Help me spend less on food?

Owleyes00

Hello!
I live just my partner and me (no kids) and at the moment we spend around £65/week on food. Sometimes it is almost £80! I don’t know if this is normal or not at all but it seems like an awful lot to me. We shop at Aldi and do a top up at Sainsbury’s for the odd bits you can’t get and I like to cook everything from as much scratch as possible but I really don’t think we eat that much! I would really like to get the food shop spend down to £50/week or lower. 

How much do you spend on your weekly shop and how do you get the number down???

joedenise

First off I'd say don't try to cut down that much in one go or you will end up beating yourself up for not doing it!  Perhaps cut down by £5 for the rest shop, stick with that for a couple of weeks and then cut another £5 off.

Check out the Grocery Challenge and perhaps join in.  There are loads of economical recipes on there which you could try.  What sort of things do you eat then means you're spending so much?  There are only 2 of us and I'd say we average about £50 a week (I allow £250 per month) but also budget a Bulk Fund which I use to buy meat at the butchers, trays of tinned tomatoes and beans etc.  I budget a minimum of £20 a month but sometimes manage to be able to put more in; I also add anything left from the previous month's Grocery Budget.  This month it was about £18 I think so much but it all helps.  I also spent about £65 on an online meat order so took my Bulk Fund down to a much lower figure.  Fortunately I'd already topped up my tinned stores at the end of last month!

Good luck with reducing your budget.

MovingForwards

Without knowing what you are buying, no one can point out any areas to cut back.
If you've got any receipts check what you are buying, is it booze and treats contributing to your costs?
Do you buy a lot of the middle row special items?
Are you buying the more expensive option if there's two types of the same thing?
How much are you throwing away?

I budget £25 a week for two + cat, all of us are meat eaters.

theoretica

Agree on throwing stuff away. 

Be aware of the price range in each category you buy - carrots are cheaper than asparagus, chicken thighs than beef steak... and try to find your ordinary buying at the cheaper end and more expensive for treats.

It is worth looking through a couple of months of receipts and categorising your food spending (eg meat, fruit, veg, drink, dessert, stodge, cereal, snacks...) - the ones that take the biggest chunk of your spending are probably where there will be most reward for closely examining what you are buying.

[Deleted User]

From watching 'Eat Well for Less' on TV, I'd say that most of those who spend a lot on food are completely blind to where the money is going, so asking questions like 'are you wasting a lot', and 'are you buying premium products' isn't going to get to the bottom of it. You need to go through you groceries item by item and ask yourself if there are cheaper options, and keep a record of how much you throw away. I can eat a healthy diet for about £1.06 per 1000kcals, and waste less than £4 a year.

Pollycat

Menu planning cuts down on waste and can save you money.

For example, you can buy a family pack of peppers and mushrooms and use them in any number of recipes.

As MovingForwards says, without knowing what you are buying, nobody can give you advice on cutting back.

We don't know if your figures include cleaning/laundry products and/or alcohol.

But...would you use a full pack of mince for a meal for 2?

I buy multiple packs of mince and spend a little time repackaging for the freezer in amounts that I know will be an adequate meal.

I buy multiple packs of chicken thighs or breasts and match them (some packs have 3 in which are no good for a family of 2) and freeze them. Or dice them for goulash etc.

I buy large joints of beef (often 3 at a time) when they are half price and cut them up myself. I do slices for braising and dice some, grading them for various dishes and putting the more scrappy bits for pie fillings to be cooked in the slow cooker.

I am very organised with my freezer, keeping a list of what goes in, when and weight. And am anal about keeping it up-to-date.

Do you batch cook?

Do you buy stuff when it's on offer?

I don't pay full price for anything. But I do have a 'corner shop' in my garage that has shelves full of tuna, corned beef, tinned tomatoes, various beans/pulses that I bought on offer.

p00

I spend an average of up to £25 for myself and 2 dogs. I have a large stock in my freezers and store cupboards. I rarely have a take away, maybe twice a year. I dont think my spend is excessive for one person. Occasionally I can go 3 or 4 weeks not shopping at all. If you like steak you will spend more than someone who doesn't, so its difficult to compare to someone else.   Add on some beer or wine etc and it jumps significantly. Its analysing what you actually buy that helps you decide if you are 'overspending'.  I find its actually the extras like eating out or having a delivery, or even having a coffee on the way to work daily that uses your money without noticing.
Look at the food you already  have in then look at what you are buying. I'm terrible for having 5 of the same thing.
p00 x

goldfinches

There's also making an inventory of everything edible you have in the house at the moment and then meal planning to use that without buying anything else. You could go meat free one or two days a week if you are currently eating meat every day or try to eat more seasonally which tends to be cheaper too.
Grocery Challenge is very helpful and so are various other threads on the Old Style Board so have a look around and see what appeals to you and come back if you've got any questions.

