The Salad Bar Shortcut To Save Money On Whole Foods Nuts

Whole Foods Market is a lot of things, but "affordable" may be at the bottom of the list. The grocery store has been providing customers with organic and natural options since it first opened its doors in 1980, and has gained the reputation for being hard on your wallet along the way. Still, as with any grocery store, there are plenty of ways to save money at Whole Foods, like checking out the free services at its seafood station. Another hack involves the salad bar, and getting the most bang for your buck when buying nuts.

Tree nuts like pecans, walnuts, and cashews are known for being on the expensive side even when they're sold at stores other than Whole Foods. This is because nuts are pretty finicky when it comes to where they can be grown. They also only have one small yearly harvest. None of that helps us when we're trying to put together a quality trail mix or get enough pecans for a pie on the cheap. That's where the Whole Foods salad bar comes in — instead of buying pre-packaged nuts or grabbing them from the bulk section, you can get them from the salad bar and save a few bucks.

Let's crunch the numbers. For our research we looked at Whole Foods' prices in New York City, but this trick should work at any location. The Whole Foods salad bar costs $11.99 per pound, regardless of what's actually contained in your salad. That means you could theoretically fill your to-go box with whatever nuts are available for that price, which would be cheaper than the other ways to buy nuts at the store. For example, if you were to buy nuts in bulk, you would have to pay $12.99 per pound of organic walnuts or $14.79 per pound of organic cashews.

Getting your nuts from the salad bar will also cost less than getting packaged nuts from the Whole Foods 365 brand. A 10-ounce bag of organic almonds is $8.29, and you would have to buy two packages to get as many nuts as you could at the salad bar, adding up to $16.58. Even if you were to break down the price by ounces, the 365 brand is about 83 cents per ounce for almonds, while the salad bar is about 75 cents per ounce. Taking these numbers into account, it seems buying nuts from the salad bar will save you money any way you slice it.