September 2026 Grocery Challenge

PipneyJane

@Greying_Pilgrim - I didn’t know that the C0-0p had franchises. Thanks for enlightening me.

I have several small spends to declare:

• £5.49 in Sainsbugs on peppers 2x£1.23, YS spring onions 71p, YS smoked BASA Fillets 2x£1.16.
• £19.17 in L!dl on Monday, spent on 2 sirloin steak £12.79, pan-fried potatoes £1.6, peppercorn sauce 2x59p, YS Maple Bacon Quiche £1.65, YS flatbreads 2x£1
• £0.86 in MrT’s yesterday, spent on 8 bananas.
• £2.37 in L!dl today for a tub of Oxy-Action powder at 15% off.
• £2.99 spent on 4kg of brown onions from a grocer in the high street.

This brings our total spend to £30.88/£180 leaving £149.12 for the rest of the month.

I really must do some meal planning.

• Pip

Greying_Pilgrim

@PipneyJane - I didn't either, but possibly (?) it had something to do with it being based at a petrol station? Would it be the same principle if you had an m&$ shop at the petrol station, or a Morries, or bUdg3ns? might they be a franchise too? I'm asking in general - not specifically of you - I don't know the answer. All i know is that the QR reader that you hold in front of the reader in The c0op, didn't automatically take the offers off in this 'blue' co0p, and that was the reason the guy gave. But neither did it stop me benefitting from the offers either. Presumably, if The c0op is a franchise at this petrol station, in time it could change? In a year or two, maybe it could become an a$da, or an m&$?

Greying X

thriftwizard

I'm a bit late to the party here, having been in Wales greeting our gorgeous new grandson & helping to look after his equally gorgeous - if exhausting! - big sister for a week. So will continue to aim for

£450

for 3 adults, all with special dietary needs, plus weekend & occasional weeknight guests, for September please. First spend today, coming in at £17.06, mostly on fresh fruit & veg which had run right down with OH in charge! (Only two days until I could have paid market, rather than W8rose, prices but my insides weren't happy about waiting.)

But there's plenty of good stuff to be had for just-about-free out there; the tomatoes are still coming thick & fast at the allotment & the runner beans are just (!) getting into their stride - at last! The courgettes look to be over now, and The Girls have stopped laying, so autumn's definitely not far away, but there are blackberries, elderberries & sloes a-plenty in the hedgerows, which might go some way to helping preserve some of our massive apple crop. I've been putting boxes of windfalls at the end of our drive & replenishing daily. I have lots of little grapes yet to deal with, but today I made blackberry & apple muffins and crab-apple & passionfruit jam; our passionfruit went bonkers, climbed up the holly tree & fruited heavily. It did look a bit bizarre; a glossy green holly tree festooned in big bright orange fruits! My allotment neighbour gave me a big bowl of crab apples, hence the jam; now I'm wondering what to do with the other litre of crab-apple extract, but the calamondin in the conservatory's covered in fruit & I'm wondering about crab-apple & calamondin marmalade, before the quince crop starts; I actually had to buy some marmalade this summer!

This evening we ate, in a traybake, the very last Turk's Turban squash from last year, along with allotment-grown beetroot, the last courgette, & bought-in shallots; my home-grown ones were tiny. The squash still tasted decent! A lot of people have told me that the blackberries aren't any good this year, and some have definitely "gone over" with the much-needed rain. But there are still lots where they're sheltered, underneath the leaves or bigger trees. And up at our local Iron Age fort, the blackthorns are blue with sloes. I'm going to have a busy few weeks!

Suffolk_lass

I love that you pick and forage as well as growing your own fruit @thriftwizard - I know I could do more with elderberries (plentiful) for the vitamin content - several autumn linctus products are based on it, but I'm not that keen. I've just committed to going to my Mum's in October as my Sis and her husband are away for three weeks so my preserving has come forward a fair bit. Here is the east, the apples are really struggling with cork spot (brown speckles under the skin) and we have a real codling moth issue here (maggoty apples) - what with that and plum moth I have actually bought some nematodes to try and control them.

I've got one harvested Turks Tuban I am looking forward to trying, and having composted the massive Guatemalan blue squash plant, I can see two more now we've had a little rain. A modest number of butternuts too. I love how HG winter squashes augment our food supplies in winter and keep the costs down a bit.

Suffolk_lass

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82121803#Comment_82121803

@Cressida100 I think the inventory is an excellent start. I do this periodically and bin a few things (swollen packets anyone?) and used to put the "must use first" bits on the counter top or windowsill so I couldn't ignore them.

I think my breakthroughs came when I began meal planning from what I havein (shopping from home), substituting with similar things rather than buying expensive ingredients and having a freezer/storecupboard week, once a month. Now I do one major SM shop, have my milk delivered (twice the price but still cheaper if I am out of the shops!) and my housekeeping (albeit since DS left home) dropped from over £800 to a £3000 annual budget. We are at just under £1850 for the year to date and eat well, and healthily. Good luck with your journey on here (it won't work immediately, if you are like me!)

