Before going out and buying either bulk canned drinks or two litre bottles of soda to save a little, you might want to consider dry flavor drink mixes like Lemonade. Most markets sell large canisters of drink mixes like Lemonade and Limeade. And of course there is the old standard - Tang.

While I certainly dig Tang (the astronaut’s drink of choice of course) it can tend to be a little more expensive. In any case, if you can get one of the really large canisters at Costco, Target or any other bulk food store you can really rack up some savings. The one I got, weighs in at a whopping 5 pounds and costs about $6. It comes with a convenient plastic scoop inside so you don’t have to measure; just scoop and mix.

According, to the packaging the serving size is 1/2 a “scoop”. There are 136 servings per container. That works out to about 4 cents a glass. That’s pretty Cheap Eats. Hey, if you open your own lemonade stand and sell a glass for 5 cents you’ll make a 1 cent profit!

But seriously, even if it’s not such great savings, the advantage it has over litre bottles of soda is that once you open soda, it tends to go flat. With drink mixes, you can store it for an indefinite amount of time and just drink a glass whenever you feel like it. One thing to keep in mind is that the mix tends to clump after a couple of months, especially if the lid is not tight or you some moisture in there. So try to keep it as dry as possible and away from hot places that will cause condensation to form.

The taste. Well it is sort of, meh… but what do you expect for this type of cheapness. But you can make a quick two quarts of it and drink it all day long. Oh, as a bonus you get 100% of your daily recommended Vitamin C…

Cheap Eats Score: 6/10