I admire my parents so much. We had a household of 7 (5 kid, 2 parents, blended household) and one income. By today's standard we were living lean, but we never wanted for food. My mom has always been a great money manager.
Once a year, they would share a cow with the neighbors and it would be cut up and packaged for the freezer (local farm offered this), they would sometimes do the same with a pig. There was a dairy farm about 45 minutes away that had great prices on milk, so someone from the neighborhood would make the trip and fill their trunk with milk and we would distribute it among the neighbors. Mom always used coupons, and when generic foods came along, she started buying those, which were sometimes terrible
Thankfully they are much better now!
Being in Maine, they would always buy tons of potatoes at harvest time, really cheap, and we stored them in the basement. We usually had a garden and mom canned.
We always had spaghetti once a week, anyone remember "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day" We usually had spaghetti on Wednesday, what a great marketing strategy! Mom always did the baking from scratch, never buying store junk food, she did buy bread because with 5 kids she wouldn't have been able to keep up! She did buy from the bread thrift store and put it in the freezer.
My strategy for budget friendly is to always have some of your grocery money on reserve, if you don't spend the entire weeks' budget, squirrel away the excess and when you see a great sale, you can stock up! Back when money was really tight, I hated seeing a great sale and not being able to take advantage of it. We eat very well and quite healthy with very few processed foods, and don't have to spend a fortune.