68% of millennials are playing 'grocery chess' — cooking at home to fight rising prices and save their household budgets - Dining and Cooking

Young woman examines food at a grocery store

Millennial grocery shoppers aren’t retreating in the face of higher food prices — they’re getting tactical. A new survey from Calgary-based Cashew Research found that 68% of millennial shoppers are now cooking at home more often than they did a year earlier, and 56% of that group point to cost savings as the driving factor.

Cashew polled 783 millennial shoppers across Canada and the United States for a report it titled Data Drop: Grocery Chess: How Millennials Mastered Shopping. The findings suggest this generation isn’t relying on any single fix — it’s stacking several budgeting habits at once.

“This is a generation under pressure that has moved quickly into solutions mode,” Cashew Research CEO Addy Graves said in a statement tied to the release.

Don’t Miss Grocery runs are turning into budget math

For a growing share of millennials, a trip to the grocery store has stopped being just an errand — it’s become part of an ongoing household calculation.

Survey respondents described combining tactics rather than picking just one: splitting a shopping list across two or three stores, stacking loyalty points with coupons, watching sale-tracking apps, and planning meals to cut down on impulse buys.

Cashew also found that 59% of millennials openly mix “splurging and saving” in the same cart — treating themselves on a handful of items while trimming costs elsewhere in that same trip.

That blend of indulgence and discipline tracks with a broader pattern: food costs have stayed elevated even as overall inflation has cooled from its recent peak.

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Social media is shaping grocery carts, too

Cost isn’t the only force steering what ends up in a millennial shopping cart.

Seventy-eight percent of the millennials Cashew surveyed said they’d bought a food product specifically because they saw it on social media — a sign that platforms like TikTok and Instagram are still shaping grocery trends even as households watch their spending more closely.

Put another way, saving money and trying something new aren’t mutually exclusive for this group. Plenty of respondents are cooking at home to cut costs while still experimenting with recipes or products they discovered while scrolling.

Millennials are finding new ways to stretch grocery budgets

The findings add to a broader pattern emerging across Canadian households as living costs remain elevated.

Recent inflation data from Statistics Canada shows grocery prices were still rising 3.9% year over year in June — the 17th consecutive month that grocery price growth has outpaced Canada’s overall Consumer Price Index (CPI), which rose 2.8% over the same period. The pace has eased slightly, down from a 4.3% year-over-year increase in May.

For many households, cooking at home more frequently has become one of the clearest ways to offset those higher costs. But rather than abandoning spending altogether, the Cashew survey illustrates how many Millennials are adapting by becoming more selective, research-driven and intentional about where their grocery dollars go.

For Canadian households feeling the squeeze, the survey suggests the most effective response isn’t necessarily buying less — it’s shopping smarter. Comparing flyers before heading out, batching trips across stores that reward loyalty, and building a week of meals around what’s actually on sale can meaningfully cut a grocery bill without giving up the occasional treat. Small, layered changes — not one big cutback — appear to be what’s actually moving the needle for the millennials Cashew surveyed.