I don't have a calculation to back it up, but I'm inclined to believe store bought will always have a cheaper production cost. Your can of beans wasn't made by one person per one can of beans at a time. It is done in a factory producing millions of cans. That kind of industrial process will always be cheaper. It's designed to be that way. Beans can be bought wholesale below the cost available to you. And with that operation at scale it will undoubtedly be more energy efficient per can of beans. The consumer cost is something else. You will save money buying the raw ingredients and making your own beans rather than buying canned.

on dry beans v canned beans

Absolutely no comparison! In any cooking method, the energy cost is a few cents, but cooking from dry is 6-8x cheaper.

You also have to factor in the cost of your time. If it takes longer with one or the other that needs consideration too.

https://healthyfamilycookin.blogspot.com/2013/05/frugal-friday-cost-analysis-of-dried.html

I'm interested to know what power company doesn't give price for a kWh nor how many kWh you used in a billing period. It was essential when I made the switch to an EV and had to show my wife how much money we saved with electric vs gasoline.

If you don't know what your electric appliance uses to cook, you can get energy monitors that can give you the exact amount. I have an emporia car charger and a plug monitor for my mower batteries. It's as simple as setting you electricity rate in the app and setting the view to currency costs. Here's my recent usage for mowing my yard ~2 acres:

It usually costs me $0.30 to mow and trim a week compared to gasoline equivalent of my old mower and trimmer of just over a gallon per week. I pay $0.14478/kWh where I live, gas is currently $2.899/ gal. The break even for my car in efficiency is gasoline has to be around $1.50/gal iirc.

No, but I do try to keep prep and cleanup times to under 1 hour for breakfast and lunch combined and 1 hour for dinner.

Dry beans weigh less

I'm not sure where you are, but I think homemade bread is not as bad for you as mass produced.

In Poland there are small bistros that follow a tradition of communist "milk bars". Some of them even deliver in a subscription model. This totally makes sense financially if it's for just one person. You can eat there for really nice prices.

Other than that, when it's for a family of even 2, it never makes sense financially to get food delivered.

Ready to heat food is another topic. Those can also be very competitive in terms of costs and they can be really healthy as in EU it's forbidden to do any preservatives in that kind of food (frozen or pasteurized).

I know my energy company will tell me how much they charge per which ever unit is used. And I believe most appliances, you can look up how much of which ever unit is used per minute.

It'll take a little bit of research, but should be calculable.

Not really, no.

Mainly because my mother-in-law has read/seen one too many horror stories on the state of eatery kitchens and insists on home cooked food 24/7.

To us, the electricity and gas bill is the cost of assurance that all our food is fresh, clean and healthy.

shrug i cook for myself because it generally tastes better than a good 80% of restaurants in my area, usually for less money. My finances are (thankfully) not so tight that I'm calculating how much it costs to keep an oven on for 30 minutes.

It depends on your overall energy use but generally that would be negligible when compared to heating and hot water, especially during winter when the furnace runs 24/7.

In particular, during the winter, all excess energy from the oven is heat the furnace doesn't have to provide so it's basically free: you'd use that energy anyway.

Generally the economy of scale should technically favor the prebaked bread, at least before the store slaps its value added surcharge for it. The store still needs to pay for the energy (but probably gets it cheaper than you), but also needs to pay to maintain a factory, equipment, employees. So you kinda need to factor in the price of your oven too and its wear and tear.

I just buy the loaf because one thing I know for sure is if I factor in the value of my time, it's way better and easier to work an hour than spend an hour baking a loaf of bread. The time to bake the bread costs more than if I used that time to work the equivalent time and buy 5 loaves of bread with the money.

Doing the calculation isn't hard. It's harder to know how much energy (be it electricity, gas, or whatever) you actually use. It also varies wildly with meals, as some need multiple stove tops (is that the right term?), possibly for varying lengths of time and/or the oven.

Please note that you can not really deduce the energy consumption from a power rating, as those usually are max values and not what it'll actually need.

I have good enough energy monitoring that I can measure the usage (sort of), and having rather high electricity cost at around 0.40 €/kWh I do pay some attention to it. Running the oven for like an hour will be roughly 1€. Boiling water for pasta or something is probably more like 20 ct (includes cooking the pasta). Just using a lid actually helps a lot here if you make use of a lower power setting after reaching a boil and putting in the pasta.

It's gonna have to be a very elaborate meal to break 3€. So while it does matter and add up, compared to buying fully prepared food from a restaurant, it isn't that dramatic even with very high energy prices like these.

Cooking appliances use a lot of power, but they don't run for whole days at a time, so the energy used also isn't that dramatic. There's a relatively recent video by technology connections that goes into detail, and might be of interest (link).

It really depends on your energy source and your appliance, but the cost to run something like an oven for an hour is pretty negligible, especially if it's a somewhat modern appliance.

Most newer over run somewhere around 2-3,000 kwh, which nationwide averages to around .30 to .50 cents an hour.

The real cost of making food at home really just depends on how much you value your own labour/free time, and how much of a chore cooking is for you.

Something to consider is that prepared food will attract sales tax while food for cooking has either zero or reduced sales tax.

Or dry beans vs canned beans; does the cost of boiling the beans actually bring the cost up to be equivalent to canned beans?

Nowhere near, at least in a a pressure cooker. An electric pressure cooker uses 1KW when the heater is running, and you cook the beans for about 35 minutes. The heater doesn't run the whole time but even if it did, that's around 0.6 KWH at most. And you would normally do a bigger batch than you'd get in 1 can of beans. I have been wanting to measure the actual power usage sometime.