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

Ha! had missed that the OP includes a cat in her "family of 6".

more and paneer!

We spend around £200 on 4 of us but that does not include alcohol, lunches or food for the dog and we often eat out once a week and I do not buy processed food. Lots of meat, fish, cheese and veg.

Forgot to add that I am on mat leave so my lunches are made up from what we have in. DH cooks up 5 marinated chicken breast with veg on a Sunday and that's his lunches for the week. If he ate in the canteen the cost would be higher.

See MrsDV i'm the complete opposite - i love cooking. I'm gutted it's the one thing everyday i really enjoy doing (shopping unmolested by small dc and preparing a lovely dinner from scratch). But as with many things as my time is getting squeezed it's the only thing i can ditch to care for more people. But i am sad about it. I used to look at ready chopped veg and thing 'ffs how hard is it to chop a bit of veg, no matter how much money i have i will always be able to prep my own food...' er no. Now just chopping for dinners can take an hour with the constant interruptions and result in me losing my temper. Suddenly ready chopped doesn't seem so bad.

Different people have varying time/money balances in their lives and you find those who can live more frugally are those with more time to prep and shop around. If you cannot do these things then something else has to give. Sadly it's either quality or having it home cooked from scratch.

Having big people/eaters also adds a huge amount to bills. My friend is 5ft, her dh his 5'5", they are slight people and are not particularly active. When we went to theirs for dinner DH almost cried.

i always said if i ever could afford it i would buy organic meat from the butchers and have fresh flowers in most rooms every week. Of course it's possible to live on way less (in our tighter days, value porridge made with water was breakfast, value bread and ham sandwiches for lunch and pasta and sauce for dinner probably would cost 30 per week) but we choose not to eat like that because we have the luxury of that choice.

My parents are the ones who shock me as they spend 200 a week and chuck loads away. I don't think it matters so much how much you spend as long as you actually eat it. We waste nothing.

The £50 is on meat and chicken. Not one MN chicken . Also king prawns for a pescetarian.

Family of 4 and we spend approximately £100 per week and eat pretty well. I could possibly spend up to £200 if we shopped at waitrose, dined on fillet steak, had organic everything and lots more wine

Yes £10 on a piece of pork. But that's not the only meat or fish most people eat in one week. That's one meal, maybe two. What about the other 19 meals in a week?

For £60 meat and fish that's roughly, a chicken, some bacon, some lamb mince, some beef. Plus two or three lots of fish, anything from cod, salmon, prawns, squid, plaice, haddock, sea bass.

Some fruit is very expensive, most berries are a small punnet for £2-4 but a family on a budget can eat nectarines, peaches, apricots, all very cheap at the moment, grapes are reasonable price,, also some varieties of apples, bananas are very reasonable.

A couple of punnet of blackberries or raspberries and a punnet of cherries - thats a tenner got instantly.

We are a family of 5 plus dog, cat and hamster.

We spend about £120 on our weekly shop, but that doesnt include top up shops or any meals out we may have.

Have tried Aldi and would often spend £70 in there, but then there would be more stuff we'd need so have to go elsewhere and then spend another £70 so its easier for us to just go to one shop and spend £120.

The problem with Aldi is that there is no choice. Yes we could possibly do a weekly shop in there, but we'd be eating the same things week in/week out. We have tried to use Aldi as our weekly shop, but it never worked out for us. That's us though we are all different.

We bulk buy when we can. There is a large butchers near us that is really well priced. We go there every month or two and spend £50-£100 on meat, but it all goes in the freezer and lasts us ages. Same with things like dog food, cat food, washing powder. We buy the large items (£10 for a large bag of dog food, £9 for a large box of wash powder etc) which usually lasts for a good month.

