is it realy cheaper NOT to buy from supermarkets?

carriebradshaw

not for me I live in a small village with a couple of shops and one butcher. All are so hideously expensive that we use use the supermarket 70 miles away and yes that's the nearest and it's still worth it once a fortnight or a month if I can stretch things and we fill up with petrol there too

Solly

There's HUGEsavings to be made on foodbills, this is such a passion of mine - here we go

It's definately cheaper to avoid supermarkets for anything unprocessed, I've found. grocer's shops are variable as far as price goes, so you have to check a few out.

Myself and my partner spend £30 a week on food. We buy our fruit and veg from a market because at ours, we get much better value AND quality. Then we buy processed things like tinned food and biscuits and cereal from morrisons.

Now, we are farmers so we produce all our own meat, but we worked out last night if we bought 2 pigs from us (as our own customers IYKWIM), half a cow and 2 lambs and filled a couple of (very energy efficient) freezers it'd cost £740. That's 140kgs of meat which we think would see us through, even though we eat a lot of meat so an avg. of £5.20/kg and this is top-of-the-range eco-friendly, rare breed, locally produced meat bear in mind...

add that to our £30 a week and the yearly total is still only (£1560 + £740) £2300 so even if we bought our meat at top whack, by buying in bulk like that our weekly foodbill is £44!

Next year we will grow all our own veg and the vast majority of our fruit. So next year we won't be spending between £6-£10 a week on F&V. We also make use of the hedgerow fruits (rowanberries, hawthorn berries, brambles, damsons, sloes and rosehips) to make jam, chutney, ketchup, sauces, jellies etc to see us through the year, so we can chop that off our foodbill too.

I just discovered the local cash and carry - a sack of rice for £15, hundreds of teabags for a tenner, a sack of sugar for £13.99 and a sack of strong flour for a tenner. Bake our own bread, cakes, pizza dough and biscuits so we won't pay for all that processing. It's the processing and packaging you're paying for, not the ingredients. Toilet rolls in bulk for a fiver etc etc etc. We can even buy big blocks of cheese, chop them up, wrap in greaseproof paper and freeze.

So, I think we can reduce our weekly foodbill to virtually NIL!!! :rotfl:Of course it also does your health/weight wonders to eat healthy meat and less processed food...