By now we all have been told to keep our distance from others—staying sex feet away as much as we can. Most of the time we can do this, but when it comes to leaving the house for essential reasons, such as restocking our home with groceries we cannot always keep our distance from others.

With a large amount of my family home currently during the pandemic, our home is needing to be replenished constantly with food. It feels like I am feeding an entire army, but I know I cannot avoid going to the grocery store completely during this time. So, it got me wondering how can I stay safe while grocery shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Here are 6 Grocery Shopping Tips for Your Family During COVID-19!

1. Try to Limit Your Time

Before heading to the store, you should prepare a shopping list of all the groceries you need to get. This will help minimize your time in the store and coming into contact with others. When going to the grocery store, I have always made sure to have my payment readily available in my pocket so I can quickly pay once I am ready to check out.

Another thing you might consider limiting your exposure to others is doing your shopping when the store is less busy. Most grocery stores now have their early open hours reserved for individuals with underlying health conditions too.

2. Keep Your Hands to Yourself

Limit your contact from touching items in the store. You should only touch things you are going to put in your cart.

Before I grab my shopping cart, I always use sanitizing wipes and clean the grocery cart handle. Most grocery stores will provide the sanitizing wipes for you but just in case you should carry some yourself.

Make sure you avoid touching your nose, eyes, or mouth when in a public area since you can easily touch a surface without thinking. You can always wear a face-covering too to help prevent from touching your face while out in public.

3. Wash Your Hands

After I am done grocery shopping and I load everything into the car, I always use hand sanitizer with 60% alcohol before getting into the car, I normally buy a 72 pack 8 oz antiseptic hand sanitizer gel so that I always have one wherever I go. When I am home, I then wash my hands with soap and water for 20 seconds as the CDC recommends. I even will go the extra mile to wash my hands after putting away the groceries.

4. Be Mindful of Packaging

If you are concerned that the virus might be on your food packaging, you can always wipe down nonporous containers like glass or cans with disinfectant wipes. You can always throw away unnecessary external packages too, such as cereal boxes. Put the food contents in other containers, such as your own plastic containers at home.

5. Wash Produce

Fruits and vegetables, you purchased at the grocery store should be washed immediately. You can take an extra step and wash their containers too, such as the ones berries might come in, before storing them.

You could always opt-out from the produce section of the grocery store and buy frozen vegetables and fruits.

6. Delivered and Picking Up Groceries

Many grocery stores and companies are stepping up their delivery and picking up services. There are some steps you should follow when ordering or picking up your groceries.

1. Arrange to have your groceries delivered to your doorstep or placed nearby.
2. Tip the delivery person through the app or the online ordering systems instead of in person.
3. If you are picking up the groceries yourself, open your car door yourself rather than the employee bringing your items. Try to tip on the supermarket’s app instead of in person too.