Miracle - yes but those here with 9 people in a family, a bunch of bananas is still £1 min for about 5, so they still need £2 just for one banana each. Times that buy all portions of veg and fruit over three meals and 7 days. It still seems hard to feed 9 for £90. Based on a banana which is fairly cheap, you would need £70 a week to just meet minimum fruit and veg costs for 9

We are a family of four (me, dh and 2 young dcs) and we spend over £200 a week. Easily done if you buy organic, branded and premium brand for everything. I tend to spend £150-£180 with Sainsburys and about £50-60 with M&S. The fruit, veg and 24 pints of milk usually takes care of the first £50 of the bill! It's actually reassuring to know we aren't the only ones, as I know it's not "normal"!

I do find it odd that so many people think it's wrong to spend a lot on food. As I said earlier, our mortgage is paid off and we have a comfortable income.

Someone else's family of 5 may include young children. Mine includes 4 males - 17, 19, 21 and 58. All well over 6 foot, all very active/sporty, all like to eat healthily and all with huge appetites. We have an undercounter fridge and a large fridge freezer - otherwise I'd be shopping every day!

Sorry Artandco i was just speaking generally about the cost of fruit and meant someone on a lowish budget not an extreme budget, so no specific poster. I haven't a clue how one would feed 9 on £90 a week, we spend over that for the two of us.

I think it depends a lot on what you like to eat. Those that don't spend much, without effort and regardless of budget, just don't have the same tastes as those that spend more. I would find it really depressing to only spend £65 a week and could probably easily spend £200 (family of four with two teenagers). I don't know whether the low spenders are eating healthily but they certainly are having quite a restricted diet.

Slightly tangential but hey ho - can I ask those of you who bulk buy meat and fish and freeze it how you defrost it? Please do not laugh at me

Had an horrific experience once when v young due to someone else not 'defrosting' fish and haven't dared ever try it (would go so far as to say am full on phobic about it ). Do you defrost in fridge or out overnight? How long does it take/how do you know it's completely thawed but not left out too long etc etc? Also, can you then freeze whatever you make with it?

Currently have diced lamb, chicken breasts, and fillet steaks in freezer c/o Ocado's 'flash sales' (the last bit before you check out) which bought but couldn't use in time but couldn't bear to just bin and waste so bunged in freezer... where they have languished ever since

Again, please do not mock the afflicted...

Some of the things some people do to save money aren't available to everybody.

For example: where are some of you finding these lovely farm shops where mince is half the price of the supermarkets? Where I live, Farm Shop means vair éxquisé locally sourced organic raspberry-fed ethical meat at 2 or 3 times supermarket price, supair fancie petit pottettes of chutney handmade by virgins at £6 a jar, tenner-a-pop ready meals, breadsticks that cost three quid a box(!!), a manky-looking cauliflower for a couple of pounds, etc.

Supermarket reduced sections (at 7-8pm, prime maximum reduction time) usually only discount by 25% at the very most - sometimes more, if you get a very generous member of staff on, but I've seen elderly green lamb chops selling for only 75p less than fresh.

Go to Lincolnshire, on the other hand, where my parents live, and farm shop MEANS farm shop. Like, in front of the farm and that's ignoring all the roadkill onions and cauliflowers at the edge of the field that weren't worth harvesting that you can pick up and at a fraction of the supermarket cost. The local Tesco there is an utter bedlam at reduction time - the crates are brought out onto the middle of an aisle and thirty people will gather round. They'll literally hover their hand a cm from the punnet of raspberries so they can grab it the moment the 10p label goes on. I'm not nearly aggressive enough to have succeeded at grabbing a reduced bargain in one of those scrums more than once or twice. Once, they had beautiful bronze and black turkeys for £5 each on boxing day. I bought three and we had turkey for weeks (I suspect I only managed to get those because many of the locals don't have the time, space or freezer space to do that, and probably can't afford £15 all at once on the spur of the moment).

