Dry Milk: Is it Still Cheaper?

Crystal at MoneySavingMom asked if dry milk was still any cheaper.

Funny you should ask, Crystal! I encountered this very question at Aldi's this week.

My household uses dry milk exclusively. I stared doing this in college, since I never drink milk and don't put it on cereal. Since I only cook with it, it was a waste for me to buy milk for one or two things I was cooking, because the rest would go bad. One day it occurred to me to buy a box of dry milk, and that worked great.

When I got married, I bought my husband skim milk in the jugs, but it was much pricier than my dry milk. I wanted to switch to dry, but a lot of people cringe and talk about how nasty it tasted. Since I do not drink milk, I did not feel like I could switch it and claim it tasted the same.

At the same time, I hate oranges and orange juice. I hate even the smell of oranges. But there are some recipes that have orange juice in then that I've LOVED, but once I know that the orange is there, that's all I taste. So I decided to mix up a batch of dry milk and put it in the carton to see if he could tell a difference before I told him that there was. The brain can be a funny thing.

I did this for three weeks, then asked him if the milk was okay. When I admitted that it was dry milk and that we would save quite a bit if we used it, and he said it really had not noticed the switch, we started using dry milk exclusively.

A few weeks ago, we were out of dry milk. Aldi's has been the cheapest source of it, and they were out. The reason given was that they were changing the packaging. And change they did! When I finally found a box of it this week, they had drastically reduced the amount of milk in the box, but kept the price. I pulled out my trusty calculator and made a few calculations right there in the aisle.

At my Aldi's, comparing to Aldi's gallons of milk, the powder was still about .50 cents cheaper. So yes, it is still cheaper than regular milk in my area. But the price is creeping up, and the once large gap in price is closing. This happens a lot, you know...keep an eye out, esp as food prices continue to climb. I calculate by ounces, not by can or box. Note that a lot of things that once had 8 oz in it will go down to 6, or 16 oz down to 12 oz, etc.It's time to pull out those price books again and keep an eye on such things- I imagine that this is happening with a lot of food items.

Unless powder become more expensive than regular, I will still buy it, because even with two adult males and me in the house, we still use less than half a gallon a week. But I think the days of feeling frugal because of it may be coming to an end. What once absolutely unarguably frugal items are you noticing to be not so frugal anymore? What prices have you noticed going up lately in food products?