£250 per week on shopping. Is this nuts, or reasonable?

[Twobigsapphires]

The jury seems to be out amongst people I’ve spoken to (not many, basically my family). We are essentially now spending around £250 a week on the food shop (one main shop a week and one top up). Household consists of my and Dh, ds20, dd18 and ds16. Often ds1 gf will stay for dinner on a Sunday and one or two nights in the week. We have 2 dogs but Dh pays for their food separately.

shop covers park lunches for Dh and I plus ds1 and ds2. Dd I give an allowance too and she pays for lunch out of that. Also covers a couple of bottles a wine a week and household cleaning products and most essential toiletries (shower gel etc).

Dh thinks this is excessive, I think at £50 pp per week this is what it is. My dm said I should be aiming for £150 per week! Dsis says she spends around £150 per week on her food shop for her, Dh and two small dc (doesn’t include dinner money and her Dh buys lunch out each day).

what does the mums net verdict think?

@teenysaladandsniffofarose if you can get salmon trout instead of salmon, I recommend it. It's bit cheaper but imho nicer.

I suspect you are shopping at an expensive supermarket.

If you can afford it that’s fine

Yes, not an outrageous amount and if you can afford it, why not?

If you want to cut the cost you could bulk buy and eat more basic veg - to pad out meals and for making soup. Eat more vegetarian meals with beans / lentils, buy less meat. Make your own garlic bread, which works out cheaper if feeding a lot of people. And you should ask the others in the household to contribute to the extra Labour that would involve.

Yes we use lots of frozen veg, onions, pepper, mushroom, carrots
but use lots of aubergine, cucumber, avocado, courgette, pepper for lunch boxes. You can’t replace all veg with frozen.

We are a house of two. I spend about £60 a week on our food/essentials.

Absolutely. I had issues with frozen broccoli when fresh one was shit everywhere for months. I like mine crunchy. Frozen one makes great omelettes but that's about it for me. Loads of aubergine and courgettes here too. Even grew them one season.
Miso aubergine is glorious

We spend about £150 a week for five of us, BUT - we get a discount because DH works for Tesco, and one of our kids is a small eater. We'll also get a takeaway once a fortnight or so for about £50.

I can well imagine £250 being how much we spend in a year or so as 11YO DS gets bigger.

This time a year ago - pre-worker discount I might add - we were mostly spending about £100 a week (not including takeaways).

Pasta recipes can have a lot of vegetables - we do a lot of dishes like pasta with borlotti beans and greens which is both cheap and healthy

That sounds really good to me, especially with teenagers. We spend about £150-200 for a family me, DH and DS5.

Good god that seems a hell of a lot!! I might expect it around the £150 mark, but £250 seems excessive

Sounds like a normal cost for a big family who isn't on a super tight budget.

You're buying wine, fresh orange juice, avocados, chicken, pork etc.

Prices are high these days. If you dropped off the wine, just and avocados you'd save £30 a week, but if you don't need to, why would you?

Our essential shops (including 3 meals plus snacks, household cleaning, toiletries, general bits and bobs needed for home like foil, kitchen roll, etc) comes to about £35 per person per week. We spend much more than that but we can afford to. We make everything from scratch, no frozen pre-made food etc. It definitely costs more if we buy convenience food, so if you're buying that because it suits your family then the prices make sense!

honestly if you can afford it, you get everything you need and aren't going without, it's reasonable. If you're unable to buy everything you need, you can cut back in areas.

I'm picking up my Sainsbury's shop today, and it's £73.42. That's lower end for us, I generally spend between £70 and £90 depending on what we need. This week I didn't happen to have any household or toiletries that needed topping up.

Family of 2 Adults, 2 older teens (so effectively 4 adults). DC have school lunches. DH and I WfH and have leftovers for lunch if available or otherwise have something simple like soup or salad or a sandwich or something on toast.

Breakfasts are yoghurt and fruit or porridge or something on toast or cereal.

