How to save time and money food shopping

Consumer Reports asked experts as well as its Facebook followers for their best time- and money-saving food shopping tips. Here are the results.

• Look high and low. You’ll find the lower-cost generic versions of cereal, cake mixes, paper goods and other high-turnover staples on the very lowest and highest supermarket shelves. Retailers charge manufacturers a fee to be at eye level.

• Use discount apps. Two that Consumer Reports likes are Ibotta and Flipp. Both coordinate your store loyalty cards with current discounts and coupons. With Flipp, you scan the app with the market’s checkout scanner to apply savings at the point of sale. With Ibotta, you select rebates in the app and photograph your receipts to import savings to an Ibotta account. Savings are transferred to a payment app, such as PayPal, or a gift card.

• Get navigation help. Some store loyalty club apps let you locate items by aisle, which can help you avoid crisscrossing aisles — and avoid more temptations. At major chains, the Flipp app can do the same.

• Keep a calculator handy. Unit price shelf stickers under each product can help you compare. But if the store doesn’t have the stickers — only nine states require them — use your smartphone’s calculator. Divide the price by the number of units in each package you’re comparing. If, say, one soda’s price is per fluid ounce and the other’s is per liter, ask Google how many ounces are in a liter and do the conversions.

• Ask for a rain check. When a sale item is sold out, ask a store employee for a rain check — a paper IOU — that you can use like a coupon when the item’s in stock.

• Go with store brands. Consumer Reports’ trained tasters have found store brands with quality equal — or superior — to that of brand-name items, at prices usually 15 to 30 percent lower. That’s because generics are sometimes made by the same companies that make the big-brand foods.

• Use a cash-back card. Consumer Reports’ Credit Card Adviser Comparison Tool found great potential savings from the American Express Blue Cash Preferred card, which pays back 6 percent on the first $6,000 in groceries each year, as well as 3 percent on gas and departmentstore purchases and 1 percent on other purchases. It also returns $150 if you spend $1,000

in the first three months. A user spending $200 monthly on gas, $500 on groceries, $100 on department-store buys and $300 on other items would save $583 in the first year of card ownership and $1,449 in the first three years, even factoring in the $95 annual fee.

• Shop at quiet times. According to a survey by the Time Use Institute, a consulting company, the busiest time on weekdays is from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. and the least busy is before 8 a.m. and after 6 p.m. On weekends, the peak shopping time is from 11 a.m. to noon.

To learn more, visit ConsumerReports.org.