To be struggling to budget my food shopping

[Toomuchtooyoung01]

We are spending a crazy amount on food shopping each week and its not sustainable. We don't eat anything extravagant, are both teetotal at home so not spending anything on alcohol, toiletries wise we only buy the absolute necessary basics (shampoo/conditioner, shower gel, handwash etc) so its not like I'm filling the trolley with a £10 pot of this or a £10 tube of that, its really frustrating as we easily spend £150-£170 a week and I feel for that money we should either have alot more than we do or we should be spending alot less for the very normal, non flashy food/products etc we are buying.
The only brands we buy are Pampers nappies (large pack a week) and every few weeks I'll stock up on Childs Farm bubble bath etc when its on special offer! All food is own brand.
Breakfast is cereal or toast with fruit sometimes pancakes or brioche for DD or sometimes mini bacon sandwich. Usual meals are a roast, sausages with veg and mash, fishcakes with veg, one or 2 nights might have oven food (9 months with baby 2 so not doing as much cooking as would usually). Lunches are usually sandwich/tin of soup/DD has things like chicken gougons if not eating the same as me.
Typical food shop - fresh fruit (apples/bananas/strawberries/raspberries/ oranges) fresh veg (brocolli/carrots/potatoes), miscellaneous staples like houmous, yoghurts etc as well as meat mentioned when listing typical meals. I do often make a chilli/a large tuna pasta bake etc which theoretically should see us through for a few days but never quite does, as OH often comes home for lunch so will heat up a portion of this etc
Please can anyone offer advice on where I'm going wrong & how to make some savings?! Thanks!

Have you tried Aldi or Lidl supermarkets? We were spending £120 a week in Tesco/Sainsbury's and het the same stuff and we rarely go above £70. Fruit, veg and meat is, in my opinion, fresher from Aldi too!

Go through your receipts and see where it is going.
Look at price per kilo.
Raspberries are a lot per kilo this time of year.

Could you post a picture of a receipt from a weekly shop? Obviously censoring anything personal. It's very difficult to understand how you're spending £170 on the things you have mentioned, but with an accurate list of items and prices we could maybe help.
We are also trying to get a grasp on our spending which had spiralled almost out of control. Meal planning and batch cooking has been revolutionary in this house.

You need to do a meal plan and buy only what you need...I have friends who even work out exactly how many potatoes they need !
Buy fruit and veg in season or frozen veg keep a record of what you are throwing away or freezing and not eating
Go to money saving expert forum and read the posts on old style money saving

Do you throw alot of stuff away?

Obviously also it does depend where you shop. Waitrose you won't get heaps for your £170 but in Aldi you would struggle to spend that much. I tend to get what I can from Aldi and then mop up the rest in Sainsbury's. We buy organic meat and dairy for example which isn't available at Aldi so we go to Sainsbury's for that.

Meal plan! For absolutely everything - breakfast, lunch and dinner. I do buy additional treat things for if we fancy it, but I plan everything else.

I sit down on a Sunday morning whilst dd is having breakfast and work out how many meals we are home for, what we’re having and what I need to buy. And only buy those things!

Fresh things used first, and then meals with frozen veg etc at the end of the week.

I’ve gone from spending £400 a month (just me and dd ) to £200 including toiletries and cleaning products.

Where do you shop? That sounds like a heck of a lot of money.

Do you throw much food away?

How much attention do you pay to prices when you shop? DP will just grab the first of whatever he sees, whereas I will have a close look at the prices on shelf to make sure I'm getting the best deal. Guess who spends a lot more when they do the shopping!

If you're buying stuff like raspberries at this time of year it's going to push the cost of your food up.

I'd recommend:

• Before you leave the house check what you have in. What's in the freezer/cupboards/fridge - can you make any meals from it
• Then make a mealplan, first incorporating what you already have, then taking advantage of anything on offer/in season/cheap ingredients (root veg, brassicas, pulses, beans, rice, pasta etc)
• Then write a list based on the mealplan

Things like snacks, juices, fizzy drinks will add little nutritional value but loads of £££ onto your shop.

I'd also switch to Aldi/Lidl...OR consider doing it all online. That way you can tamper with your shop to bring it down.

We spend £40-55 a week for a family of 3 including cat food, wine, cleaning products, and basic hygiene products...but we shop at Lidl, and only once a week. If we run out of something then tough!

£170 a week?

Post a list from your last shop i find it difficult to match that up to what you say you are buying

We spend about the same (or £20 or so less but we don't generally buy toiletries). It's because we buy brand or taste the difference for a lot of stuff, eat loads of fresh fruit and veg, eat and drink a lot of dairy and eat a lot of protein (meat and fish). It used to frustrate me but now we can afford it more easily and food is important to us so we just go with it now. Environmentally I'm trying to buy less meat and have a veggie night twice a week, a fish night at least once a week and then buy meat for the weekend from the butcher. The cost has gone down since I started doing that but not overall because I'm spending more at the butcher.

Also not every meal has to be a production. Beans on wholegrain toast followed by a piece of fruit is a midweek lifesaver - cheap, yummy, super quick and minimal washing up!

After with trying Aldi and Lidl.

Rather than buying shower gel and hand wash every week, get soap instead. Lasts longer, so works out cheaper and no plastic. Buy fruit and veg in season, for example, out of season raspberries and strawberries come in tiny containers and cost a fortune in winter.

