Realistically can I feed 5 for £150pw?

[PinkPinkPinkBlue]

Switching to Lidl/Aldi tomorrow (they are on same retail park) and would like to spend a maximum of £150 per week is this possible? Currently spending nearly double that at a major supermarket I no longer want to dip into savings each month to feed us. No alcohol but will need to include toiletries and cleaning supplies, any items I should give a miss and anything worth buying? We are a non fussy household but no fish/shellfish due to an allergy, I am happy to go into to both shops as they share a car park.

I read it as they gave a 500g pot each for the week with the diary free child having Alpro or equivalent.

Our Aldi bill is about £100 per week for 4. I cook a lot from scratch, don’t mind frozen veg and don’t eat a huge amount of meat.

Absolutely you can. I mainly shop (online) at a major supermarket and average £120 a week for 4 of us. I will also use Lidl for things like detergent, cereal, coffee, loo roll.

If you don't already, meal plan.

I'm wondering what on earth you were buying to be spending £300 a week. Was it waitrose by any chance?

A lady I work with gets an online delivery from Tesco once a month for 2 adults and 3 older teens and spends £400 or near enough every month, she plans her meals every month so she knows what to buy and then she buys milk as and when needed as well as fruit, she buys veg monthly and freezes it!
Me on the other hand, I don’t plan meals because I’m so fussy and will pick what I want to eat that day in the morning, and I spend at least £80/100 weekly in Aldi/Lidls and around £50/70 a month on meat for the butcher!!

It's literally what you'd have for breakfast... yoghurt, berries or any other fruit some oats and water or apple juice or coconut water.....
Sometimes I use tinned fruit in juice (not syrup!!) or add fresh ginger for a kick!

I don't think you could get the bill down to £150 at Waitrose but you could definitely feed 4-5 for £200 a week at Waitrose eat less exotic fruit their essentials range is good, I rate their own baked beans much higher than heinz or branston

i have lots of protein snacks ready as well which fills up.

I’ll boil eggs in bulk as they last in the fridge for 5 days.
Baby bels
can you have oats? Oats and yoghurt with fruit is filling. I also make oats with water for porridge.

Wraps is also a big one here as
can stuff them with salad and some chicken. I buy the Aldi chicken for £11 that’s 1kg of chicken breast. (Actually I think it’s 2kg?!)

Slow cooked casseroles etc can be cheap and filling but that will depend on sauces with the allergies etc.

I also have individual sized freezer/microwave pots so any leftovers get portioned up and frozen so if someone needs something for lunch etc there is usually something they can heat up. I also have thermos flasks so can be heated and taken to work for lunch too.

I think though you’ve highlighted why we have an obesity problem in this country - the cheap food is highly processed.

But yes, Aldi will be naturally cheaper. If you have a farm foods near you that’s always good too.

I shop for 4-6 adults at Waitrose and spend between 130-180 per week depending on whether the uni students are home - no alcohol as I go to Majestic and DH doesn't really drink any more. £300pw is nuts but that is a LOT of expensive fruit. We have a lot of fresh berries in the summer but stick to apples/oranges/grapes and pears in the winter. I do meal plan and we don't eat much red meat really...I'm sure you can do it for less, even at Waitrose!!

Have you got a market nearby. Fruit from the market is a lot cheaper than from the supermarket and often much fresher
It will be all the fruit that is bumping up the bill and expensive fruit too.

Big surprise

Spending fortunes on imported fruit and veg and now I'm wondering where it's all going

Why not go and have a browse in Aldi and compare prices, see what they’ve got etc and you’ll get an idea?
I don’t have any issues with the fruit and veg lasting

Sign up for To Good To Go and look to pick up cheap items going out of date

https://www.toogoodtogo.com

I feed 3 adults for £50-60 a week. Aldi shop. We have 2 allotments and a home kitchen garden.

that's a lot of corn. I didn't see any cabbage, cauliflower broccoli or other vegetables. Do you all have a sweet tooth necessitating a lot of sugar?
Maybe for health reasons it would be good to rethink your diet?

Note what you've already got then plan a menu & write a shopping list for those missing ingredients. I've saved a significant amount of money doing it this way & reduced food waste.

@PinkPinkPinkBlue Alpro do a large tub of dairy free Greek style yogurt.

apologies, just saw the coleslaw and broccoli

@PinkPinkPinkBlue If you really want to reduce your food bill you need to focus more on fruit and veg that don't have high foodmiles. Your list of tropical fruits is astonishing. If you only have apples and peaches or seasonal berries your dc may eat less fruit (which is actually full of sugar). So what might they fill up on instead? Home made hummus and veg (and chopping up a cucumber is much cheaper than buying mini cucumber); or pates made with mushrooms, cream cheese and herbs; or dips made with ffgreek yogurt blitzed with red pepper. Anything with egg. Soups. Lentil, tomato and bacon; chickpea, chilli and corriander (Delia recipe); cauliflower cheese or broccoli and blue cheese.

