The cheapest cupboard proteins, ranked by cost per meal

Budget cooking · 8 min read

US$0.37. That is the lowest figure in the three published rankings checked for this guide — the cost of 30 grams of protein from split peas, from a list priced on Walmart.com in the United States. Everything else here hangs on two cautions attached to that number. First, the three lists do not agree with each other, and second, none of them is Canadian. What follows is a ranking that keeps each source's figures separate, converts them onto one unit, and names the gap instead of filling it.

One unit, three sources, no merged fiction

The published lists cannot be compared as printed. One ranks cost per 30g of protein, one ranks cost per 20g, and the third mixes per-20g figures. The table below converts every figure to cost per 30g of protein — per-20g figures are multiplied by 1.5 — and keeps the source beside each number, because the sources were checked on October 25, 2026 and their prices are United States prices. A converted figure is arithmetic, not a new price check.

Read the table by source, not as one ladder. Within FrugalForLess, canned black beans sit near the top at US$0.42. Within A-to-Z Fitness, canned beans sit at the bottom, at three to four times the dried lentil figure from the same list. Both cannot describe the same can at the same store, and this guide does not pretend they do. Different products, pack sizes, and store prices sit behind each list. The ranking that survives across all three sources is narrower and more useful: dried lentils appear in every list, always in the cheaper half, and dried legumes as a group beat canned legumes in two of the three lists by a wide margin.

The cheapest tier: dried legumes

Split peas hold the single lowest figure, US$0.37 per 30g of protein in the FrugalForLess list. Dried lentils are the most consistently cheap item across the sources: US$0.46, US$0.51, and US$0.84 per 30g depending on which list prices them. Dried black beans appear in only one of the three lists, at US$0.50 per 20g — US$0.75 converted — which still places them well under the canned range in the A-to-Z Fitness list.

That spread on lentils, from US$0.46 to US$0.84 for the same food, is the honest headline. The food is cheap in every list; the exact saving depends on the store and the bag in hand. A household comparing its own shelf should copy the unit, not the numbers: work out what a bag costs, how much protein the label says it holds, and divide. The method travels to a Canadian shelf even though these particular prices do not.

Canned legumes: the convenience premium, and one disagreement

Canned beans and chickpeas are the convenience option in the cupboard, and in the A-to-Z Fitness figures that convenience is priced: about US$1.00–1.20 per 20g of protein against about US$0.34 for dried lentils from the same source. Converted, that is roughly US$1.50–1.80 per 30g — about three times the dried figure in that list.

FrugalForLess disagrees, pricing canned black beans at US$0.42 per 30g, cheaper than its own dried lentils. Rather than average the two into a number neither source published, treat the disagreement as information: canned prices vary enough by product and store that a single ranking is not available from these sources. What can be said is that dried legumes are cheap in every list checked, while canned legumes are cheap in one list and the most expensive items ranked in another.

The rest of the cupboard shelf: priced as a gap

Peanut butter, canned tuna, and canned chicken belong in a cupboard protein ranking — they are shelf-stable, and this site cooks with all three — but none of the three checked rankings prices them on a comparable unit. No figure is printed for them here, because inventing one, or borrowing a price from an unrelated listing, would break the one rule this ranking is built on. They are ranked qualitatively instead: they are the proteins to reach for when the meal needs no cooking, no soaking, and no simmering, and their cost per meal has to be worked out from the jar or can in hand, using the same divide-by-protein method as the lentils above. That missing Canadian, like-for-like price check for the full shelf is a recorded gap, not a detail to smooth over.

A worked example: ten protein portions, three ways

The arithmetic below uses only the published figures above, converted as described. Ten portions of 30g of protein — a labelled working assumption for the example, not a serving recommendation — cost:

The same ten portions cost US$3.70 at the cheapest published figure and up to US$18.00 at the most expensive canned figure — a difference of about US$14 over ten meals, before cooking fuel, time, or anything else in the dish is counted. Even the two dried lentil rows disagree by US$3.80, which is why the example keeps its sources attached. The saving from choosing dried over canned is real in the lists that price both the same way; its size belongs to the store where the food is actually bought.

When the ranking flips

Cost per 30g of protein is not the whole cost of a meal. Dried legumes take time and cooking energy to get to the table — costs a household can price from its own routine, and costs a ready-to-use can largely skips. A can that gets eaten beats a bag of dried beans that stays uncooked because the evening ran out — the cheapest protein is the one that becomes dinner. Waste flips the ranking too: a large dried bag bought for its unit price and half-discarded costs more per eaten meal than its label math suggested.

A note on method, in place of a procedure: this is a buying guide, not a how-to, so it carries no numbered steps. The one action it asks for is at the shelf — pick the unit, cost per 30g of protein, and divide the price in hand by the protein on the label before deciding which bag or can is actually cheaper that week.

General information only, not personal financial or nutrition advice. All prices above are United States figures published by the three sources named, checked October 25, 2026; no Canadian price check was available for this ranking, and Canadian shelf prices will differ.

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— Penny Hughes, Money Writer — Saving Desk