I know you don't have much time but could you make big batches of soup and freeze them in individual portions? That's mega cheap and your husband could have that for lunch rather than what you were saving for the evening

That does sound a lot. We are a family of 5 (three young DC) and seem to eat better/more extravagantly than you do but our shop is rarely more than £100 a week, £120 max. We also buy pampers nappies in that spend.
Are you throwing a lot of food away? What are your portion sizes like?

Stop letting your DH eat dinner for lunch. Not in a nasty way just stick a note on it ‘Thursday Dinner’ or whatever. If he still has his portion at lunch then he gets soup/a sandwich that evening while you and your child get the chilli/pasta bake as planned.

To me it does sounds like you are buying a lot. Are you buying things in a just in case type of way, like having several options at hand for each meal? I fall into that trap when I’m tired. I just buy things on autopilot, and the reality is we don’t need to buy most things every day/week/month.

When my bill starts creeping up I go back to basics, and it resets me. I stop shopping for as long as possible apart from the fresh staples which are STRICTLY milk, eggs, apples, carrots and a green vegetable, usually cabbage. Bread sometimes makes the staples list but it depends how much flour and yeast I have in. I can nearly always stretch a ‘weekly’ shop into a fortnightly or longer by doing this, just means I use up random things from the freezer, bags of lentils and tins of beans, odds and ends of bags of sugar or dried fruits etc in the baking drawer, spices or sauces.

When I’ve gone the longest I can I shop daily for a week or two, getting specific things in when I need them, taking advantage of freshness and reduced things, and never buying something just in case we might eat it eg random yoghurts, hummous pots.

I’m doing all of this now in January on account of not having any money and I’m in the buy-daily phase at the moment, I managed not to shop anything more than the above basics between 29th Dec and 15th jan, for our family of four. I suspect if you are at a high spending level you could do the same, as I bet there will be all kinds of things in the kitchen store or freezer.

I do a meal plan. Look through fridge/freezer/cupboards to see what I’ve got, what needs using up first.
I also find if I do my shop online then I set myself a limit and don’t go over it because I can see it adding up as I go. There’s also no hurriedly shoving stuff in the trolley and randomly grabbing stuff u wouldn’t normally get.
We are a family of 8 and there’s probably 2 nights of the week where the eldest 2 aren’t here for meals and we manage to keep our food shop at around £120 per week and I cook pretty much everything from scratch. Obviously my DC are older than yours so cooking from scratch is easier for me.
Perhaps try cooking certainly things in bulk and freezing them. Chilli/bolognese that sort of thing.

OH often comes home for lunch

I suspect this may be your problem.

I spent years scratching my head over our grocery spends, until I realised that how much DH actually ate in one day and that our food costs had actually shot through the roof when he started working from home.

Basically, your domestic grocery bills will include an extra meal for an adult male most days as opposed to households where one or two adults are purchasing lunch elsewhere. And this can seriously mount up. The only way I've found to mitigate against it is to make a large batch of something like chilli or bolognaise, and bulk it up with cheaper ingredients and offer that for lunch.

I've found that if I want to keep grocery bills down, I have to make up for it in time spent preparing and planning cheaper meals (for every meal as well). It seems to be one way or another.

I plan for snacks too so nothing I'm planning for a meal gets hoovered up by my (teen) DC. Also, if you are planning to stretch something to 2 meal, box and freeze the second half so it isn't immediately available to anyone looking for a snack./ quick lunch.

Unless you are feeding 10-12 people, I can't see how you are spending so much. Or is your DH eating piles of food?

I don't see any problem with having leftover dinner for lunch and it can be cheaper than sandwiches if bought or using expensive ham from Waitrose, but obviously you have to watch portion sizes. Lots of people mention greedy DHs polishing of batch cooking that's supposed to make several meals in one go.

Waitrose meat and fish is usually more expensive than other supermarkets, even M&S sometimes, so that's probably an area to cut down either by buying less meat, eating cheaper cuts, or having more meals with less meat or no meat at all.

How much are the nappies? Aldi nappies get very good reports on here, so that's something to try. Otherwise, can you get a Costco card - I think branded nappies are cheaper there, but that probably needs confirming.

Stop buying summer fruits in winter? It's bad for the environment and your budget.

Less meat - eg if you make chilli, use one pack of mince, plus three or four tins of beans/chick peas and lots of onions and peppers. Put some aside to go in the freezer before DH gets near it.

Or buy frozen berries from Aldi, fine if it's going in yogurt, cereal etc and much cheaper than fresh from elsewhere.

Even if you can't get there every week, it's worth making a trip at least once a month to stock up on freezer and non perishables, plus long dated fresh stuff like cheese.

Sorry, also realised that you don't say you shop at Waitrose, I think I must have assumed that as I can't see how you'd spend so much elsewhere.

I can see how a weekly shop can end up costing that kind of money. We don't buy any fresh fruit, dips, cooked/cured meat, but if we did, we'd be looking at this kind of spend. And I shop at Aldi and Morrisons, and never buy ready meals, snacks or biscuits.

But what I will say is that it might be an idea to separate your household items and toiletries budget from your food one, just to get an accurate picture. When I did this, I realised that some months I was spending £50 on them (when a number of things had run out like laundry detergent, toilet roll, shaving gel, wax strips, razor blades) and hadn't realised that had bulked up the spend. If you get forensic about it, it might surprise you.