It looks like you eat a lot of meat portions: pork chops, portioned chicken thighs, burgers, sausages in brioche bun. If you do want to reduce your food bill you need to find ways to bulk meat out with vegetables and pulses. Sausage casserole; pork and bean stew. Slow cook cheaper cuts of meat. Don't buy ready seasoned meat portions (tikka chicken thighs / lemongrass and ginger mini fillets) make them from scratch. Iread somewhereonce about using meat as a condiment - bascially pulses and vegetable are the core, then some crumbled bacon, or spiced fried lamb mince of top.

Why buy individual pots of yoghurt? Buy a big one. You can easily portion it up at home if your family find it difficult to assess portion sizes.

If you don't want to make these kind of changes, then yes you have to accept that your bill is £300 per week and increasing.

Involve your dc in the whole process. You will be setting them up for a much better future (in terms of food budgeting), maybe even let them input their ideas and cheaper swaps in exchange for a % of the money saved. Make it a positive family project rather than Mum's money saving meanness.

I manage on £150 ish for 3 adults and 1 very hungry teen. With a bit of meal planning I think it should be ok

Get your DC to use their computer skills to create a spreadsheet of recipes and their ingredients from your cook books. Estimate the cost of each meal so that you can track that. Get the DC to score your meals. Use the SS to identify the cheapest favourite recipes each week and drive your shopping list from that.

I operate a super-duper version of this with over 1500 recipes and about 1000 ingredients. If I get a cheap Brocolli , say, or need to use up the last bit of Miso Paste left in the fridge then I can turn to my SS and quickly filter on the ingredient to find recipes that use it, their cost, how good they are, how long they take to cook and when we last had it.

Just seen how much fruit your get. Use frozen and tinned fruit it will reduce your bill by a lot. Frozen fruit doesn’t go to waste, tinned fruit is still good if you drain it.
I take frozen fruit out the freezer every night and just buy fresh apples, pears, bananas, kiwis, the odd pot of fresh berries.

Sainsburys always have frozen fruit and vegetables on buy 2 get 1 free. I stock up using that offer all the time

I also find the Tesco magazine 'cook once, eat twice' suggestions can be helpful. They give ideas of how to reduce food waste, and make it easier to reduce the time you spend in the kitchen if that is not your happy place.

I know your dc found frozen berries 'mushy'. Why not 'pick your own' or bulk buy when they are in season, and blitz them into coulis and freeze. I think that's much more palatable then mushy frozen berries.

Have one evening a week when it is deliberately 'left over night' even if that means everyone is eating different things. Or 'cheap-eats' night when you plan to have beans on toast or baked potatoes.

I think you’ve highlighted why we have an obesity problem in this country - the cheap food is highly processed

I’m not sure that’s true. Lots of fresh fruit is expensive, yes. But we spend £70-80 a week for two adults and two small children, and I think the reason it’s so cheap is because DH and I both have allergies (DH’s more severe as he needs an EpiPen) that mean we cannot buy ready made stuff. Everything is made from scratch out of necessity.
That’s not the only reason it’s cheap, I meal plan and shop carefully, but it’s definitely not making it more expensive for us to have to buy ingredients rather than processed things.

A pp mentioned upthread about buying chicken breasts and seasoning them yourself instead of ready-seasoned. Er... nope. Chicken breasts are about the most expensive way of buying chicken there is. Go for legs instead, you can divide them into thighs and drumsticks, and they are considerably cheaper. Or arm yourself with a large knife and some poultry shears, and buy a whole chicken to cut into portions.

Sausages. Easy to make them go further, you just chop them into pieces, and use in a traybake with a load of onions and peppers etc. Nobody will notice that they are getting less sausage than if you leave them whole.

Look out for 'wonky' fruit and veg. I bought a punnet of wonky blueberries the other day as DH likes them. They were half the price of normal ones, and the only difference was that they were a mix of big and small instead of all being a uniform medium size. Wonky carrots taste just like carrots. They are all just weird (and sometimes amusing) shapes.

@PinkPinkPinkBlue It's a pity you said no fish as Aldi frozen fish is brilliant, and both they & Lidl sell fresh salmon much cheaper than anywhere else.

Aldi washing-up liquid is better than the Lidl one for some odd reason.