For those asking how you eat well without spending much I have just done my weekly shop in Lidl. For 6 people (although dh away until Thursday) I have spent £55. Meals to be cooked as follows:
Veg sausage and veg casserole
Thai prawn and pineapple curry
Fig and Serrano ham pizza
Jacket potatoes beans and cheese (kids only, I have friends over)
Cous cous salad with halloumi
Pearl barley and steak salad
For lunches there will be omelette, sandwiches. I make my own bread which is easy.
I would much prefer to be able to spend £200 each week and eat more meat and fish but I can't. I don't think that's too shabby for being on a budget though.

For my household, the only 'big shop' we do is at Christmas/New Year where we can spend up to £300... That's for everything including the alcohol!

There's 5 adults in the house and we all do our own shop for things we want, so there isn't a definite amount how much we spend weekly as it can vary.

The shops we mainly use are Tesco and Sainsbury's with Aldi as an occasional shop (meaning when we're low on cash). Unfortunately Aldi isn't great for everything so normally we have to do a top-up shop somewhere else.

We use butchers for all of our meat, whether it's a local one or a chain butchers (like Crawshaws) and with fruit and veg, we either buy loose from the supermarkets or from a green grocers.

For household items and pet food, we bulk buy from B&M and Amazon. B&M sells washing stuff like fabric conditioner, washing gel, washing up liquid in huge quantities.

I could spend a fortune I've two bodybuilders in the house and I spend about a tenner a week on eggs and £7 on milk they've both got hollow legs

LadyStoic, I only freeze stuff I've cooked that day, so today I'll cook a large lasagne and a chili as 2 midweek meals. We rarely, if ever, have bought and frozen meat or fish apart from I often keep 2 packs of frozen battered fish fillets to go with some frozen chips as a twice a year emergency supper.

I feel very nervous about freezing stuff. Even though I know it's usually ok. I have a friend who freezes milk which makes me shiver a bit.

London my eldest dc are 12 and 17 so they eat adult portions. The next youngest are 4 and five and then I have three toddlers.
The portions are t particularly small, we don't buy alchol expect once in a blue moon and the dc drink tap water.
A pack of mince last two meals for the whole family and maybe a lunch for the four pre schoolers. I bulk up bolagnaise etc with lentils and veg. A sack of potatoes is £2 or £3 pounds. I never use ready meals and the only " oven food" is pizza , we don't buy chicken nuggets fish fingers etc as the dc havent liked them when eaten elsewhere.
We shop in Aldi and muscle food for meat.

Defrosting- the advice is to defrost in the fridge BUT I find it takes too long and is still half frozen the next day. Soooooo, last thing at night before bed I get food out of the freezer, leave it on t draining board and first thing in the morning it goes straight into the fridge and I use it that day.

Food you make can then be frozen but never refreeze meat/ fish without cooking first.

Thanks everyone this is a genuinely informative thread and has helped me understand how a "normal" family can end up spending £200 pw. Prices vary so much don't they ? As well as appetites, time to cook from stratch and also expectations. I think I feel very lucky that we only need to spend half that to feel well fed. Comments about £50 on meat for one meal and 24 l of milk a week are eye opening.

Once, they had beautiful bronze and black turkeys for £5 each on boxing day. I bought three and we had turkey for weeks

We did the same - popped into the local M&S the first day it was open again after Christmas and got turkey joints very cheaply. I think IIRC it was a £25 joint thing reduced to £5. We had CHristmas dinner all over again on New Year's Day!

To the freezer phobic lady - defrosting is very easy. I never defrost in the fridge, just on the kitchen counter. If we're having chicken in the evening I'll take it out in the morning and it's ready to use. Any bacteria which may have started to grow during defrosting will be well and truly zapped if you cook it thoroughly all the way through. Fish generally is sold in smaller, thinner portions and therefore takes less defrosting time. If you're making a fish stew, casserole or pie, it doesn't matter if it's still slightly frozen when you put it in, as long as you make sure it's piping hot before serving.

The only thing you need to be aware of is defrosting and refreezing - it's fine to defrost raw chicken breasts, cook a curry or something and then refreeze it. It's not OK to defrost chicken, change your mind and order pizza, then refreeze the raw meat.