Beans and Rice: The $0.41 Serving That Outprices Meat on Protein
The cheapest protein source is a bag of dried lentils
At the Kroger store our recipe corpus is priced against, a 16 ounce bag of dried lentils costs $1.69 and contains about 112 grams of protein. That is $1.51 per 100 grams of protein, the lowest figure of the ten sources we checked. Dried split peas and dried black beans land within 20 cents of it.
Every other protein in the store is priced against that floor. Some come close: peanut butter at $1.98 per 100 grams of protein, eggs at $2.47, chicken breast at $2.83. One is in a different universe: 85/15 ground beef at $10.66, seven times the lentil figure, at the same store on the same day.
How we got these numbers
Two inputs, both public. The prices are the actual products our matcher picked as the cheapest acceptable option for these ingredients across our priced recipe baskets, captured at Kroger store 01400513 in July 2026. The protein figures come from USDA FoodData Central's SR Legacy dataset, which lists protein grams per 100 grams for each raw food.
The arithmetic is one line: package weight times protein density gives grams of protein in the package, and package price divided by that gives cost per 100 grams of protein. Everything is measured as purchased, raw, before cooking, because raw weight is what you pay for at the register.
Two honesty notes. Canned beans are measured on their packing-liquid basis, which is how USDA lists them, so the canned figures include liquid you will drain. And these are one store's prices on one day, not national averages; the ranking is far more stable than the exact dollars.
The full ranking, cheapest protein first
Ten sources, sorted by what 100 grams of protein costs. The spread from top to bottom is a factor of seven, which is larger than the spread between any two recipes on a normal weeknight. Legumes occupy the top three spots, and every plant source on the list costs less per gram of protein than either grade of ground beef.
Cost per 100 g of protein. Prices: CentsPerServing corpus pricing, Kroger store 01400513, July 2026, as-purchased raw weight. Protein content: USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy.
Canned beans lose to chicken breast
This is the result that surprised us. A $1.00 can of store-brand black beans holds about 26 grams of protein, or $3.84 per 100 grams. Boneless skinless chicken breast at $2.89 a pound holds about 102 grams, or $2.83. Measured strictly on protein, the convenience can is the more expensive purchase.
The reason is water. USDA lists dried black beans at 21.6 grams of protein per 100 grams and canned black beans at 6.03, because a can is mostly liquid and rehydrated bean. You are paying $1.00 to have someone else add water and heat, and per gram of protein that service costs about as much as the beans did.
None of this makes canned beans a bad buy. They turn a 90 minute dinner into a 15 minute one, they need no planning, and at $1.00 a can they still beat almost everything in the meat case. Just do not assume the cheap-looking can is the cheap protein.
Ground beef is the outlier, and 2026 made it worse
Ground beef sits alone at the expensive end: $10.66 per 100 grams of protein for 85/15 at $8.99 a pound, and $11.56 for 90/10 sirloin at $10.49. That is not a quirk of one shelf tag. Beef and veal prices were 11.8% higher in June 2026 than a year earlier, per USDA Economic Research Service, while poultry was flat at -0.1%.
ERS expects beef and veal to finish 2026 up 10.7% for the year. Whatever the rest of the grocery bill does, the gap between a beef dinner and a bean dinner is widening, which is worth knowing before you build a rotation around it. We broke that category split down in what actually got more expensive in 2026.
Rice is a cheap calorie, not a cheap protein
Rice earns its place in beans and rice, but not on this chart. USDA lists raw enriched long-grain white rice at 7.13 grams of protein per 100 grams, roughly a third of a dried bean. A $1.79 two pound bag holds about 65 grams of protein, which is $2.77 per 100 grams: more than eggs, more than peanut butter, more than chicken breast.
What rice actually buys is bulk, texture, and calories at a price nothing else matches. That is a real job in a cheap dinner. It just means the protein in a bean-and-rice plate is coming almost entirely from the bean, and the practical lever is how much bean is in the pot.
Inside the $0.41 dinner
The cheapest fully priced dinner in our corpus is Simmered Beans, a USDA public-domain recipe, at $0.41 per serving. Its entire basket came to $4.87 for 12 servings: one bag of dried pinto beans at $1.19, an onion at $1.19, and a jar of bay leaves at $2.49. Three items, one pot.
Look at where the money went. The bay leaf jar was more than half the basket, and it is the one item that carries into every future recipe calling for a bay leaf. Once it is in your cupboard, the marginal cost of cooking this dinner again is $2.38 for 12 servings, or about 20 cents a serving. The full priced card shows every line.
That pattern repeats through the cheap tier. Bean dinners are about 18% of the dinners we priced but 38% of the ones under $2 a serving - 18 of those 48 recipes. The full sub-$2 list is where the legume tier shows its depth.
The honest catch: small protein per serving
Cheap per gram is not the same as generous per plate. Simmered Beans splits 2 cups of dried beans across 12 listed servings, which is roughly 7 grams of protein each. Split Pea Soup at $1.04 per serving runs to about 11 grams. A quarter pound of 85/15 ground beef is about 21 grams.
So the fair comparison is not serving to serving. Matching one beef portion's protein takes about three servings of Simmered Beans, which costs $1.25 against $2.25 for the beef alone, before the onion, the rice, or anything else on the beef plate. The bean version still wins by a wide margin. It just wins by less than the headline suggests, and you have to actually eat the larger portion.
The practical version: if you are cooking from the cheap tier for protein rather than for cost alone, add a second can or a second cup of dried beans to the pot. It is the least expensive upgrade available in a grocery store.
