As Thanksgiving nears, grocery aisles fill, prices shift and shoppers race to assemble the essentials for the holiday table.

It also brings sticker shock after families return home from the grocery store, as prices are rising on food items across the country. We looked at 10 different Phoenix-area grocery stores to determine where you can find the best deals for your Thanksgiving dishes. Here’s how we did it:

We selected seven dishes we consider a quintessential part of any Thanksgiving meal: roasted turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and pecan pie. We also limited ourselves to only as close to ready-made dishes as possible. While you may be able to make some dishes, such as pumpkin pie, more affordably if you buy the ingredients yourself, we opted for the least hassle option. Finally, we tried to get as similar products as possible for a group of 10 people. 

Grocery stores may vary in price by location, but we looked at the online price. We also compared the Thanksgiving basket meals on offer that compile a lot of the ingredients you will need into one basket to see if you actually save money. 

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Turkey can be the most expensive item on the table at Thanksgiving.

Turkey

The turkey is the star of the Thanksgiving table and usually the biggest line item on the shopping list. Whether you roast it, smoke it or deep-fry it, most shoppers are starting with the same kind of frozen bird.

This year, the cheapest option we found was at Walmart. “Jennie-O” frozen turkey is $0.84 per pound. If you’re unsure how much to buy, Bon Appétit suggests planning for 1 to 1.5 pounds per person. That means a family of 10 would need roughly a 12 to 15-pound turkey, putting your total around $12.

Sides 

No matter how fancy or simple a Thanksgiving meal gets, stuffing and mashed potatoes are the two sides everyone expects, and the ones most likely to disappear first. 

Stuffing brings the unmistakable Thanksgiving aroma into the kitchen, and for many households around Arizona, that starts with a simple boxed mix. This year, the cheapest option we found was at Aldi, where the Chef’s Cupboard cornbread stuffing sells for $0.79 a box. A family of ten would likely need two, bringing the total to just $1.58.

Mashed potatoes proved trickier to compare because stores typically offer two ready-made routes: instant mixes or refrigerated, heat-and-serve trays. Instant almost always wins on price, though the chilled versions come closer to tasting homemade. Walmart’s instant mix comes out to about $0.14 per ounce, making it one of the lowest-cost options in that category. But the best value among ready-made potatoes is Sam’s Club’s Garlic Redskin Mashed Potatoes at $0.15 per ounce. They’re sold in a three-pound tray that can go straight into the oven for about 45 minutes, and the full dish costs roughly $10.13, depending on weight.

Sauces? Gravy and Cranberry

Whether you call them sauces or not, no Thanksgiving plate is complete without these two essentials that tie everything together: gravy and cranberry sauce.

For gravy, Walmart has one of the cheapest options: a packet that you mix with a cup of water and heat on the stove. Each Great Value Turkey Gravy packet costs $0.67. For cranberry sauce, Safeway offers a 14-ounce can of jellied cranberry sauce for $1.50.

A group of ten will likely need two of each, bringing the gravy total to $1.34 and the cranberry sauce total to $3.

You can’t forget the pie at Thanksgiving.

Pies

When the meal’s over, everyone tries to stay awake for one reason: the dessert. Many Phoenix households opt for pumpkin and pecan.

For pumpkin pie, the best deal we found is at Sam’s Club, where a 12-inch pie sells for $5.98 and easily feeds a crowd. For pecan pie, Marie Callender’s Southern Pecan Pie Frozen Dessert is the most consistent bargain, coming in at $5.98 for a 10-inch pie at several stores, including Fry’s and Walmart.

Thanksgiving meal packages

Some grocery stores offer pre-assembled Thanksgiving meal bundles, which can save time and sometimes money. Walmart and Aldi both advertise a 10-person meal for about $40, though neither bundle was in stock when we checked.

If you’re looking for a ready-made option you can actually buy, El Super has a $79.99 package. It includes your choice of meat, turkey, spiral ham or pork loin, plus 12 French rolls, a pumpkin pie and your pick of two sides such as mashed potatoes with gravy, stuffing or green beans.

If you decided to build your own Thanksgiving meal by going store to store and grabbing the cheapest version of every item, you could get a surprisingly affordable spread. It would take some driving and planning, but it’s doable and the savings add up fast.

Using the lowest prices we found across all 10 Valley grocery stores, the New Times Thanksgiving basket comes out to $39.59. That includes turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce and both a pumpkin and pecan pie. 

Of course, this approach requires hopping between multiple stores. The extra effort is worth shaving a few dollars off an already expensive holiday for some shoppers. For others, convenience wins out, and a single trip makes more sense even if it costs a bit more.

But if you’re willing to follow along with the New Times basket, and you don’t mind stacking a few different store-brand items in your cart, you can serve a full Thanksgiving meal for under forty dollars. In a year when food prices continue to squeeze household budgets, that’s about as good as it gets.