Your Gluten Free Kitchen

How to Shop

for your new Gluten Free Lifestyle

Walk down any aisle in any major grocery chain store in America and you will be confronted with thousands of choices. Hundreds and hundreds of products are on display, saying BUY ME, BUY ME. But can you? Which ones are safe for you to eat and which ones will having you running to the bathroom in 20 minutes or less?

Here is the strategy I used to eventually streamline my shopping and make it a lot easier for me to get out of the grocery store in a timely fashion without spending hours reading labels.

Get yourself a notebook that will fit into your purse so you can take it along with you every time you go to the store. On the inside, place a heading for each grocery store you normally go to. Leave at least 5 pages between each heading.

Now the hard part! You need to spend at least 2 hours at each store for your first run! 2 hours! Yes, at least 2 hours. This is your research and development phase of your shopping. Start by going around the perimeter of the store and check out any grocery items that you are interested in. Read the labels thoroughly and jot down any that state they are gluten free or do not contain any ingredients that could contain gluten.

Place the name of the item in your notebook. Then go down each aisle and do the same thing, along with the location and how much it costs. This will give you the ability to comparison shop and to see if a sale is really a good deal or not.

If you cannot get through the whole store in 2 hours, that's okay! Jot down which aisle you ended with and next time you go shopping, check out the next aisle. Do that every time you go and you should be able to complete your list in a timely fashion.

Not all grocery stores carry everything that is gluten free in a nice neat area all by itself. A lot of things are strewn all over the store. This is about the only way you can find everything. Stores like Trader Joes have pamphlets that tell what they carry that is gluten free and where it is located. Definitely ask at the customer service counter and see if one is available. If it is, your search time is shortened considerably!

Once you have identified everything that is gluten free in your favorite grocery store, you can go on and do the same thing with the next one. Once you have your lists made up, it is easy to find what you want. You can look through your list and see which store carries what and go to the one that has most of the items you want to buy. This will be a real time saver in the end.

Another real time saver is to purchase a copy of The Essential Gluten-Free Grocery Guide published by Triumph Dining. They have done a lot of the hard work for you. It is a great guide for a beginner to use as they list brand name products and store brand products that they have researched for you. They have a gluten free labeling system that allows you to decide what kind of products you feel comfortable with. I recommend this book to everyone who attends my gluten free cooking classes. Many of them are newly diagnosed or have children that are newly diagnosed.

Not everything is listed but at least you can determine which name brand products you can purchase. Living in the Southwest, there are many products not listed that I can purchase here that do not contain gluten. Everyone has regional specialties that do not cross over every state line. There will still be grocery items you will need to research for yourself.

Always,always,always read labels. Be protected, stay informed.