozen meat,' Head says. 'We do frozen vegetables usually. It lasts at least three weeks and we try to stretch it to four.'
That big shop also covers diapers (roughly $80) and other baby essentials. 'I was telling my husband the other day, 'We have not taken a break from buying [baby] wipes in nine years almost,'' she laughs. 'It's crazy.'
And then there's the weekly trip to Aldi for fresh fruit, yogurt pouches and the dye-free snacks and cereal her daughters like; that's another $125 to $150 a week. She'll also do a weekly Walmart order for any random household needs.
Head calls herself 'the queen of convenience.' Though she makes her own bread, she's also happy to keep her fridge (and the deep freezer in her garage) stocked with simple staples like frozen waffles or heat-and-eat rice.
'We eat the same things over and over for dinner,' she says. 'We eat a lot of rice bowls, so I'll buy the rice in the bags that you can microwave [and serve them] with chicken sausage or chicken breast or steak bites. I'll switch up the meat, and we'll do veggies in it with some Japanese barbecue sauce from Costco or a soy sauce. We eat that probably three times a week. We eat pretty healthy, but it's the same things.'
Because her kids are homeschooled, they're also eating all of their meals at home. Saying no to juice drinks and restaurants (with the exception of an occasional trip to Chick-fil-A) are two ways Head keeps costs down, but that's become harder lately.
'Every time I'm in Aldi by myself checking out, I'm texting my husband, like, 'Why is everything so expensive?'' she says. 'And actually, Aldi's not even that bad. Sam's is crazy, I think. And Walmart. And we don't shop at Kroger because I think it's outrageous.'
Ultimately, saving money comes down to careful planning. 'We try not to buy a lot of extra stuff,' she says. 'I make a list and we pretty much stick to it.'
6 homemade loaves a week
4 half-gallon cartons of almond milk a week
64 pouches a week
8 pounds a week
'Bold Chex Mix. That is my weakness. But I have to hide it because the kids like it.'
Juice and sports drinks. 'We don't buy drinks for the girls. They're expensive, and we have five [kids].'
There's something hypnotic about watching Melanie Cade slice and dice veggies for her salad bar or crack open lobster tails for a mac and cheese bar in the videos she posts to her Raising Cades 10 account. What you can't hear is what's going on around her. 'I'll have either a sermon going on in the background, maybe some gospel music, maybe some jazz — and then a whole bunch of noise from these children,' Cade says.
Shopping brings its own kind of chaos. Once a month, Cade and her husband spend a few hours (and a couple of thousand dollars) at Costco for shelf-stable items that can last for weeks. They might bring along a couple of their older kids 'just to help with the manpower.' If they don't have a babysitter booked, the other children will tag along too, but it's not ideal. 'It's already a circus in Costco,' says Cade, who has another viral video in which she schools her overwhelmed 12-year-old twins on navigating the superstore. 'You cannot go in Costco and just browse because you will get run over.'
For perishables like produce, she'll put in a grocery delivery order online — or used to, anyway. 'With prices rising the way they are,' and to avoid surcharges on deliveries, Cade now makes an effort to shop in person at a local supermarket like Publix or Sprouts. And as someone who used to teach a couponing class, she's always got her eyes peeled for sales and will plan her shopping trips around that.
Cade estimates that she hasn't bought baby food pouches in 12 years; for her youngest, she'll just blend or cut up whatever veggie the rest of the family is getting. She's also hoping that starting a vegetable garden at the family's new home will result in spending less money on produce. Her weekly menu planning includes not just meals (pasta, Salisbury steak and French dip sandwiches are favorites) but snacks too. 'They can't just go raid the pantry for snacks,' she says. 'If it was a free-for-all, we'd be going to the grocery store every day.' Picky eaters — fortunately, she only has a couple — must at least try the main meal before they help themselves to something else from the salad bar.
