How much does food cost in Volcan and Cerro Punta, Chiriqui Province, Panama?
James David Audlin - Editores Volcán Barú
What does food cost in the Volcán and Cerro Punta region? The basic rule is that Panamanian produce and products are quite inexpensive but of excellent quality, and anything imported, including from the United States, tends to cost about the same as in the States. My wife and I eat quite contentedly on a grocery budget of about $70 a month. We shop at a supermarket in Volcán, and also buy fresh produce from farmers and fishermen. We also do an amount of sharing and barter with...
What does food cost in the Volcán and Cerro Punta region? The basic rule is that Panamanian produce and products are quite inexpensive but of excellent quality, and anything imported, including from the United States, tends to cost about the same as in the States. My wife and I eat quite contentedly on a grocery budget of about $70 a month. We shop at a supermarket in Volcán, and also buy fresh produce from farmers and fishermen. We also do an amount of sharing and barter with our neighbors. I recommend the latter, once you get to know your Panamanian neighbors; such sharing is the custom here, and it strengthens warm relationships.
Posted May 26, 2013
John Gilbert - PanamaKeys
When my family and I moved to Volcán, we were pleasantly surprised at how much our grocery bills dropped by shopping locally here in the local fruit stand vendors of Volcán, and not in the major grocery stores here like Romeros and Berard’s. There’s a butcher here in Volcán who smokes meat for his customers all over the country. I’ll tell you a secret: you can get a whole filet mignon for a family of eight here in...
When my family and I moved to Volcán, we were pleasantly surprised at how much our grocery bills dropped by shopping locally here in the local fruit stand vendors of Volcán, and not in the major grocery stores here like Romeros and Berard’s. There’s a butcher here in Volcán who smokes meat for his customers all over the country. I’ll tell you a secret: you can get a whole filet mignon for a family of eight here in Volcán for about US $17, which is extremely cheap. Nobody cooks a better steak than I do, so that’s a double blessing.
The local fruit and vegetable vendors in Volcán are amazing. I can purchase pineapples for $.075, watermelons for $1 - $2 depending on the weight, a 100-count bag of oranges for $5, bananas for $.50 a pound, and 20-pound bags of vegetable assortments for $6. These bags contain potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, and all kinds of different fresh vegetables from the local farms.
With a family of eight, I truly appreciate the grocery bills here. Some of the vegetables in the 20-pound bag will still go bad because we can’t eat everything in the bag, but we don’t really care because it’s $6. We’ll just go buy another $6 bag of 20-pound vegetables.
Berard is the surname of a family that raises cattle, smokes meat and sells to the other supermarket chains in Volcán. Paul Berard’s is the smokehouse where we can buy meat inexpensively. They also own a grocery store chain called the Super Berard’s, two of which are in Volcán. The prices in Super Berard’s are a little better than Romero’s prices, but it’s still a grocery store, which means vegetables are often 2-3 times more expensive than buying them from the plentiful individual fruit stands in Volcán.
(The Gilbert kids preparing fried plantains, Volcan, Panama, pictured.)
Posted February 11, 2017