Grocery Shopping on an Island in Belize

Super Buy Grocery

During our stay on Ambergris Caye, we decided to visit some of the grocery stores to check out the prices and things that would be available to us there.  The island has many grocery stores to choose from located throughout the island, most of which are very small and cater to the specific area on the island.

We found most of the stores carried similar items that we were familiar with back in the U.S.  There was Oscar Mayer Luncheon Meat, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Nabisco Chocolate Chip cookies, Del Monte canned vegetables, Charmin Tissue, Criso Oil, Jif Peanut Butter, Pedigree dogfood and Patron Tequila.  However, these items can be quite expensive due to having to be shipped into the country. 

We checked out prices and talked to people in the stores...all of the comments that we got were.."You Gotta Shop Around".  The prices vary from store to store, sometimes maybe going to as many as 5 different stores to get everything that you need.  But, hey we figure we are going to be retired, so we will have lots of time to shop and compare prices and I really like going and looking around in grocery stores just to see what they have. 

Rou Rou Supermarket

Check out the price on the Patron Tequila - $184.95BZD/$92.50US

Of course if you eat like the "Belizeans" and buy authentic Belizean groceries, you can really eat pretty cheap.  There were many open markets that we visited and we were able to buy fresh produce, homemade sweets and tamales, all at the same place.  The only thing that I would definitely advise, would be to just buy a small amount and try it first to see if you like the item.  We found that even though it may be called the same, it may not taste the same.  We learned this lesson when we bought several dozen hot tamales.  Bill loves hot tamales, but the Belizean hot tamales we got were very very sweet tasting and they were full of chicken bones, yuck.  So to say the least, we did not eat them.  We gave them to some starving backpackers at our hotel and warned them about the bones. 

The other thing that we found, you really had to check the expiration dates on food items such as milk, cheese and the sandwich meat, many had already expired by about a month. 

Local Grocery Store

There are several bakeries on the island and I found all of them to have wonderful looking breads, cookies, cakes and sweet rolls.  They tasted yummy too.