But even with two kids off at college, it's hard to cut back too much. 'I think some of these people are going to turn into bacon,' she laughs. 'We go through a lot of that.' The family also enjoys going out to eat from time to time, or will pick up food to have at home. A carry-out family-style meal at Olive Garden, Cade points out, costs less than dining at the restaurant for a group this size. The convenience factor: Priceless. Take it from this mom of nine: 'I would lose my mind if I had to cook for all these people every single day.'
5 dozen a week
4 gallons a week
4 loaves a week
Charmin toilet paper. 'I'll cut out my coffee before I buy generic toilet paper.'
Bottled water. 'We used to buy maybe six or seven cases of water a month so that everybody could conveniently have a bottle of water. We decided to instead invest in a water fountain that we've got in our kitchen; we get five-gallon jugs delivered to our home once a month now. … The upfront cost was a little bit higher, but I can see that I'm spending less on those convenience bottles. And juice drinks, I don't buy as much of those anymore. I'll now do a big container of lemonade or something.'
When Alicia Dougherty's family of 13 travels, they bring along a suitcase packed with cups of mac and cheese, little cereal boxes and snacks. 'I pack a lot of what we eat on vacations and then we'll usually get dinner out,' Dougherty, the Rochester, N.Y., mom of 11 behind Dougherty Dozen, tells Yahoo Life.
Going out to eat is something the YouTube-famous foster-adopt family used to do more of. With food prices rising, restaurants are reserved for vacations. They're limiting their use of food delivery apps like Grubhub and DoorDash. Dougherty says she's also switched up where she shops for groceries.
'I used to go to the higher-end grocery store out of convenience and personal preference,' she shares. 'But that has shifted. I'm definitely going to the wholesale stores and Walmart a lot more.'
Dougherty's shopping starts with careful meal planning for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the week. On the weekend, she'll go by herself to the store at 6 a.m. for what she calls her 'major shopping haul.' It's quiet. Nobody else is there. Her kids (and husband, for that matter) aren't around to toss impulse buys into the cart. She can get things done.
'It takes a good three hours, start to finish,' Dougherty says. 'Checkout time alone is about 45 minutes.' Her grand total, each week, is 'upwards of $1,200.'
And increasing. 'Prices were quickly rising,' she says of her more recent shops. 'I mean, it was drastic. It wasn't like creeping up a dollar here, dollar there. One week I went and got steak and the next week ... the price was double.' The price of eggs (her family goes through five dozen a week) also seemed to have tripled. 'So we're trying to shift our meal plan and make it more economical, obviously, because $1,200 a week — about $5,000 a month — is a lot of money.'
Dougherty — whose garage is lined with five extra fridge/freezers along with a food pantry they keep stocked — has a few tricks to stick to her budget. She's picky about produce and will take the time to make sure she's getting her money's worth ('If I am spending $10 for a bunch of grapes, I want them to be fresh and perfect'). She repurposes leftovers. If dinner on Monday is Philly cheese steaks, leftover breakfast sliders are on the menu for Tuesday morning. She also keeps chickens, though she notes that a cold winter has resulted in a decline in egg-laying.
But these kids have big appetites. Dougherty gets up at 4 a.m. to start packing their school lunches. When it comes to afterschool snacks, she'll make a charcuterie board of sorts they can pick at rather than reaching for a less-filling (and more expensive) bag of chips. Another hack? She serves most meals deconstructed, so that any picky eaters can eat the bits they like and leave the rest. 'When you have 11 kids, you can't make 11 different dinners.'
And what about mom and dad? Dougherty says she and her husband don't treat themselves to any supermarket splurges. 'We kind of just eat the kids' scraps,' she laughs. 'Whatever the kids are into, that's what we eat.'
5 to 7 gallons a week
4 to 5 loaves a week
5 dozen a week
'We can Grubhub on birthdays. It's a special occasion.'
School lunch, which is not free in their district. 'Our school's cafeteria is à la carte. … If all my kids were to buy lunch every day, that's $500 a week.'