Her trick to make berries last got 18 million shares. She wants to help you save on food
Shoppers sometimes recognize Amy Cross as “the strawberry lady” when she’s at the grocery store.
The 46-year-old Bonney Lake woman’s Instagram post about how to make strawberries last for weeks in the refrigerator went viral last year. She said the trick has been shared more than 18 million times.
What started as a hobby sharing tips and tricks about food preservation and answering questions online has turned into a business, The Cross Legacy, that teaches families how to make food last longer to save money, among other skills.
Cross said she became especially focused on food security during the pandemic, when supply-chain troubles affected grocery stores.
“I store like a year’s worth of different items so that I can make anything at any time that I want to make,” she said.
Cross said she goes grocery shopping once every three weeks and has zero food waste.
She budgets about $135 per person each month for groceries in her family. She has backyard chickens and gardens and has been a long-time canner.
The tips she shares come from things she learned growing up on a fifth-generation farm near Auburn. She looked up to her grandmother, who was a canner, and also learned a lot from neighbors she was close with.
For instance: When she cooks a meal, she freezes half of it instead of throwing it away. She knows lemons and avocados will stay fresh for a month if you store them together in the crisper drawer, but potatoes and onions spoil faster if they’re stored with one another.
“You can keep produce fresh longer,” she said. “... When you’re buying that apple in July, you’re not thinking that it was in somebody else’s fridge for the past year.”
She didn’t think much about all the little things she did to make her food last longer. They were just part of her family’s routine.
Then a neighbor complained frequently that she needed to get more lettuce from the store because it was regularly going bad. That didn’t make sense to Cross, until she realized her friend wasn’t washing her lettuce when she brought it home and taking steps to make it last.
“I didn’t know that people threw away their produce until my friend kept bugging me about it,” she said.
She shared her tips with her friend, who was amazed and encouraged her to start sharing her tricks with others.
It was Oct 12, 2021 that her post about how to make strawberries last for several weeks in the refrigerator went viral. That night she said she hit 3,500 Instagram followers. The next morning it was 25,000, and later that day they hit 65,000.
“They haven’t left,” she said.
Cross said she has more than 105,700 followers today.
She spends hours every day answering questions from people around the world.
Mentoring others and “relieving some of the stress that’s coming from the kitchen just means the world to me,” she said.
She said it’s faith-based for her. “This is how God is using me,” she said.
She believes in what she’s doing, so much so that she and her husband refinanced their home to invest in it.
She speaks at local churches, to parent groups, and said she’s worked with nonprofits such as the Bonney Lake Food Bank and Step by Step in Puyallup.
She said she has a shop, two books, her website (thecrosslegacy.com) and her YouTube channel. She’s also developed an online course that she adds to regularly, which followers can take for $150. It covers grocery budgets, what to stock in a pantry, food preservation and other tips.
Cross said she’s gotten some attention in Australia and was featured on a morning show in Toronto. She also did a TEDx talk in Spokane in October for an audience of 700, she said, that should hit YouTube soon.
There are eight people on the Cross team now. Lindsay Shaw, 31, was one of the first.
Shaw’s family was having trouble affording the rising cost of groceries. She vented to a mutual friend, who told Cross that Shaw was looking for extra work. Shaw joined the team almost a year ago.
Now she’s the full-time social media manager.
Meanwhile, the tips she learned from Cross cut down her grocery bill.
Shaw said her family was paying about $1,000 a month for groceries. Now it’s about $500, $600 at the most.
“Right away we noticed a difference,” Shaw said.
She’s not afraid to buy produce in bulk now, she said, because she knows how to keep it from going bad.
“I find myself being able to stretch grocery trips longer,” Shaw said.
Lesli Barrett, 60 of Yelm, said the tricks have helped her save, too. She started following Cross when a friend posted the strawberries tip after it went viral.
“It wasn’t just strawberries, you know,” Barrett said. “It was grapes, it was lettuce, it was all these things, and I had no idea.”
It took a few times before Barrett got it right. The produce has to be extremely dry first, she said, and any that’s already starting to turn needs to be removed and used first.
And instead of throwing away extra produce that’s gone bad, she uses tips from Cross to freeze certain things instead before they spoil.
“I have onions and peppers in my freezer that are already sliced, and when I’m cooking a meal I just take them out and use them,” she said.
Instead of buying bags of greens that didn’t seem to last long, she uses romaine, red and green lettuce that Cross taught her how to preserve.
“It’s teaching me lifestyle changes and ways to save so much money,” Barrett said.
She said it’s been more than a year since she’s thrown away any lettuce.
This story was originally published December 11, 2022 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Her trick to make berries last got 18 million shares. She wants to help you save on food."
