Why You Should Bring A Towel To The Grocery Store For Extra Savings

Sometimes, it can just feel impossible to catch a break on your grocery bill. Even the savviest of savvy shoppers can get stuck in the slog of smart shopping when food costs continue to rise. Whether the causes of inflation, climate, operating costs, strains on supply chain, or wildly profit-hungry corporate overlords are responsible, the end result is the same: higher prices for you to pay.

While some groceries may seem to stabilize in price in the coming year, the long view of food prices are not great, Bob. Per the USDA analysis of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for food, 2025 is due to see an overall increase in food prices, up 2.4 percent from 2024. But fear not, weary and price-conscious shoppers. While there are plenty of sneaky ways grocery stores try to get you to spend money, there are also plenty of strategies to save money at the grocery store. Some of these tips and tricks require careful planning and comparison shopping. However, one grocery-bill saving strategy requires nothing more than a degree of boldness, and a humble towel.

Produce misters that sprinkle down droplets of water to the tune of "Singin' in the Rain" aren't doing so just to keep herbs and vegetables fresh. The excess water weight from the mist can contribute to higher per-pound produce prices, and as it turns out a well-placed towel on a too-wet bunch of carrots might mean the difference between saving serious cents on your produce purchases, or getting totally hosed.

Using a towel to pat produce before you purchase may sound like a savings tip straight out of the Great Depression. In fact, the towel trick is actually clever advice from a top Chicago chef. "The rain they spray on veggies in the produce aisles is a game of money," Chef Steve Chiappetti told HuffPost, in an article featuring shopping advice from chefs, adding: "It's not necessarily just about keeping them fresh, but adding water weight to the scale."

Chiappetti is currently the executive chef at Chicago's The Albert restaurant, the house restaurant of Hotel EMC2. He's worked with a number of brands and hotel partners, as well as run his own highly recognized restaurants, including the now-shuttered American bistro Mango, which garnered him a James Beard Award nomination. If a top chef like Chiappetti shops for produce with a towel, home chefs should be encouraged to do the same.

There are grocery store towel best practices to follow when deploying this water weight-slashing, cost-cutting trick. First: Adhere to common sense, and keep expectations in check. Drying off an overly misted bunch of herbs isn't necessarily going to shave big bucks off of your grocery bill. However, you might save a small percentage, while preserving a priceless sense of finally getting one over on greedy grocery corporations.

Second: Keep it clean. Use paper towels in your mission to dry off droplets, dollars, and cents. Using a towel from home may draw disgust from store clerks who catch onto your game. Even a towel you freshly laundered could pick up pesky contaminants on your walk or drive to the grocery store. No one needs your dirty towel touching clean produce, and you don't need to become the frugal shopper shouting, "My towel is clean! I swear!" while a store manager forbids you from shopping for cilantro in their store ever again.

Third, only apply the towel trick to produce you actually plan on buying. This is for the sake of common courtesy, and to save on your own paper towel budget. British science fiction author Douglas Adams famously wrote in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" that "[a] towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." To that end, a paper towel might be the most useful thing a smart produce shopper can have, but only if used judiciously.