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.

@PinkPinkPinkBlue A little tip for a household who eats lots of fresh fruit and veg - Lidl have boxes of stuff that only has a few days left on it, and you can't pick what you get in there, but it's only £1.50 per massive box (they come in those large cardboard banana boxes)! You get a lot of variation and with a bit of tweaking to your usual meals you'll find it easy to use up the whole box/more than one box.

This week:
Chickpea and spinach curry.
Quiche and chips & brocoli, sweetcorn & peas.
Meatballs & Rice (extra tomatoes, peppers in sauce).
Sauage & Mash, cabbage, carrots.
Pizza - bread flour, yeast from scratch, anchovy, pepperoni, peppers, mushroom, olives and mozzarella topping.
Toad in the hole (I know I had a sausage craving!).
Italian chicken tray bake.

Great meals and low prices

No judgement from me as your diet sounds good. The thing that stands out is that the type of fruit you're choosing is expensive (e.g berries). A big pack of carrots is a lot better value so I'd think about how you can keep the good amount of fruit and veg overall but try to pick the cheaper options.

I'd also do dishes where meat is combined and bulked out with other things, rather than having a separate, individual portion of meat each.

And have a couple of vegetarian meals each week.

There are some things in Waitrose that are decent value but fairly sure you can get fruit elsewhere much cheaper.

I only have previous experience of my own Aldi and Lidl so this is anecdotal but I would say you need to inspect the fruit and veg carefully as although the general quality of food is fine, the quality control isn't as good (i.e. Lidl onions might be comparable to onions from anywhere, but you're more likely to get one mouldy one in a pack).

@Allthings thank you, I’ve just found that on the website, is it new? Been buying the 4 packs for years and had thought to see if it now came in the bigger carton.

Things I’ve taken from this thread and found useful:-
• The large tube of soya Greek style yogurt
• Hard boiled eggs for snacks
• Cut up more carrots/red peppers/celery for snacking buy extra normal cucumber for kids to chop up as wanted, also bought some sugar snap peas.
• buy more Waitrose essentials brands trying the hummus this week the tub is double the size and much cheaper so only need 2 tubs instead of 4 was paying £2.70 a tub essentials range is £1.80.
• I ordered some ripen at home bananas for mid week onwards, only got nectarines and not peaches as well, halved the avocado amount, only ordered 1 type of melon, halved the berries (kept the grapes) and ordered a pack of essential apples and pears to try.
• Will be baking blueberry muffins and carrot muffins.

Meals this week are

Fri:- homemade chicken souvlaki kebabs, homemade flatbread, Greek salad.
Sat:- Homemade bolognese, meatballs and spaghetti
Sun:- Roast chicken, potatoes, carrots and parnsnips homemade Yorkshire and stuffing, spring greens and cauliflower.
Mon:- Home lasagna will make a double batch of meat sauce Saturday with green salad.
Tues:- chicken tikka, rice, naan and popadoms
Wed:- Toad in the hole, broccoli, savoy cabbage, green beans and new potatoes for those who want them.
Thurs:- Teriyaki seasoned chicken stir fry, cabbage, carrot ribbons, broccoli, bean shoots, pepper, baby corn and sugar snap peas with rice noodles.

Shopping came is at £247 Waitrose, so small changes made a saving without to many sacrifices.

A few suggestions:

Did you buy ‘plain’ chicken to marinate yourself? If not, that would honestly make a massive difference.

Are you having bolognese and meatballs? As, generally, people have one or the other.

For the stir fry, did you buy whole veg to cut up or a stir fry mix?

One thing about Lidl and Aldi fruit is it's not kept in chill cabinets (in my stores anyway) so I find it better for soft fruit you want to eat straight away - nicer and riper.

Agreed about the Bolognese! Meatballs and a meat sauce?!

Vegetarian option would likely bring down bill even further.

Good changes OP, and once you start you might find how much easier it becomes.

A couple of comments on your meal plan:

Fri:- homemade chicken souvlaki kebabs, homemade flatbread, Greek salad. on the kebabs alternate chicken with peppers, add ffgy tsatsiki
Sat:- Homemade bolognese, meatballs and spaghetti if you're making your own meatballs use less mince and add in some puy lentils and if you are really having meatballs with meat sauce, add lentils into that sauce for today and for Monday's lasagne
Sun:- Roast chicken, potatoes, carrots and parnsnips homemade Yorkshire and stuffing, spring greens and cauliflower.
Mon:- Home lasagna will make a double batch of meat sauce Saturday with green salad. maybe you'll have leftover stuffing that you can add to the meat mix
Tues:- chicken tikka, rice, naan and popadoms in the chicken tikka, include any leftover veg from Sunday - potatoes, cauliflower, carrots... IN fact deliberately hold some back just for this purpose. ??is it left over chicken from Sunday or is this more chicken pieces that you are buying??
Wed:- Toad in the hole, broccoli, savoy cabbage, green beans and new potatoes for those who want them.
Thurs:- Teriyaki seasoned chicken stir fry, cabbage, carrot ribbons, broccoli, bean shoots, pepper, baby corn and sugar snap peas with rice noodles.

