How Veggie Mush Saves You Money
In addition to being healthy and easy, we strive to make the cost of Veggie Mush as low as possible. Despite currently being produced in small batches, Veggie Mush is much cheaper than most other food options. We accomplish this with the following strategies:
We're not trying to build a megacorp, so we don't waste money on expensive marketing.
We chose to be a nonprofit so we can prioritize offering cheap meals over turning a profit. This allows us to offer our Mush at prices starting at the cost of ingredients.
We designed it to be affordable. We make ample use of healthy, cheap, and calorie dense foods like oats and beans to make up the bulk of our Mush.
How Veggie Mush Compares on Price
Methodology [Skip if you just want to see the results]
Different meals have a different amount of calories, which makes it hard to directly compare the price of different meals. For example, a serving of Easy Mac is cheaper than a serving of Veggie Mush, but a serving of Easy Mac is only 240 calories compared to a serving of Veggie Mush at 500 calories.
What we really want to know is how much more or less it costs to get a full day's worth of calories from meal X vs. meal Y. To do this, we've normalized costs in our research to cost / 100 calories.
Our Veggie Mush representative meal to use for comparison is a full serving of Cruciferous Mush with 2 tbsp of olive oil (note that olive oil is not a whole food, but is an easy way to add calories to a meal). This comes out to a total of 700 calories at a cost of $2.42, or a cost / 100 calories of $0.35. (For reference for those not adding olive oil, a serving of Cruciferous Mush alone is 500 calories and costs $2.00, for a cost / 100 calories of $0.40.)
Low Food Cost Household in Massachusetts
According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator for Middlesex County, MA, the yearly cost of food for an adult who prepares all their meals at home, in bulk with no kids is $5,036. This is determined from using the low cost USDA federal meal plan as a base cost and is adjusted for the region.
This comes out to $0.69 / 100 calories, or roughly twice as expensive per calorie as Veggie Mush at $0.35 / 100 calories. Eating Veggie Mush would save someone eating according to this plan about $2,500 / year.
Additionally, because Veggie Mush is shelf stable (6+ months) and is so easy to make, it's likely that having it around the house would reduce the frequency of ordering out, which is much more expensive.
Meal Replacements (e.g. Soylent)
Meal replacements like Soylent and Huel come in drinks and powders. The powders are cheaper, presumably due to reduction of packaging requirements. Here's how they stack up to Veggie Mush on cost.
Meal | Price per 100 calories | Price comparison |
Veggie Mush | $0.35 | 100% |
Soylent Drink | $1.00 | 289% |
Soylent Powder | $0.57 | 166% |
Huel Drink | $1.11 | 320% |
Huel Powder | $0.69 | 200% |
While a Soylent drink is a bit easier, we think the 10 minutes of Veggie Mush prep time is well worth it to cut your price by two thirds, which comes out to a ≈$4,700 / year savings. In addition to being cheaper, Veggie Mush is also healthier and tastier. You get to eat real, whole foods that pack a lot more nutrition than a bunch of cheap, industrially processed parts.
Other Whole Food Plant-Based Easy-to-Cook Meals
There's one other company that does healthy and easy just about as well as Veggie Mush. How do they stack up on price?
Meal | Price per 100 calories | Price comparison |
Veggie Mush | $0.35 | 100% |
Leafside Tex-Mex Savory Bowl | $1.62 | 469% |
Yeah, these meals are $9.99 a piece AND you have to buy via a subscription (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Anyways, eating Veggie Mush over its fancy for-profit cousin-in-law is an easy way to save ≈$12,000 / year.
Frozen Meals
Freezing food retains a lot of the nutrients, so with the right ingredients, frozen meals could be competitive with Veggie Mush on healthy and easy. Let's see how they compare on price.
Meal | Price per 100 calories | Price comparison |
Veggie Mush | $0.35 | 100% |
$1.39 | 402% | |
$0.67 | 192% |
One of the big problems with the frozen foods that are typically stocked in the grocery store is that one package just isn't that much food. For example, the Grilled Chicken Marinara we sampled has just 280 calories. That's not enough fuel for an adult human to be healthy.
We tried finding a frozen meal that was more calorie dense to see how that compared, and ended up going with the Hungry Man Fried Chicken meal that consists of fried chicken nuggets, potatoes, corn, and a brownie. This is NOT a healthy meal, but even so it still comes in at only 750 calories, just 50 more than Veggie Mush + olive oil. And on top of that, it's still almost twice the price of Veggie Mush.
So, what gives? One big reason frozen foods are so expensive is that you have keep them frozen, and that increases costs in production, shipping, and storage.
Easy to Make, but Unhealthy Processed Foods
Processed foods aren't healthy, but they are cheap and easy to make.
Veggie Mush costs about the same per calorie as making a big box of Easy Mac, and Ramen is a good deal cheaper. However, we think the health benefits of eating whole food plant-based are worth the extra buck a meal :)
Conclusion
Veggie Mush can save you a lot of money compared to most food options out there. Some of the cheapest per calorie, heavily processed and nutritionally deficient foods match or beat its price performance, but the rest of the food options we studied weren't anywhere close.
The different food options typically offer trade-offs between healthy, easy and cheap. Cooking meals from scratch is healthy and not super expensive, but not easy. Processed food is cheap and easy, but not healthy. Meal replacements are easy, but not healthy or cheap. With Veggie Mush you get all three, because we're doing this to improve the world, not to make a bunch of money 🌈
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