LotsOfTea

Hi, I've been MIA over the summer due to just too much going on but I'd like to get back to normal now and join in for September again.

I'm aiming for £300 for the month for two adults and a teen. Thanks!

Greying_Pilgrim

Good Morning GC'rs

First shop (proper) of the month. I went to Leedle and sainsbugs today.

Boy, do supermercados play you……. 🤨

First stop Leedle. They are guilty of misrepresentation of offers. I knew that their butternut squash is always 'price per kilo' - so the app price of 49p seemed a reasonable offer. In the app it quite clearly states 'unit price', which to me, equates to 'each' - but armed with knowledge of SEL's I kept an open mind. Sure enough, the offer is 49p per kilo. Given that butternut squashes are self-contained, not packaged etc, I think it's fair to say that 'per unit' is misleading. However, I dug through the boxes (all the BNS's were HUGE) and got a couple that were suitable - weighed them both and selected the one that offered best VFM to me. Then I partook of the Riesling wine offer - which according to the app was £1 off a £7.99 bottle. Needless to say, the bottle was hard to locate in our store, and there was no price to check as there was no SEL's for the display box the wine was in. But I double checked on the app that I was getting the same bottle as pictured - I was. I wondered why there was a discrepancy when I went through the tills - it was 50p more than I'd totted it up to. Why? Because the wine went through as £8.49 - less £1. So 50p more than the app said. Naturally the offer goes off your app when you use it, so I've nothing to go back to the store with, to say 'oi, I've been overcharged'. But Leedles pettiness really, really grinds my gears. Who hasn't been overcharged or had YS'd things go thru full price? They seem to think because its such fandango to get a refund, no one will bother, and meanwhile their profits go ⬆️

Leedle are changing their 'gold' coffee jars to plastic ☹️ Presumably they will be recyclable?

I did get some YS'd strawberries in Leedle for 99p. In total (because i did buy a 7.5kg bag of tatties), I spent £30.50 in Leedle today - but I'm going to take the £7.49 for the Riesling off, as I bought that for Christmas (goes well with coconut based curries).

Then I went to Sainsbugs. I didn't have much on my list but still managed to spend £15.80. Annoyingly, I picked something from the n*ctar priced fridge - don't know why I bothered, the leak and 'spill' sign were barring the way - I should have just walked on. But the SEL said 300g bag of qu0rn pieces was npriced down to £1.75. As I picked it up, I did spy 'vegan' but thought nothing of it. I should have done, as the SEL was either put on the wrong product, or they had got mixed up, as the 280g bag of vegan qu0rn pieces went through at full price of £2.75…….. And you all know what MY n*ctar offers are going to be full of now, moving forward, don't you……. 🙄

I'm wondering if I should be let out on my own shopping, or whether I need a chaperone 🤔

£37.96 spent today on food. 85p on the TV mag.

Greying X

mandco

@Greying_Pilgrim I found sains are really crafty with offers lately either the offer doesn’t get applied like the 2 for 1 advertised cat treats I brought yesterday, the price charged on a offer is higher than the label - they had this with chocolates & treats the other week they were all going though at a higher price than the offer though lower than the original price so if you only glanced at it it indicated you were getting discount price even though it was more than it should have been or they’ll have the item but a different size put in the place where the offer is making you assume it’s the right one - very easy to just pick it up and not double check - I’m getting a bit sick of having to double check every item is priced as labelled.
Asda is another where I can’t remember the last time I did a shop without being overcharged on at least 1 item

brought some sausages in Aldi for sausage & mash last night but I really wasn’t a fan they had an odd frankfurtery taste? so the boys are having the rest as hotdogs later = 99p for finger rolls.

K9sandFelines

I'm not technically in September's challenge until the 13th; but I've just bulk bought some items - £10.40 each on two boxes of 5ply 27 roll bamboo toilet paper. I will put as this month's spend; but they will need to be opened as soon as they arrive, as I'm on my last one now. The last lot I ordered was on the 13th of June, and so they've lasted around 3 months. So when you spread the cost out over three months, that's phenomenal! 11p per day !

I had to cheat slightly ànd sign up with a new email, to get me a discount of £5 off as a 'new' customer. So, I know what I'll be doing in six months time, when they run out 😂. Free postage on the first order.

Then on a different site, I bought various protein powders, half price cat biscuits ( not accounted for in this challenge). Some other things (I will work these out or buy them from myself once they arrive), as I won't need to open them til possibly October. I'm going to use up the open protein powder first. Then move to the short dated ones, and use in date order from here on in. I think I'll be good well into 2027 with what I've bought. I just wish I'd remembered to go on that site before getting them from TokTik shop initially.

Any one wondering about the site, it's :

"I wonder what's next".

LotsOfTea

First spend of the week as DH got veg on his way back from another errand. £9.88 spent.

£9.88/£300