To wonder if people actually spend 200+ on a weekly shop

[pleasemothermay1]

Watching eat well for less and I just can't believe people actually spend 200+ a week on a food shop

One lady was giving a teen 20 a week to get chips and chicken 😟

We have 6 in our family

One baby
One toddler
One teen
Me and hubby
And a cat

I spend £65 a week including nappies and toiletries

This gose up to £90 during holidays and the teen is eating at home not collage

It's mad what are these people feeding there kids

My children have breakfast lunch and dinner I don't encourage grazing all day they can have fruit in between meals and I cook from sctrach pretty much 5 days a week junk on a Saturday then roast on a Sunday

Yes that family were shocking. The £200 was being spent on really poor quality foods. Sometimes on this, they do say that things like bacon are better quality and more expensive. It was the microwave meals, pot noodles, crisps and coke the mother was feeding her kids on rather than wholly the money that was the problem. My DM does the same. It's like spending money on junk for the kids to eat equals love. I let my DM do it because she sees them every 6 weeks or so. If she was doing it every day, it would be a major problem.

Very true moonrise! 40k will see you comfortable enough in a lot of the country, but I wouldn't fancy it in London unless I had SH or had bought a property at least 10 years ago.

I am finding Tescos is costing more these days. Just me and 11 year old ds but we spend at least £80 even £90 including Home Bargain Stores and Iceland all in. Will try Aldi again soon just for a change. Although I get tired of Aldi quite quickly as you can't find everything in there.

Yes I think Tesco is expensive!

raisedbyguineapigs I use themeatman.co.uk - they are father and son team from Shropshire. Everything is cut and packed to order. What I've had from them has always been good quality, and the prices are fantastic. They send orders out within 24hrs, packed on ice via an overnight courier. So if I place my order on a Sunday night, it gets cut and packed on the Monday, travels with an overnight courier on Monday night, and I usually get it first thing Tuesday morning. A few of my neighbours have asked me about it, and now I see some of them receiving deliveries with the same green logo on the boxes so can't be just me who thinks it's great!!

I have 3 teens who would polish their way through £200 on their own leaving DS and I to manage on a fiver. I don't know "how" they do it, but they bloody well do. Cereal, yoghurts, snacks, 3 meals it's never ending

We spend £100-£150 a week on food for me, Dh, toddler and baby. But we live somewhere without big supermarkets so food costs a lot more.

It is quite hard to put an exact figure on it, I just tried to work out a typical week but I don't tend to shop to a budget.

We have an income of about £65K, have practically no mortgage, no large outgoings and DS has left home so we can afford to buy a bit nicer food, for example I buy the little broccoli spears instead of a large loose stick, the nice cherry toms instead of the basic boxes of them, the nice lamb chops and ham, all this can add up to quite a lot but we did plenty of scrimping when DS was small and we had childcare bills etc.

I pop into Waitrose, as and when, as I work near and it is convenient and I can buy most stuff from there, if anything I use a lot is on offer I will stock up on it and just shove it upstairs in DS's old bedroom. That is another thing, sometimes if you have a house full with children and stuff it is hard to find space to store things if you want to bulk buy.

Flowerpower I agree that Tesco is expensive and poor quality. The ranges in Aldi have increased a lot in the last year or two so you might find you can get more of what you need.

I can well believe that many people spend around £1000 pm on food and the difference on here is that more people can afford it. What is 'normal for Mumsnet' certainly isn't normal for the population of the UK as a whole and over £200 pw on food shopping is well over average.

What matters is what your priorities are and what you can afford. If you can afford this level of spend without missing out on whatever else you want, fine, but if you can't its an easy way to cut down to free up spending for what else you want - for many of the families on the EWFL, it's a holiday - spending £50 pw less will free up over £2600 per year which will pay for a holuday that they often can't otherwise afford.

Many of the spends on here are due to buying the most expensive version of everything - eg fresh fish from Waitrose. Spending less won't necessarily be lower quality, a worse diet, or even ethically worse. I buy steak mince from a local naice farm shop that is less than half the price of the equivalent than Waitrose.

Someone mentions a fish pie costing £25 to make - I make mine with frozen fish, including prawns and scallops, an equivalent sized pie would possibly cost around a third of this amount for effectively the same meal.

We spend about £120 for 2 adults and 2 DC (7&4). So no nappies. But I buy a lot of fresh fruit and veg, and meat and fish. DC1 has allergies so we can only buy specific brands of processed foods.
I tend to also try and balance cheaper meals with more expensive - e.g. Rainbow trout one day, then chickpea and lentil curry the next - and always use up leftovers.

I was shocked to be behind a woman in waitrose this week who bought what looked like a weekly shop for £327.

And a lot of people just don't know about slow cookers you can even cook the meat from frozen in it
Don't do this! You'll end up with food poisoning as it takes too long for the meat to get up to a safe temperature. Fine to cook from frozen in the oven as you get it up to temperature quickly. I make soups,stews,whole chicken,rice pudding pulled pork- nothing tastes 'the same.'

We spend 80 ish for 2 adults and a starving teen plus about 7 a week on cat food. What cat food do you buy OPto keep your bill at 65? And can you give an example of what you might cook in a week please? Genuinely interested.

The problem is that not everyone is on a restricted budget. A couple earning £100k each, couple of kids, low living expenses will have a lot of disposable income and may choose to spend £200 or £300 or even more on food each week. And that is their CHOICE TO DO SO. It's not right, or wrong, or crazy or wasteful, its their choice.