Six bean dinners that taste nothing alike
The standard objection to the legume tier is monotony, and the corpus does not support it. These six all sit under $1.10 a serving, and they share almost nothing beyond the bean. Prices are full baskets at one Kroger in July 2026, including package remainders that carry forward.
| Dinner | Per serving | Basket / yield | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simmered Beans | $0.41 | $4.87 / 12 | A pot of dried beans with onion and bay leaf |
| Caribbean Pink Beans | $0.70 | $11.13 / 16 | Dried beans stewed with plantain, tomato, sweet pepper |
| Fiesta Beans and Rice | $0.84 | $5.07 / 6 | Brown rice, canned red beans, salsa, tomato sauce |
| 3-Can Chili | $0.92 | $5.49 / 6 | Canned beans, corn, crushed tomatoes, chili powder |
| Split Pea Soup | $1.04 | $6.27 / 6 | Dried split peas simmered with onion and butter |
| Bean Enchiladas | $1.10 | $8.78 / 8 | Canned pinto beans baked in tortillas with cheese |
Source: CentsPerServing corpus pricing, Kroger store 01400513, July 2026. All six are USDA public-domain recipes, fully matched item by item.
Two of them start with a bag of dried beans and take an evening. Four start with cans and are on the table in half an hour. That split is the real trade in this tier: the cheapest protein in the store is also the slowest, and the fast version costs roughly double per gram.
How to use this at the register
Three rules cover most of the value. Buy protein dried when you will cook a pot anyway, and buy it canned when you will not cook at all otherwise. Treat chicken breast as the cheap animal protein and beef as the splurge it now is. And read rice as a calorie line, not a protein line.
The larger point is that protein cost and recipe cost are different questions. Our ranking of recipe cost by protein group shows how far a recipe can drift from its headline ingredient, and the weekly view in a realistic grocery budget for four puts these swaps into a real weekly total. More of this data lands in Budget Strategies as we publish it.
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Price a recipeFAQ
What is the cheapest protein source at the grocery store?
Dried legumes. At the Kroger we price against, a 16 oz bag of dried lentils costs $1.69 and holds about 112 grams of protein using USDA composition data, which works out to $1.51 per 100 grams of protein. Dried green split peas came to $1.52 and dried black beans $1.72. A pound of 85/15 ground beef at $8.99 works out to $10.66 for the same 100 grams.
Are canned beans still cheap protein?
Less than you would think. A $1.00 can of store-brand black beans holds about 26 grams of protein, which is $3.84 per 100 grams of protein - more than twice the price of the same bean dried, and more than boneless skinless chicken breast at $2.83 in the same store on the same day. Canned beans are still cheap food; they are not the cheapest protein.
How much cheaper is a dried bean than ground beef?
About seven times, measured per gram of protein: $1.51 per 100 grams from dried lentils against $10.66 from 85/15 ground beef at the same store. Put another way, buying 25 grams of protein - roughly one adult portion - costs about 38 cents in dried lentils and about $2.67 in ground beef.
Is chicken breast cheap protein?
Yes, by meat standards. Boneless skinless chicken breast at $2.89 a pound came to $2.83 per 100 grams of protein, close to eggs at $2.47 and cheaper than canned beans at $3.84. Chicken is the one animal protein that competes directly with legumes on price per gram.
How much protein is in one serving of a cheap bean dinner?
Less than a meat plate. Simmered Beans, the cheapest fully priced dinner in our corpus at $0.41 per serving, works out to roughly 7 grams of protein per listed serving from its 2 cups of dried beans. Split Pea Soup at $1.04 comes to roughly 11 grams. A quarter pound of 85/15 ground beef is about 21 grams. Cheap per gram does not mean the serving is large.
What is the cheapest dinner in your priced recipe data?
Simmered Beans, a USDA public-domain recipe, at $0.41 per serving. Its entire basket was $4.87 for 12 servings: a bag of dried pinto beans, an onion, and a jar of bay leaves. The bay leaf jar alone was $2.49 of that basket, and it carries into every future recipe that calls for one.
Why is rice not a cheap protein source?
Rice is cheap food, not cheap protein. USDA lists raw enriched long-grain white rice at 7.13 grams of protein per 100 grams, about a third of a dried bean. A $1.79 two-pound bag holds roughly 65 grams of protein, which is $2.77 per 100 grams - more expensive per gram of protein than chicken breast at our store.
Does buying dried beans instead of canned really save money?
Yes, by roughly half per gram of protein: $1.72 dried versus $3.84 canned for black beans at our store. The trade is time. Dried beans need soaking and a long simmer, which is why the cheapest recipes in our data are also the ones our tagger marks as involved. Cooking one large pot and freezing portions captures the saving without repeating the work.
External data: USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy dataset (protein per 100 g, raw basis, and the 50 g standard weight for a large egg); USDA Economic Research Service Food Price Outlook, updated July 24, 2026 (beef and veal +11.8% year over year in June 2026, poultry -0.1%, 2026 beef forecast +10.7%). First-party data: CentsPerServing corpus pricing, Kroger store 01400513, July 2026, item-level shelf prices with package-count math, pantry staples excluded. Method: cost per 100 g of protein is package price divided by package weight times USDA protein density, measured as purchased and raw; canned beans use USDA's packing-liquid basis. Store prices change without notice and vary by location. This article reports our own measurements and public government data, and is not nutrition or financial advice. Build a week of these dinners to see the combined total.