Are your food bills rising?

Hell yes - if I don't look much at prices a monthly online shop (tick most of 'my favourites') has gone from around £100 to £150 over the last 2 years. Local supermarket most prices now are over £1.

I can go to Lidl and save some money but they often don't stock stuff I need. The nearest fruit+veg market is actually more expensive than Sainsburys!

Yes. Because I'm in Italy. Can never believe how cheap supermarkets are in the UK.

Swapsies anyone?

Yeah. We eat a lot less meat now and make our own bread, pizza dough etc. We spent about £75 a week on groceries before (including toiletries and household stuff like washing powder) and now it would be over £100 if I hadn't altered our spending patterns.

we were terrible for buying daily but now find a weekly shop in iceland/farmfoods is much cheaper. We tried aldi's at the weekend and didn't get half as much as we would normally. I try to look for offers wherever I am shopping. It just seems such a significant price increase on essentials

I nipped into a Tesco express and picked up a bag of their cheap blue stripe teabags 27p for 80 teabags. I haven't tried them yet, but I'll be interested.

They say try stuff.

We do a monthly shop, and it's gradually crept up in price, despite the fact that we've dropped more and more 'luxury' items. We do about 2/3 via Tesco, the rest in Lidl.

I cook pretty much everything from scratch which is fine, but time consuming.

Our shopping was between £150-£170 a week at Asda for 7 of us but we still seemed to have to get odd bits and pieces from the local shops.It was a thread on here that got my shopping bill right down.I started doing a meal planner and started shopping once a month online with Asda and my bill went down to £400.I had quite a few problems at the end of last year with wrong orders turning up,things broken,wrong items so decided to ditch Asda.We now shop at Lidl and get our meat from the butchers in town and our fruit and vegetables from our local market and toilitries and some cleaning products from our local 99p shop.Our shopping bills now gone down to under £300 a month which is going to save us between £300-£380 on what our weekly asda shop was.So thankyou lady's and Gentleman of MN for all the great tips.Oh and Lidl 50p for a bag of bread flour we get 3 loaves out of that.x

Cheddar cheese seems to have rocketed in price £5 for a block seems ridiculous and that's for the cheapo stuff not vintage cheeseboard.

Yes. I used to spend £50 a week on tesco online delivery, including the delivery charge, this would include a bottle of wine. To keep my bill under £50 I have to go in person to Aldi first, then tesco, in person (very annoying as I work f/t) and forgo wine, and also look for reduced things.

and Pringles - used to be 78 pringles in a can, now 70. Bastards!

Oh and flour - last year a kilo of flour was 56p. I bought one yesterday 98p

So I bought two in case they are £2 next week!

Potatoes are really expensive.

All the packages have got smaller.

And products have been reformulated too - I know this sounds daft but there appear to be less beans in the baked bean cans these days and more juice. It's weird.

And I am probably very weird to notice it.

But supermarkets do have some very interesting pricing models which people don't seem to notice - the whole 'inflate the price, then cut the price'. Or the 'special offer which is actually more expensive than the regular price one'.

What's odd is smaller packets seem to be getting more expensive than big packets in lots of things, like breakfast cereal, I saw a chocowotsit doodah flakes (don't ask me, the kids like them - it has a spaceman on it) anyway - and the 'big value pack' gram for gram was 30p more than a small pack . How does that work then?

Of course the trick is to buy small and often because you are less likely to forget what you've bought and also you get stuff reduced.

Oh and ignore sell buy dates entirely. Not furry - good enough me for!

I think avoiding the supermarket helps, we try and buy direct off the farms near us, which helps as we know them now and if we can't pay they usually let us pay later.
And people tease about farmers markets but still i find them better value as i am not tempted to buy things i don't need because it looks like good value.

Although some things we do buy from the our local discount shop or supermarket like milk and nappies, i try to use real nappies but with 5 peoples laundry it's tough.

I use our child benefit to buy food, nappies, toiletries and cleaning things so that's £50 a week, no idea how i will manage in April when it will drop to £30 my husbands salary is only enough to cover the bills, and as he works away i will struggle to fit work around children until my youngest is at school.

Yes, I was going to say that I have noticed quite a few products being re-packaged/re-launched in smaller sizes

Oh, and talking of supermarket's sneaky tricks ...
I don't like the current trend of keeping the same price but giving you less for your money. It's a bit underhand.

Well I have the whole of 09-10 Tesco receipts batched in piles of 10 for data entry into my accounts

& they have gone up, a lot

We have cut out the spare things and the treats & we are still spending the same or more each week

Oooh cheers for that Honeydragon, know where I'm going tomorrow!

And yes. Hugely. We're going to have to stop eating at this rate

I also have noticed a difference and have changed the way i feed the kids. I only buy cuts for roasting now as i find they're cheaper and go further, i also stock up on the kids favourite foods when they're on offer, otherwise i can't afford them. I love cuts to roast as you can bulk them up with stuffing and veg so you don't need potatoes. Or i often make soup and a pudding, i think speaking to my Grandma i cook a lot more like she used to than my mother. My Grandma was raising a family at the end of rationing and my mum in the 80s. Also fruit; my kids see it as a treat and i cook with it rather than giving to them raw as you can get away with using bruised or older pieces and that way its cheaper. Also Suet and milk puddings help bulk up our meals. I think it saves money to cook everything from scratch, although milk is freaky expensive and we use about 16 pints a week.

Yes, over the last 2 years, I've gone from spending £40 a week to £60. We're creatures of habit so I haven't substituted cod for caviar or the like :)

The most increase in the last 3 months has been the cost of flour (breadmaking flour)

It's gone from 65p to £1.29

Definitely, did a shop that I expected to be about £60 it cost over £80. I don't understand how or why. I shop at Sainsburys but I'm not sure I can afford to anymore.

It used to be that you could pad a meal out with carbohydrate, and make it go further that way. But the price of carbohydrate - bread, pasta, noodles, etc - has rocketed. Prices are double what they were a few years ago. It's not surprising that low-carb / carb-free diets are so popular at the moment.

I haven't changed my shopping habits much because I have always cooked from scratch, meal-planned and buy off a shopping list. I suppose the biggest change is switching to more meat-free meals.

AtYourCervix

Co Op £1.45 for 6 pack at the mo

've noticed some of the products from the cheapest ranges just disappearing!

balia - totally agree there.

I've certainly noticed a rise starting from last year as has MiL. I do most of my basic shopping and dry goods at Asda to utilise the 10% guarantee and then buy short date meat etc through the week to freeze.

I also gave up drinking altogether to economise.

I think I shop quite cannily (meal planning, online, offers, using leftovers/freezer meals etc) I have happily kept to a budget of about £100 - £120 for 3 adults, 1 teenager, 1 under 5 and 3 cats (including toiletries, makeup, cleaning products) for about two years but am finding it really hard now, and that's despite youngest now being completely dry day and night (so no nappies, pull-ups or bed mat type things).

I have already cut down on wine - which I suppose is a good thing - but am finding it hard to make decisions between healthier vs cheaper options (low fat/low additives/organic) and as a previous poster said, the welfare of chicken has not been my highest priority. I do still make a real effort to buy Fairtrade when that is an option and would put that above organic. I also make huge use of a slow cooker so I can get cheaper cuts of meat. I've noticed some of the products from the cheapest ranges just disappearing!

Cadbury's Creme Eggs are an average of 55p each

and the average chocolate bar 60 - 65p each.

outrageous.

I don't do shopping sohave no idea about real food but have noticed this.