We are not watching every penny and I don't have a figure in my head I have to stick to when going shopping. I do meal plan though because about 5 years ago I suddenly became conscious of how much was getting chucked out.

The people on the Eat Well for Less show have some sort of "issue" which means they want to reduce their spending - daughter off to Uni in the Welsh family, wanting to save for a holiday in the Essex lot. What the show demonstrates is that often supermarket private label products are just as good as branded. We buy a wide range of products from the Asda value cornflakes at 25p a box (kids say they're the nicest ones they've had) and things from Lidl or Aldi through to supermarket own brand crisps, yoghurts, cereal bars etc to more expensive branded items - I like my Green & Black's chocolate. We are open-minded to trying new things and I have never thought that branded automatically means better. (Will never understand why people buy Nurofen at £3 a pack when supermarkets sell 16 ibuprofen tablets for 25p - they are exactly the same).

What Eat Well For Les does show is that there are lots of people with incredibly poor understanding of food prep and cooking. Even if you're not a keen foodie, you have to feed your kids. People like the woman in the last show who roast a chicken, pick at it and then throw the rest away because she's either scared of bacteria or haven't a clue what to do are creating huge amounts of waste. My kids have the odd microwave ready meal when we are on holiday and I can't be arsed cooking. But that's about one every six months, not every week.

raisedby I buy beef from Donald Russell on line, it is excellent. I try to buy their deals/special offers as the 'headline' prices are high.

I think for some people the food bill is an expense like the water or electricity bill - something necessary that they have to pay but want to cost as little as possible. For others it's part of their lifestyle in the same way as having a particular car, living in a nice area, holidaying somewhere expensive. For me saying I could spend less on food is like saying my husband and I "could" live in a 1 bed flat versus our 3 bed townhouse. We could, did it, don't want to again!

I'm always a bit surprised at people who can't find everything they want at Aldi. Apart from ready meals which OH likes in winter to take to work when he works a night shift it's rare I can't find everything there and a shop takes a fraction of time as its closer and smaller than the other supermarkets. I've probably over time modified menus so I don't need to top up anywhere else as I loathe big supermarkets and battling round them. I'd like Aldi to have a bigger range of frozen veg but there's always plenty of range in the fresh so that's just a bit of extra prep and less time than a jaunt to Tescos would be and I'd rather do a bit of chopping than battle the buggies and pensioners that block the aisles in the big supermarkets. I really should get more fruit and veg at the local market too but mostly can't be bothered unless I'm in town on market day.
Not sure why anyone buys cheeses and yogurt anywhere but Aldi as they are great quality and much cheaper than Sainsburys etc. I had to buy steak from one of the big four last week on my way home instead of at Aldi , the quality and flavour was a lot less for more money.

I'm equally intrigued at the poster who spends £40 a week feeding two adults?
What do you eat?

I suppose just like people don't like quality -beats me from Waitrose I don't like the quality in Aldi.

I still just don't get how people spend so much

That's fine as long as people understand that some people here don't understand how other Familes can be fed on so little.

Yes I definitely think it's having teenage boys that bump mine up. However, I cannot comprehend our weekly shop ever dropping as low as £45/£50. I'm amazed and slightly envious of that.

We're fortunate that our aldi is on par with waitrose,there really isn't any difference ( I don't buy ready meals so can't comment compare them) we don't need to shop cheaply as such but aldi is so good that it makes sense .

What is there not to "get" about others spending £200 a week on shopping or whatever? Why all the "shock"? People are saying they do spend this. Everyone is different.

The stupid thing about that programme is they replace the family's usuals with things from loads of different shops. It's not a replicate-able experiment unless you are going to go to 6 different supermarkets each week. They should do it one store per week, eg. This week it's tesco, so swap all their brands for tesco own or value products and then if you the viewer shops at tesco you can see what you might swap/save. Then do sainsburys, asda etc each episode. Most people have 1 or 2 places they go to for their shopping, and even sahp don't have the time to trawl every supermarket to save 50p on a pack of cornflakes.... For the record, dh and I have been tracking our spending for mortgage purposes, we thought we spent 120 a week, but in reality with top ups etc it's more like 200. It's shocking really and we 'do love to cut back. We spent over £50 on formula so far this month!!

We have recently had to review our food spending because of a change in situation. I have done a comparable weekly food shop, using exactly the same shop, brands where I would use a brand, and own label where I would use that and actually between the big stores (tesco/asda/sainsburys) there is a few pounds difference between them all on a standard weeks shop. Waitrose worked out a little more maybe £20 a week but I could use much more of their own label stuff when I went there because it's such good quality. I think there is a misconception that food shops between the big shops are vastly different, when I tried it I was surprised by how little variation. I did an online shop on the same day with each of them to see what the difference was. It's quite eye opening. The only real difference I think is if you go to Aldi/lidl. Which I don't do because we shop online.

I like the holiday analogy. Just like some people will find a way to get the same holiday for a lot less the same is true of food.

I spent just under £500 on a flight to Chicago and back , flight to Michigan from Chicago ,Amtrak back from Michigan and 4 nights accomadation. Had I booked it with a high street travel agent and flown direct rather than indirect changing in Europe I'd have paid £650 for the London Chicago flight alone. For me the extra time spent was worth the money so similar lifestyle choice but I could invest the time in researching options and extra travel time rather than pay a lot more to do exactly the same thing. Not so different to some of the food shopping choices available ...sometimes a little thinking outside your usual box will throw up alternatives you've never thought of .