Also you have meat every day, and quite expensive meat. You can slow cook less expensive cuts (especially with veg, tomatoes and stock). And maybe try one day per week without meat. Have you seen the cookbook 'Meat Free Mondays'? It offers seasonal recipies which are really delicious.

You can make a vat of hummus with 1 can of chickpeas, a tablespoon of tahini, lemon juice, olive oil and garlic. Chickpeas are about 45 pence a can.

Just whizz it all up in a blender. Keeps in the fridge.

If you eat a lot of hummus can you make your own as would be much cheaper than bought especially if you used dried chick peas.

On this list, you can easily have 2-3 veggie meals!
Eg for the Spaghetti & Lasagne sauce just make a basic tomato sauce with added vegetables (basically ratatouille style) and mushrooms and hallomi. You can also add kidney beans for your Lasagne for protein & fibre instead of the hallomi.

Then do similar with the curry. Instead of chicken add chickpeas or butter beans and some lentils. It's very filling.

I usually start off these types of meals with a base equal parts of minced onions, carrot and celery that's usually fried off with some oil and tomato puree. (You can add garlic if you wish) From there you can add any herbs and spice you want to make a sauce or make into a soup with whatever veg you want (broccoli, tomato, carrot,...) I use this Base instead of stock cubes so only add a bit of seasoning to my dishes.

baby corn and sugar snap peas

I'm not on a budget but I'd never buy those packets of tiny veg as they are £££.

My stir fry veg are carrots,onion, red pepper, broccoli, fresh ginger, mushrooms.

@ForZanyAquaViewer no not meat and meatballs with the spaghetti, making enough tomato sauce in one batch for both meals. Mince will be added to one batch for lasagna the other batch will be added to spaghetti for meatballs.

@venusandmars I have bought meat for each meal any leftover chicken etc will be eaten on salads for lunch. I’ll use left raw over veg for the stir fry as well as the bean shoots 60p and the mini corn I purchased. I got sugar snap peas for snacking so will keep a handful back.

There's somewhere near here where you can buy a live pig, they will rear it, look after it and eventually butcher it to your requirements, I've known families going to visit 'their' pig though how that plays with the children I don't know.

Ask chatgtp to do you a meal plan. Tell it you want to shop at Aldi. You are feeding 5 people and how much you want to spend.

If you have food preferences (such as no beef, or gluten etc) it'll work it out for you

I never do a shop without a chatgtp shopping list

We once grew corn, the back garden looked like Oklahoma and I found myself singing Oh what a beautiful morning, but it was easy to grow, need little attention and two or three plants produced loads, it freezes very well too,

Sugar snap peas from Waitrose are really expensive- over £2 for a small packet.
They are also usually from Kenya which means lots of air miles. Are they really 'snack' material?

Have you tried costing per head a main meal?

You should be able to do a main meal for £1.50 -ish a head if you use enough veg and have the basics in the cupboards, and mix up some pasta/veggie meals with less meat over the week.

Children are fine with it, it’s perfectly normal to look after a couple of animals and then eat them later. If you’re eating yourself the animal can avoid the slaughter house and be killed and butchered at home by a competent person ( and there are people who specialise in this).
Lots of people with large gardens or allotments fatten a couple of pigs

The stuffing - get extra and make these, they’re really nice!
added the recipe and also her Instagram as she has good food ideas which are usually budget ones too

The problem is that you are relying on meat for every meal, adding a lot of 'extras' (eg rice, naan and poppadoms) and providing 'grazing treats' over the day.

I know teens get hungry but they should be directed to the bread bin for toast or ff yoghurt if they want to snack, not exotic fruit.

If you could move away from the idea that you need meat at every meal you could save a fortune.

We often have stuffed mushrooms ( the huge ones) with Puy lentils and herbs. Grated cheese topping (leave it off for your dairy-free child.) Serve with a jacket potato and a green veg.
Ditto stuffed peppers.

Use eggs- veggie frittata, salad, and either chips or jacket spuds and crusty bread.

Stuffed jacket potatoes for a main meal- 'double cook' as they call it- take out the filling and mix with chopped bacon, cheese, onion, tuna, etc- according to what your kids can eat. Serve with a green veg.

Fruit- our fruit is an apple a day, a banana, blueberries, sometimes frozen mixed berries, sometimes a pack of grapes once a week. In season we'll have UK raspberries, strawberries and plums. None of us like citrus. I don't buy much 'high air miles' fruit for environmental reasons, but obviously it's hard to avoid it 100%.

If you want ideas away from the web-

Deliciously Ella- great for veggie curry, rice & veg based mains.
Mary Berry- good pasta dishes without meat.
Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall- Eat More Veg, 30 Plants a week.

