Help me reduce my grocery bill please?

[Evianna83]

I've tried to reduce our grocery spending but struggled. We very rarely eat processed foods so I think that increases the overall spend. We live in London and use online grocery delivery services so I think that rules out Aldi / Lidl. (We've no car and no Aldi/Lidl close by and we are time poor so need delivery).

I've tried shopping around most of the online supermarkets taking advantage of various newbie offers. I have actually given up with ASDA as I have ordered from them 4 times and each time the order has been late (after the slot sometimes by hours) with no communication and once was cancelled at the last minute. I wanted to persist as they seemed the cheapest but the massive inconvenience makes it not worth it.

We are two adults and a two year old. I'm including nappies and all household stuff like cleaning products in the shop, but struggling to get it down each month below about £95 a week! I meal plan every dinner and I eat an apple for lunch (DH at work & toddler at nursery).

Does anyone else have any tips? Especially if you do tend to eat healthier foods?

If you use Tesco you can type aldi price match in their search bar and it’ll bring up all the cheaper items, I buy most of my weekly shop that way. Saves loads.

@Evianna83 you haven't given enough information IMHO - if you are time poor does this mean you have time to cook everything from scratch? The tone of your post is that you can't change anything.

Why look at just your grocery bill? You have to look at everything - maybe make compromises, changes, cuts to other parts of your life to enable you to spend more or more easily afford your groceries.

Go to your bank and look at the fixed outgoings - DD's etc - is there anything you can get rid of or reduce? I've reduce my monthly phone from £7 to £6, reduced the phone call services for my internet/phone line from £42 to £37.50. My gas/electric was £177 but I take readings every month - have them all in a spreadsheet going back years - I can see what I am using and I my actual monthly usage is now bouncing around between £124 and £154, I stopped using rinse on the dishwasher because better tablets made it unnecessary, I have looked carefully when buying my car, buildings and contents insurance - got rid of breakdown cover (gone with autoaid instead), got rid of legal aid, etc. I try hard not to use the oven and the heating (not on now) was turned down and we got used to it - wore more warm clothes. We shower less (runs off the boiler). Basically we really don't buy unnecessary things - we don't have any subscriptions to online services e.g. Sky, Netflix, Spotify, Disney, etc., I buy lots of fresh veg, fruit and cereals and pad out meals that have fish or meat in them - neither of us are keen meat eaters - I'd never buy chops, steaks, burgers, joints of meat - rarely eat sausages, bacon even less than that - we stick to porridge for breakfast - healthy and cheap - I make all of our bread in a breadmaker - slightly less than 2 loaves a week - make fresh sandwiches for both of us every day - salad, cheese, egg, tuna. Plus many other trivial things. We have a lot of things on regular order from Amazon - as much as I would prefer not to deal with them - toilet rolls, cleaning products, tea, coffee, dog biscuits, toothpaste, dishwasher tablets, washing powder, etc I could do what a lot of people have done - cut my landline - I probably will - I was self employed for 12 years and my landline is one of the numbers that was on my business info - I stopped in Nov so I probably don't need to keep it - it's in with my internet - it wouldn't save much - I still have to pay for line rental for internet - I might still do it though - in theory I could even hot spot my phones and get rid of internet at home but mobile reception is patchy in the house - we don't watch much live TV but do use iPlayer - streaming over the phone is clunky to we'd have to download the files and that would be slow.

If you want savings you have to believe you can find them and you have to be prepared to make decisions and to change what you do - you can't approach it in a half hearted way.

If you have Amazon Prime they are doing a £10 off next 3 shops at Amazon Fresh offer. I've been spending a fortune on Ocado so thought I'd give it a try and have been impressed both by food quality and price. We eat similarly to you and I've found my shopping bill has gone down from at least £120 on Ocado to around £75 on Amazon Fresh so a massive difference. It may be regional but a lot of the food is from Booths as well so really delicious and even the By Amazon range for fruit and veg I've been impressed by.

We have home-made lentil soup twice a week which is very cheap. We have it with broccoli and carrots one day and then spinach a few days later. You can bulk it up with mushrooms. You can also add tinned red kidney beans after it has been cooked.

Think about switching to frozen fruit.
Just as nutrtious but much cheaper. You can buy mixed soft fruit which is the cheapest or single fruits.
Add to a pan with a dash of sugar and heat through. keeps several days in fridge. Dollop on yoghurt or porridge.

I think actually if you are spending £95 on only cooking dinners (no breakfasts/lunches except for 2 year old), plus cleaning supplies/nappies, that is probably quite a lot. I cook from scratch, healthy foods, for 2 adults and 2 primary age dc, breakfast, lunch and dinner plus snacks for 7 days a week (except 1 dc who has school dinners), and I'd say we spend maybe £120 a week at Tesco.

Based on your sample meal plan, I think it's that you are buying expensive items. Salmon, mackerel, sweet potatoes, jackfruit are all relatively pricey compared to other things you might make.

We have lots of soups (carrot and ginger, creamy courgette, corn chowder, things like white bean, tomato and kale, etc.) with bread and butter. All very basic ingredients. I grow certain things like the kale as sometimes you just need 2 leaves and it's wasteful to buy the whole 200g at the shop. Chickpea and lentil curries/dal with rice and naan (or you can make your own chapatis for pennies). Whole roast chicken, which we can make into soup the next night. Pulled pork on rolls with coleslaw or salad. A shoulder joint costs like £6 and we could get probably 2 nights of dinner plus a lunch out of that. Spaghetti with whatever cheap in season veg or frozen peas or pesto. It's like 30p for 500g of spaghetti at Tesco.

