Six things from Azure Standard I can no longer live without
It’s been about six months since I started ordering from Azure Standard, and, when I say the experience has been life-changing, I’m not exaggerating. Azure makes bulk shopping a lot more accessible and affordable for us, which in turn frees up a lot of my time to spend doing things I actually enjoy instead of grocery shopping.
Azure carries like, evvveryyything and honestly sites like that make me really anxious. Like HOW DO I KNOW WHAT I WANT TO BUY?!?!?! So, in the interest of helping out anyone who’s seen me talk about Azure but been like, “ok how does this help ME?” I’ve compiled a list of my favorite things to buy from them:
RAW CHEESE
Ha you thought I was going to say GF flour, weren’t you. NOPE, the REAL thing that sold me on leaving the house at the ungodly hour of 7am to pick groceries up from the back of a truck was this cheese. Benny and I don’t do so well with dairy. Ok, Benny really can’t have dairy at all. Unless it’s raw. Which, while totally legal in CA, is stupidly expensive (likeeee $7.99 for a 8oz…) BUT Azure has MULTIPLE VARIETIES in bulk for under $30 for FIVE POUNDS. $5ish a pound. You’d pay that for orange cheddar at Target. And this cheese won’t give my son diarrhea.
Gluten Free flours
If you read my sourdough post (or signed up for my sourdough course….) you know all about this. But in case you haven’t, AZURE HAS 25 POUND BAGS OF THE BOBS RED MILL FOR UNDER $50. As long as I keep my baking to a reasonable level, this lasts us a good two months and, added bonus, is totally plastic free.
Bulk dry beans
We eat a lot of beans. Like, 3-4 dinners a week involve beans. Choosing dried beans over canned has a variety of benefits, but getting them 1lb at a time from Sprouts was getting really tedious but buying more than that at a time created some storage issues. So now I buy our most-used beans (black and garbanzo) in 5lb (paper!) bags from Azure that are easy to store and allow me to meal prep like a good mom that meal preps.
Honey
One thing I’m really working on in our diet is reducing our intake of refined sugars, which I’m mainly doing by switching to honey and maple syrup for our cooking at home. In THEORY this seemed like an easy swap (and pretty quickly cut down our sugar cravings/tolerance) but DAMN honey is NOT CHEAP and I have STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT THOSE PLASTIC BEARS. But Azure has this wonderful QUART SIZE glass jar of raw wildflower honey for, get this: THIRTEEN DOLLARS. Like, I’ve paid that for a pint jar at Sprouts.
Gluten free oats
Ok so Benny and I are both celiac, but he’s a LOT more sensitive than I am, so… where I can cheap out take some chances with non GF-certified oats… he absolutely 100% can not. But since I’m a mean mom that won’t buy box cereal, oatmeal is kind of our main weekday breakfast and… we go through a LOT of oatmeal. A $7.99-a-two-pound-bag-from-Bob’s-red-mill-is-just-not-happening amount of oatmeal. We go through over a pound of oatmeal each week so… Azure is a lifesaver with their 5 and 25lb bags of oats at around $2 a pound.
Gluten free pasta
I have small children. I am very lazy. Pasta is a pretty necessary staple in this house. In all honesty this one isn’t really cheaper than buying it at a store but the convenience of buying it in a TEN POUND BOX and just ALWAYS HAVING PASTA on hand is worth its weight in gold. Idk what ten pounds of gold is worth but thats probably what I’d be willing to pay to just HAVE pasta for every time I didn’t want to cook actual food.
Do I sometimes order other things from Azure? Yes. Do I order all of these every time? Of course not. Am I saying that these are the only or best things to order from them? Absolutely not. BUT, if you wanted a peek into what our best buys from Azure are, there you have it! Also, full disclosure this is an affiliate link and I get a kickback if you use it and/or use the code VictoriaMeyers2 at checkout, which I would really appreciate BUT all opinions are my own and I do spend A LOT of my own money at Azure…