Yes, I was going to say what @AnnikaLowe and other pps have - if you reduce your meat consumption by adding in some veggie meals that will reduce the cost. Including potato-based meals or egg-based meals can really cut down the costs (and potato & egg meals are a double bonus in that regard!!).

Your exotic fruit consumption seems massively over the top - and you are setting your DC up for having very extravagant tastes / food shops as they move out / become more independent, which is not great in the long run. Also, I have read (in terms of keeping blood sugar more stable) that it is much better to have sugary foods (like fruit) only at the end of a meal (a meal that has plenty of protein and veg in), as this will limit the impact of the sugar surge in your blood sugar levels, and avoid them spiking. And probably will reduce the amount of snacking they need to do. So fruits should only be for dessert!

I would suggest having a labelled snack box on the go in the fridge, with sticks of carrot / cucumber / pepper / celery in; this would be much healthier for them, and if you encourage them to snack on the crudités with something like hummus or other protein-dense dips then hopefully they will need to snack less (as snacking on protein actually satisfies your appetite much more effectively than anything else). A box of veg sticks can last for up to 2 days, but is much fresher on the first day!

Also, raw nuts are your friend for snacking. We have large bags of shelled almonds, cashews, pecans, hazelnuts - a small handful of these (maybe 10-15 nuts?) also makes a great, high-protein (therefore filling) snack. The best place to get these is Lidl (I don’t have an Aldi nearby) - as they cost so much less than everywhere else.

My kids also like eating cold marinated tofu chunks (cauldron) as snacks - Lidl have really upped their game over the last few months in terms of variety of foods - I used to have to supplement a weekly Lidl shop with a Sainsbury’s shop for all the specialist veggie / vegan foods, but Lidl now does a really good range of them (including tofu and marinated tofu chunks), so I am now super happy :)

I buy frozen fruits (from Lidl) - and yes, they can be mushy when defrosted. But - I actually eat them frozen / only very slightly defrosted, and they are amazing that way. My favourites are a big bowl of frozen blueberries quickly stirred into fat-free Greek yoghurt: if you combine / stir it in really quickly, it becomes a sort of cross between frozen yoghurt and sorbet (I don’t mix it so much that the fruit is blended, just all combined, so the fruit softens only slightly, and the Greek yoghurt starts to freeze. This is really delicious!

I also like to eat frozen mango chunks - if you take them from the freezer and put them in a bowl (and leave on the side for maybe 5 minutes) they soften very slightly, and you can eat them with a fork and it is like eating chunks of mango sorbet - again, very delicious! Frozen fruit avoids waste as well (as another pp has said).

Sorry for such a long post - one final point.. I used to get a weekly shop from Ocado (when it was linked to Waitrose) - and one day I realised that the standard food shop that I would import every week (then adjust slightly) had things priced at much higher than you could get (in the same Ocado website) if you went to a different pack size where there may be discounts on. So (for example) if I had a 12 pack of toilet rolls in my long-standing weekly food shop at (can’t remember, let’s assume) £10, if I took the time to look elsewhere on the Ocado site I would find the same brand of toilet rolls in an offer like 3x 4 packs for £5. And this was really common. I did wonder whether it was something the largely online food retailers do - regularly adjust the pricing of different sized versions of the goods, so those that kept the same weekly shop were routinely paying maybe 25-50 per cent more for particular items than if they would compile an individual shop using the best value packs every single week. While the retailer is still able to say that they ‘price match’ (but only for their discounted pack sizes)…

Reading that menu and meals and shopping list - Lidl and Aldi won’t make much difference to you.

And the ‘extras’ that they sell might actually mean you spend more.

It’s a very premium menu. And very premium meat heavy.

Adding a vegetarian meal a week may start to bring the budget down. Differentiating between treat fruit and staple fruit. Eg. Many would class fresh berries as a treat not a core shopping item. Frozen bags of the mixed maybe the core shopping version.

Individual yoghurt pots are premium treats, or for people who live alone.

Larger packets of meat, you dont have to use full
packets. Portion the second one and freeze it. Or plan something that uses three packets over two meals in the week. Rather than two packets a meal.

More bog standard vegetables. Carrots, parsnips, leeks, broccoli. They’re healthy and massive cheaper per portion that fresh berries and fresh melon.

Waitrose with a sensible list can be very cost effective.

Playing devil's advocate (partly!) what's wrong with egg and chips one night? Or fish fingers (and an option for the one who can't eat fish.)

I'm a 'foodie' and love cooking but I don't get hung up over having an easy cheaper meal now and then if 95% is cooked from scratch and healthy.

I agree with PP that you are setting up very unrealistic standards of everyday food for your teens when they move out.

I wonder how the one at uni manages and eats? Are they in catered halls?

Just to add to the great post by @Stoufer , people who are diabetic are advised to avoid some fruits due to the high sugar content. The ones on your list are the main culprits- mango, melons, pineapple, grapes.

Stick to boring old apples, pears, blueberries and citrus as the staples.