And it sounds incredibly stupidly obvious, but I found that switching to own brand saved us a lot. I mean, of course it would, but I didn't really think that buying the own brand kitchen spray at £1.20 would make much difference compared to the one I really like which is £3, but over the course of a whole shop, it really adds up.

Based on your meal plan (similar to mine) I would suggest £60 a week- are you buying organic? Branded toiletries etc. it's worth looking into a monthly lidl/Aldi shop with taxi fare for the savings (luckily lidl is my nearest shop) I'm spending circa £85 currently a week for 4 adults! We eat a lot of curries especially dal and chickpeas

Food has gone up there's no getting away from it.

Being honest what's your food waste like?
What's your portion size like?

No mention of any drinks - any tea, coffee, soft drinks, alcohol.

Snacks?

Fish is expensive. Can you either reduce the quantity, make things like fishcakes or tuna pasta bake, smoked salmon and pasta, where the fish is combined with cheaper ingredients? Or as others have said try frozen or tinned.
Same with the chicken.

Salmon fillets are expensive. So are punnets of berries and tropical fruit. That's two areas where you could immediately save.

When you have chicken, what do you buy? Chicken breasts are far dearer per kilo than thighs, legs or even whole chicken.

Buy your fruit & veg loose if possible. For example a pack of 3 onions costs about 75p. Get 3 loose ones and weigh them yourself they will be about 40p. Your paying for the convenience of them being packaged. Also less plastic so win-win all round

I shop at sainsburys and I’ve drastically reduced meat consumption (we haven’t cut it out though!) due to prices and can now feed me, DH and 1 x DC & a cat for £65 a week including packed lunches, dinner, cat food and treats

Can you show us a receipt or anything?

What about frozen spinach and leftover veggies for the curry? The frozen spinach lasts ages!! Add potatoes or any other left over veggies.

are raisins expensive? I remember having to cut them out but can’t remember what I swapped them for!

Nappies are really expensive. I think I spend about $65 a month on nappies and wipes (from Amazon where they are cheaper).

But you are nearly at toilet training age!

I've found I get a lot for my money if I buy from Iceland - frozen veg, fruit, fish etc. They deliver too. I avoid getting cleaning products and branded tins from there though as it's often more expensive than other places.

I spend between £45 and £55 a week, which includes delivery fee, for myself and my DD. I'm time-poor (stressful job which involves a lot of evening work, and I'm a single mum), so unless I need something like nuts (only buy these from Lidl) or toiletries (Savers) I shop at Tesco.

I do a lot of cooking from scratch (augmented occasionally with the odd jar!). I only ever buy what's on offer, and supplement things if I can (for example, thighs instead of breast, salmon tails instead of salmon filet). I'm lucky that DD is only in nighttime pull-ups, so obviously have saved on that.

I freeze all my leftovers! And only buy loose fruit and veg. I also save the Clubcard points for my Christmas shop.

We are planning on potty training next month, so that will hopefully be one less expense!

I'm already reducing other expenses and costs on our general budget so this thread was specifically for groceries.

Yes I always try to hunt for the cheapest "per" option online eg blueberries cheapest per kg. Berries are the priciest option so I've reduced to one punnet of a type of berry per week.

Fennel was an example - it would be roasting a seasonal veg. Eg pumpkin, marrow, beetroot, courgette. Sometimes filled out with canned pluses if we are hungry.

Salmon is pricey so I'll look at other options as suggested. Mackerel is a very cheap unpopular fish which is why we eat it! (Healthy too).

I will check again on brands for household cleaning etc. We switched from Andrex to own brand loo roll already but possibly with cleaning sprays I could be more diligent.

definitely look at your cleaning products, i think sainsbury's own bathroom cleaner and glass cleaner is just as good, if not better, than the big brands.

I actually spend as much as you for food shopping and try to find a way to reduce the costs. I would see if it works when you exclude one dinner from your plan. I used to plan every dinner and found out that even if I didn't plan dinner every day I could get by. That reduced my weekly shopping bill.

We actually tried shopping at Asda but found it was more expensive than Sainsburys somehow. Some of the pack sizes are huge and Sainsburys was cheaper and more suitable to a smaller family

Morrisons was the most expensive!

But if you buy big packs of things, the cost per unit is often far less and the item will last longer so you spend less over time.

We buy meat, canned goods, laundry detergent, toilet roll, tea bags in bulk when on offer and save loads over time by doing that.

All you have to do is keep an eye out for an offer when something is running low and once you get into the swing of things, you just spread the cost over time, so one week buy the big laundry detergent, which will last for months, next week tea bags, then toilet paper etc etc.

My tip to spend less on groceries would be to buy for a store cupboard rather than what you need in the coming week, so you don't find yourself paying twice as much to buy a single can of tinned tomatoes each week as it would cost to buy a 4 pack every month (for example).

That's a good point actually @whoamI00 i usually shop Saturday or Sunday and plan meals through to Thursday or Friday but usually get by another day or two without going shopping by using up leftovers and store cupboard ingredients and things in the freezer.

Bertinet bread and blueberries are hugely expensive! Of course you can buy a lot cheaper ... you may not like the alternatives but you could clearly eat a lot cheaper. Personally I am happy to prioritise food over other items - I like to eat well, but Bertinet bread would be a real treat (for me - I wouldn't buy it for DC!)

Also agree with PPs - I would never plan seven evening meals a week, there's always leftovers, or have a sandwich or sometimes you just don't need or want a 'proper' evening meal.

For cleaning stuff I use ocean saver. £6 every 3 months.

I buy a large loaf of Bertinet reduced from my local Waitrose and freeze it and take out each day what we need. Frozen berries are so much cheaper, admittedly not quite as nice as fresh but still good for you, just need to remember to take them out of the freezer in time!