I’m a mum of 16 & spend over £1K a month to feed my brood – what I have to buy in Costco to keep us going is ginormous
A MUM-OF-16 has revealed the staggering amount she spends every month to keep her brood fed and watered.
Tiffany Nelson has seven biological and nine adopted children with husband Benji, and documents their busy life on their Not Enough Nelsons social media pages.
In a recent YouTube video, Tiffany showed how much food she orders in from Costco, and admitted it only lasts her around three months.
In the clip, Tiffany revealed she spent $4,055 (£3,352) at Costco, and another $700 (£579) at Walmart – a total of $4755 (£3,391) for three months.
That means that she and Benji are forking out £1,310 every month for food and drink for their family of 18.
Luckily, they have the option to have it delivered, which Tiffany chose, and enlisted the help of her brood to load it all into her storage room.
The storage room acts as a pantry for the family, but the matriarch admitted she’s not too good at keeping it organised.
“I know people have these amazing systems and you think by now I’d have an amazing system,” she said.
“But I have craziness going on all the time and sometimes I’m just hanging on by the skin of my teeth!”
Once everything had been transferred to the storage room, Tiffany said: “This kind of feels like a grocery store!
“I’m going to start with the cold items over here, because I need to get them put away.”
She then started detailing what was in the shopping haul, including frozen fruit and vegetables such as carrot, cucumbers, avocadoes, raspberries, grapes and peppers.
She also got a load of frozen food such as tempura shrimp, garlic shrimp, beef, corn dogs, bagel bites and dinosaur chicken nuggets.
“These kind of items, they’re probably going ot last our family the month, because I don’t like to totally pack our freezers where I can’t manage it and stuff’s at the bottom like forever,” she explained.
“So this will probably last us three or four weeks, and then we’ll have to order in some more frozen bits.”
On the fresh produce front, she’d ordered milk, yoghurt, cheese, fresh mozzarella, eggs, turkey mince, pork chops, a roast joint and some sausage.
There were also a tonne of dinner rolls, which she said they use as rolls but also as “scones on Sunday mornings”.
Having 16 kids means they also go through an awful lots of snacks, so she’d stocked up on things like snack packs of cheese and crackers, brown rice roll up bars, and chocolate fudge bars.
She’d also got bottles and bottles of water, as she said: “We have a tonne of water, we definitely go through this much.
“It probably lasts us about a month”.
Next up was the more household type things, such as a LOT of toilet paper and kitchen towels.
“I feel like this will last us a month to six weeks, and I always like to keep a month to hand ever since we couldn’t find toilet paper in the stores!” Tiffany laughed.
She’d also got tin foil, baking paper, cleaning products, torches and emergency batteries, and paper plates and plastic cutlery for when they have a party.
Speaking of parties, she splashed out on 14 boxes of cake mix, adding that they come in really handy when it’s one of her 16 kids’ birthdays.
She bought some cooked brown rice pots which her kids love, as well as an enormous range of different pastas, spaghetti and sauces.
There were also mixes for chocolate brownies, pancakes and blueberry muffins, which Tiffany said her kids love for breakfast.
And she’d also purchased some tinned goods like canned chicken for chicken salad, and tuna in water.
Then she showed the mass of Heinz ketchup bottles she’d got in front of her, as she added: “My kids go through ketchup like it’s water, people.
“I don’t know what’s in this stuff but ketchup is delicious to my kids.”
The same could be said for mac and cheese, which she’d got by the box full.
Tiffany concluded the look at her haul by showing all the medicine and toiletries she’d bought for her family – many of which would last them for around a year.
“This just shows how much Tiffany cares for each of her 16 kiddos…,” one person commented on the YouTube video.
As another added: “Bless the person who had to shop and deliver all that!”
“This is like a life time supply for my family,” a third admitted.
“That’s a haul and a half,” someone else wrote.