I buy household and toiletries in the shop too, but we use own brand, not really anything branded or fancy.

Wine is bought in bulk when its 25% off, so not in the general weekly shop, and animal food is bought separately. Toilet rolls are bought separately from Who Gives a Crap.

Meal plan for this week is:
Meal 1
Amatriciana Chicken Traybake
Meal 2
Lamb Chops, Smashed Butter Beans and Rosemary
Meal 3
Ricotta and Kale Gnudi with Arrabiata Sauce
Meal 4
Saag Paneer
Meal 5
Mushroom Yaki Udon
Meal 6
Loaded Nachos
Meal 7
Aubergine Parmigiana

I'll be honest though, I'm one of those super annoying people who is very organised and on top of stuff. I meal plan religiously and start by seeing what we have that needs using up, and base my meal plan around it. I hate food waste, and we have practically none. If I ever shop without planning, we spend loads more and end up with tons of waste. We're not actually short of money at all, it's waste and the feeling of disorganisation that I don't like.

As usual here on Mumsnet can't see that shopping will be a lot more once their young children grow up.

We've been hit with COL at the same time as our children are 14,16 and 19 so in the last year I've gone from spending around £500 to £650 a month on shopping. We eat 99% homemade. That doesn't include alcohol as my DH only buys it when he fancies some as he is the only drinker.

And as someone up thread said the cost of fresh fruit and veg is really high so we eat a more frozen veg.

Two adults and two teens here (18 & 16) no pets.
I spend 100 a week and that includes some beer and wine. I cook our meals from scratch and we use leftovers for lunches etc. DH works from home and I'm a carer for our disabled ds.

You could reduce your bill but it depends what you buy / eat.

I couldn't be cooking different meals for different people, does that not drive you mad OP?

The children are young adults coming and going at different times and getting their own meals at this time. I was pretty hard line about family meals but a bunch of young adults coming and going at odd times simply means it doesn't always work.

Plus young adults are bottomless pits - mine all ate more than we did until they were well past the teen phase. Posters comparing late teen/young adults with younger children have a shock in front of them.

Even with a house full of vegetarians and very minimal convenience foods my bill for 6 was more than the equivalent of 250ukp per week with kids at this age. I could have reduced it if needed by reducing the fresh food and the quality of the food but only to a limited extend before really reducing the quality of diet.

We prob spend that plus more for the dog food.

We are 2, nearly 3 adults and 2 teens plus a cat. We do buy a reasonable amount of wine/beer and we definitely could cut down if we needed to but we already buy what’s on offer and often own brands of things. It’s things like cheese that I find really expensive and we eat a lot of fruit too.

It really is a lot! I cook from scratch, use fresh veg etc. We eat well, never get takeaways, Why does eating well mean expensive? £50 per person per week is an average of £2.38 per meal. That is actually pretty high, considering breakfast and lunch is normally cheaper than the evening meal.
I'd say our evening meals average about £1-£1.50 per person and it's all good food. Obviously some meals may be dearer (Sunday roast, prawn dishes etc.)

@MrsPelligrinoPetrichor They eat me out of house and home already! Lots of snacks!!!

Yes, 20 year old pays £350 per month in rent. I usually put £250 of that towards the shopping bill. His gf eats here 3-4 nights a week, but then he’ll stay at hers / eat at hers the rest of the week so it evens out really.

When there are 4 of us here, 2 adults, 2 teens, we spend about £250 per week, that includes our friends and the kids friends eating here sometimes. Our son has just gone to uni and we're spending about £170 per week.

Sounds like ds is paying his way then. Technically then your shopping bill is around £187 a week if you deduct ds’ contribution.
Maybe remind your dh of that when he’s moaning about what he’s (you as a parents are) paying!

I ask my sons to add what they want/need to our shopping list including any meals they plan to cook for the week- their contribution has to cover that. It’s a good way of giving them a feel of budgeting and some independence too.