June 2026 Grocery Challenge

PipneyJane

@JingsMyBucket hope you’re feeling better today. Gut problems are not to be belittled. They can be most painful and unpleasant.

@TravelCrystal thanks for confirming the price of the Marigolds at £2.93 in A$da.

@Sallyp2 Ignore best before dates on tins - they’re a con. Unless a tin has blown, the food inside will be edible for decades. (This is what a blown tin looks like.)

I have two shops to declare £40.51 in L!dl yesterday and another £3.96 spent there today, picking up the 4L of lactose-free milk that they didn’t have yesterday.

Yesterday we used a Spend-£40-Get-£5-off voucher. We also had one for a free pack of nuts, which I totally screwed up by picking up “salad seeds” for 99p, as well as a packet of roasted hazelnuts for £4.49. I should not have bought the seeds, because guess which packet was free? The seeds, not the hazelnuts. (I’d chosen the hazelnuts because they were the most expensive nuts in the shop. D’oh!)

The rest of the shop was made up of the following: tinned pink salmon 4x£1.55, Gold instant coffee 2x£2.65, chocolate Oaties 3x£1.19, peppered mackerel 2x£2.99, smoked salmon £2.99, Feta 2x£1.69, tinned sweetcorn 4x55p, 1kg muesli £1.99, red pesto 2x89p, mayonnaise 2.89p, wholewheat fusillli 2x75p, penne 3x41p, 900g peas £1.15, garlic 87p, bran flakes 85p, and 170g baking powder 65p.

ETA: This brings our GC spend to £53.67/£195.30 leaving £141.63 for the rest of the month.

• Pip

Blackcats

I've tweaked our budget for June as we are away on holiday for a few days later this month. We are staying in a self catering cottage but will also have some meals out. The cottage is in a beautiful place and the view from the dining table is a stunning seascape with glorious sunsets so eating at home is a real treat.

the cupboards, fridge and freezer are well stocked and I would very much like to eat from our home stocks as much as possible and to have less food and more money left at the end of June.

We have done 1 Lidl shop - I used points to get £3 off my shop and got a huge punnet of blueberries as a freebie. We also bought some delicious sausages from our local butchers that we enjoyed as part of our bbq last night.

Spends to date £89.00

Balance £236/£325

Greying_Pilgrim

Goodness, I am green with envy at all you lovely MSE'rs getting money off coupons and free things from Leedl. All I got was an 'off the shelf', computer/AI generated load of nonsense as a response to my observations to them, that the 'personalised for you' offers were wide of the mark, because I don't buy anything that Lidl had 'especially selected' to give me a discount on 🙄

It was such a patronising response. Leedl must be super secure in their knowledge that their customers will remain loyal, no matter how much prices rise, or whether their competitors are in close proximity or not.

Greying X

Sallyp2

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82025468#Comment_82025468

Don't shop there for a week, see what happens afterwards

thriftwizard

Trying to scramble back on the wagon here, having been totally lackadaisical budget-wise for the last month or two whilst trying to subdue a somewhat overgrown extra allotment plot! For my first weekend shop in June, which is a five-week month for us, my total came to £93.46 between the butcher, the fishmonger, the market & the supermarket. To which I must add £88.62 spent at L!dls; both contain an element of re-stocking after a few chaotic (but delightful) weeks with assorted family visits. The next couple of months look a bit quieter (famous last words?!) but then DS3 returns again for an unknown length of time, academic budgets being even more uncertain than before, meaning he won't know whether he has a contract, and if so, what sort of contract, until the end of September, poor lad.

I do need to defrost the freezer again shortly so we'll be eating a fair bit from that this month. Then hopefully I can start stashing this year's crops - if any, after our extraordinary weather this spring! - and bargains to help tide us through this winter. The first courgettes are forming right now and my runner beans are flowering…

cowboymum

Weekend spending (included quite a lot of luxuries like wine and a paper). Haven't made a meal plan for the start of the month so am grabbing things almost daily which is the worst way to do grocery shops..Ho hum - got a meal plan now for the next few days so I'm hoping the spends will reduce.

Tesco £10.93

Sainsburys £12.80

Sainsburys £7.89

Total £209.41 / £500

Greying_Pilgrim

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82025497#Comment_82025497

I did that - inadvertently - in HT and that's resulted in the 'stuff I don't buy' being offered. Also seems to be ineffective with n*ctar - it's as though the computer isn't programmed to look at what you buy anyway, so it doesn't notice that you've not shopped either.

Greying X

ancientmum

I hope you are feeling better now Jings.

I've been out of the loop for April and May having a lovely time on holiday and seeing family, then coming back to wrestle the allotment into some sort of order before the "inspection". It looked ok before the wind and rain this week but I'll go tomorrow with the kitchen compost to check.

Back to groceries, I've updated my siggy, and spent some time over the weekend revising budgets generally. I usually spread the spend over Sains, Lidly and Aldy, depending on what they have on offer and what I like. I'm current saving up Mr. L points for money off a big shop but I agree with others on here that they've made it more complicated and I can't be bothered to spend time trawling through the offers just to get a free cake.

Not added to the total yet but spent £4 in the market yesterday as it was closing on a big bag of bananas, bag of little easy peelers and some lion's mane mushrooms. I've not tried these mushrooms before but had some last night with bacon and a jacket potato - very nice. The stall holder called it "brain food" so I'm hoping it works!

LotsOfTea

Re: supermarkets and their offers, it's worth remembering that the only thing they're trying to do is get us to spend more money. The offers are not there to help us save money, they're there to tempt us to buy more stuff which is why they're often on things we've bought rarely and they want us to buy more of, rather than things we're going to buy anyway or rewards for spending a certain amount which is more than you usually would. It's a trick to increase their profits and we just need to accept that and just take up the parts of it that actually benefit us if and when they turn up.

We've spent a total of £35.36 over the last week across a number of shops - refilling cleaning products, getting nuts, bread, bulk buys of dried beans and couple of other bits.

We're now up to £99.55/£300 for the month.

diminua

A whopping £138.91 spent so far, largely on meeting up with people for pizza and drinks yesterday after the London Open Gardens event. Lovely gardens but not really the weather for it!

Otherwise all the usual things plus ice cream cones when we had the hot spell.