Monthly food shop

[Springrabbitheadingforeaster]

What items do you buy monthly/fortnightly rather than weekly?

I have been buying things like 9 pack toilet roll and small jar of coffee weekly but now changing to bigger packs which works out cheaper over the course of the month.

Please share any other items you buy fortnightly/monthly in large quantities.

Most things that are non perishable, that we reliably use and are often on offer. Canned goods, toiletries, cleaning products, pet food, tea bags. Also larger packs of meat that is portioned and frozen.

We don't do a 'regular weekly shop' at all because it's a really expensive way to shop. To me it seems madness to buy one tin of beans a week for Xp when you could buy a 4 pack every month for 2.5Xp. Multiply that by most of your shopping and you can easily save £20+ per week, which is over £1k pa. Once you get into the swing of it, it saves so much money, doesn't really take that much room up and doesn't take any more time even if you go to different shops or get it delivered from different places because you go to shop X on week 1, shop Y on week 2, next time you need a top up shop use shop Z etc etc.

Oh, I wish I was organised enough to do this consistently!

Wholefoods, dried beans, lentils, chickpeas, oats, etc I tend to buy in the largest quantities I feel I can consume.

I always try to have a couple of weeks of milk in the freezer.

Coffee beans on subscription. (I agree tiny jars must be a painfully expensive way of paying.)

I feel I ought to buy those 5 litre or bigger cartons of domestic cleaning products - but then the fiddling about to decant them puts me off.

Same with extra virgin olive oil - particularly now the price has rocketed.

I mostly live alone and have groceries delivered - so my main aim is to cover any periods of illness; I'm nowhere near prepper levels of forward planning. Not sure I'm saving much money, in truth - I probably eat more because its there!

You get through 9 toilet rolls a week…how many of you are there? I buy 24 packs and I think they last a few months at least.

There’s always one..

Anyway, we probably only buy fresh fruit and veg, bread, diary , the odd fish and a few deli things weekly.

Everything else is monthly, even ready meals I tend to buy in a batch and freeze. Meat, fish, frozen veg and berries and some bread and milk. Not that we do a massive monthly shop, but that these things get bought through the month. Cleaning stuff I tend to get delivered separately. It does help to get it all delivered.

Yeah, I didn't realise that people lived so close to the wire with toilet roll until the start of the pandemic.

We get a massive Costco pack and it lasts months and were lucky with timings that we got one in January/February so didn't have to think about toilet roll until about May/June and I think the worst of the craziness had died down by then.

In fact, shopping the way we do kept us mostly out of the shops during the days of queues and shortages because we just used up our stocks and got the essential fresh bits from whichever shop we were passing at a quieter time when the queues were shortest.

Why on earth would you buy 4 rolls nearly every week (obviously discounting people without a penny to spare and/or living in houses so tiny there is absolutely no room for an extra few toilet rolls of course) when you can get it at far less per roll buy buying bigger packs?

@theduchessofspork it was a genuine question…

Pasta and rice, I buy the massive bags.