Watch for reduced-price stickers when you’re grocery shopping because they can save you a ton of money. I got all of this stuff yesterday for half-off or better:

• Flour
• Brown rice
• Yogurt
• Orange juice
• Oatmeal
• Nitrate/Nitrite-Free turkey sausages
• Applegate Farms turkey bacon

These are all healthy foods that I feel good about feeding my family, and things that I would have bought anyway.

Want to get me excited? Just put the organic butter on manager’s special. When I saw those beautiful yellow and orange stickers on the butter, I practically dove for them. All told, I ended up with eight four-stick packages of butter for $15.92. They had been marked down from $3.99 each to $1.99 each simply because their sell-by date was later this month. Butter freezes beautifully, so not a problem in my world.

Free-range chicken breasts run $8.95 a pound at my local butcher; All-natural, vegetarian-fed chicken breasts run $5.99 a pound at Earth Fare. I like to feed my family quality foods, but those prices are just painful to me. So what do I do? I buy anyway, but I find ways to do it at my price.

Last night I stocked up on all-natural chicken breast and ground chuck, and I paid just $2.99 a pound – that’s less than the conventional meat prices at any grocery store in town – and it was all because of two sales: Earth Fare has chicken breast on sale for $2.99 a pound through January 27 (six pound limit), and The Fresh Market has ground chuck and chicken breast on sale for $2.99 a pound every Tuesday in January (four pound limit on each).

I now have 14 pounds of quality meat to feed my family, and I didn’t have to blow my grocery budget to do it.

Want to get your own meat bill down, without sacrificing quality? Here are a few things that I recommend:

• Earth Fare, Whole Foods and all of those other healthy grocery stores offer deep discounts on their meat from time to time. Sign up for their newsletters, so you’ll be in the loop
• The Fresh Market seems to run a $2.99 Tuesdays promotion once per quarter. When it’s a $2.99 Tuesdays month, you can get $2.99/lb meat every Tuesday of that month, making it a great opportunity to fill your freezer
• Small butcher shops often run Groupons or other deal vouchers. Snatch them up when you see them. It’s a great way to cut those per-pound prices in half
• Buy direct from a farmer. You can get terrific per-pound prices when you buy a whole, half or quarter cow. Check this directory of certified, grass-fed farms to find options near you