PipneyJane

Owleyes00 said:

Hello!
I live just my partner and me (no kids) and at the moment we spend around £65/week on food. Sometimes it is almost £80! I don’t know if this is normal or not at all but it seems like an awful lot to me. We shop at Aldi and do a top up at Sainsbury’s for the odd bits you can’t get and I like to cook everything from as much scratch as possible but I really don’t think we eat that much! I would really like to get the food shop spend down to £50/week or lower. 

How much do you spend on your weekly shop and how do you get the number down???

£65/week isn't terrible but if you really want to lower your weekly spend, then you'll need to do some analysis and provide us with more details.  What do you buy and how frequently do you shop?  What else is included:  alcohol, treats, toiletries and cleaning products?  What do you eat?  How much food is chucked away?  Do you have a freezer?

There's just me and my DH. Our monthly "housekeeping budget" is £250, which we split as follows:-

£140 - General Groceries.  (All supermarket spending, which I track in the monthly Grocery Challenge Thread.)
£ 40 - Meat Fund.  (Spent irregularly at the butcher's.  I've been twice so far in 2021.  Probably won't visit again until May.)
£ 40 - Bulk Fund. (Used for bulk buys, e.g. 10kg basmati rice or flour, and alcohol purchases.)
£ 10 - Garden Fund.  (For seeds, bulbs, equipment, etc)
£ 20 - Christmas Fund (For the goose, Christmas tree, etc.  Also spent on Easter Eggs.)

We eat really well.  I cook everything from scratch, bulk buy when there's a good price for something and use/abuse my freezer.  Here's a link to a post I wrote on last month's Grocery Challenge that talks a little about how far I stretch meat meals.  I'm not a huge fan of meat and two veg, preferring to eat one-pot meals with the veggies cooked in together.  My cooking ranges from Indian through South-East Asian to Italian, North African and Mexican. My DH would happily eat double or triple portions, so while I'll normally cook 4 portion meals, I always dish up lunch-boxes at the same time as dishing up our meal.   I try to focus on getting our 5 portions of veg a day, plenty of fibre and lots of flavour.  I'll pad out minced beef based meals with lentils, grated carrot or courgette.  Stews always have pulses added.

HTH.  Please join us on the monthly Grocery Challenge.  There's some really useful links in the first few posts of the Challenge. 

- Pip

YORKSHIRELASS

Agree with what everyone has said on here.  My preference is to mealplan and only buy what I need, but everyone has a different method.  If you have got any supermarket receipts go through them at look at where you have spent more, for years I didnt really look at what food cost and had to learn the prices of things.  

For us our food shop with all cleaning and pet food works out at roughly £25 per adult per week, and I could probably do it for less than that if I really tried.  I agree that trying to reduce it in small steps is a good idea, and definitely check out the grocery challenge.

maman

Unless you really need to save some money then £65 isn't too bad at all. On the weeks when you spend £80 then I think you need to analyse where the £15 has gone. If you were buying large packs of meat to portion up for the freezer or ingredients for batch cooking then that's fine, as you'll save in the longer term, but if you're buying unnecessary items in the middle aisle  (and you can't afford it) it's not. 

Like you, I shop in Aldi with a very few things from Sainsburys like certain herbs and spices. I also do some shopping in other stores where I stock up on favourite/good value/offers/YS items perhaps once a month or six weeks. These include places like Home Bargains, Farmfoods, Lidl and occasional visits to other SMs.  There used to be an old lady posting on the OS boards that kept a separate purse for those sort of buys. I've even read about people who 'buy' from their own store cupboards to give themselves an accurate weekly or monthly  figure. Personally, I don't need that sort of detail . I'm just happy that I'm getting good value for money and not wasting it in shops that seem to charge more just because they can.