To think it's too much?

[Ellatreetop]

We spend £400 on our weekly shop, granted we have a family of seven, shop at Ocado and try to stick to organic fruit/veg/meat but still it seems ridiculous!

How many people in your family, where do you shop and how much do you spend?!

I've switched from Tesco to Morrisons and saved about £20 per week. It's worth swapping to a different supermarket to see if you can get it any cheaper. If you're throwing away food each week then buy less because you're buying too much.

Go through & list all of the food in your cupboards/fridge/freezer. Then plan meals round what you've got and only buy what you need to complete a meal.

I popped to the coop earlier and paid 1500 quid for some naice ham.
Do you think I overpaid?
Or am I just bragging (lying) about how much disposable income I have?

@hazell42 our local coop became a Budgens (which is apparently like Londis) and they sell posh pizzas that are nearly a tenner. Like I'm not even joking. I could never justify paying that when you can get a good fresh one from Asda or Sainsbury's for a fiver.

Even if I could afford to spend £1600 a month on food

Op doesnt really want to know how to cut her shopping bill.
She just wonders how the great unwashed manage to buy good food for less than £400 a week.

You’re probably wasting a third of your food each month (in line with U.K. avg) so that’s £533 down the drain each month.

Bullshit 🙄

2 adults one dog, includes cleaning stuff toiletries, alcohol £120pw at Sainsburys.

We're a family of 3 and 2 cats and spend about £100 a week including nappies, wipes, etc. Aldi is an absolute god send. I could probably cut it down loads more but we do like a weekly treat with a bottle of wine 🤷‍♀️

I call bullshit too.

7 people (1 in nappies full time, 1 at night), 2 cats, 1 dog, occasionally a friend & a child. Meat from farm shop. Pet food from internet. ‘posh‘ cat litter. £120-£140 a week (higher estimate being a week when all cleaning/laundry/bathroom products are needed).

@Lipperfromchipper going without him isn't an option as he only sees his dad for 4 hours a week and not even every week lately, I think it works out cheaper to do it online though because I'm such an impulse buyer which I can't do if I'm not in the shop, I tried aldi twice and went mad buying unnecessary and stupid things and spent more😂

roughly 50 pound a day as we shop daily and 2 adults 2 kids,15, 9 but all have big adult sized portions

Family of 4, we probably spend £150 max per week including all toiletries, cleaning products and nappies. Weekly Ocado delivery plus top ups from Tesco express. I'm not very careful, it just naturally comes to that for everything we need.

When we have in-laws staying for several months per year we turn into a family of 7 (5 adults and 2kids) and still only spend about £200 max (though we do eat less meat then as in laws are veggie and they cook everything from scratch)

£400 for 7 sounds crazy!!

TAKESNOSHITSHIRLEY what are you spending £50 daily on & any reason why you don't do a weekly shop? £50 x 7 days is £350 per week that's a lot of money to spend on 4 people weekly.

Blimey! We spend about £200 a week-that’s 5 of us, 2 large dogs, 2 cats and a rodent. Don’t think I could spend £400 a week if I tried! 🤣🤣

Family of 4, spend about £80 a week.
What you’re spending is ridiculous.

£50 a week give or take for me and one DS. Even for a family of 7 that's a ridiculous amount imo but it's all relative.

@FreakStar

I'm a 3 people less than £50 pw person.

Breakfast
Museli or shreddies for everyone every day.

Lunch
Hummus and pitta
Sandwiches
Accompanied by cucumber, tomatoes and fruit for pudding
Toddler also has a yoghurt

Once per week we might have something more substantial like a pizza for lunch.

Dinner (this week)
Beef Stew x3 this week with different accompaniments
Salmon and veg
Homemade pizza
Lentil curry
Pasta and sauce

We eat a lot less meat than we used to.
I usually bake once a week and we have that for pudding. We also got given a lot of Xmas food we are still eating.

Maybe we just eat too much then-

My meals look similar- this week we had

Homemade fish pie and broccoli and green beans
Mushroom and garlic pasta
Thai fishcakes with thai style salad and rice
Beanburgers in a bun with cheese and homemade sweet potato chips
Prawn and samphire and chilli pasta
Chicken fajitas

We ate out on saturday night

Lunches have been
soup
ham sandwiches
cheese sandwiches
leftover pasta
usually with salad stuff and fruit

breakfasts have been
Cereal
Blueberries and natural yoghurt
toast and peanut butter
Crumpets
various other fruits- grapefruit bananas apples etc.

Snacks were
protein bars
crisps
cheese+crackers
Wholegrain biscuits
yoghurts

I also bought 9 toilet rolls, shaving gel, kitchen spray and toothpaste.

All the ingredients I needed to make these meals for 2 adults and a hungry sporty teen were around £100

Oh, and dd has a school lunch so lunch is just me and DH in the week.

Family of 4, 2 older teens so 4 adults really. We spend about £500 a month max including cleaning products. We shop at Tesco, Aldi and bits from M&S and co op and sainsbos.

£6-800pm for 2 adults and 2 teens. Mostly markses, waitrose and sainsburys and the odd thing from tesco, lidl or coop. Tesco do the gigantic 80 wash boxes of daz that we can't get anywhere else local or else we'd not bother with the place.

YABU to think that if you buy the most expensive food available from the most expensive shop there is for your large family plus guests, it will not add up to a ridiculous amount of money.

And it is very far from necessary to spend that amount. You could be perfectly healthy on a seasonal partly plant based diet and use cheaper shops and spend about a quarter to a third of what you do now.

Other people spend less because they simply cannot afford to spend what you do. They do not have the money. Someone on the first page said that the average amount for a family your size is about £165 pw and from watching a lot of Eat Well for Less episodes, that seems about right. It also means that some other families of 7 spend even less than that.

And if you are one of the families that spend significantly more, it is because there is a lot of luxury within what you spend.

It's entirely up to you how you spend your money, but it absolutely will be the case that there will be considerable scope to your bill by a good amount, should you want/need to.

What it might be worth doing is looking out for a farm shop for your organic meat. We have a lovely one near us, mix of organic and rare breeds. No point recommending it as you're definitely not nearby (no ocado, here) but that's one way you could possibly save on the cost of meat, reducing food miles, in the process.

£400 a week is pretty much our entire income!
We are a family of 5 (well, 4 full time plus a student DS who comes and goes - probably eats here half the time) and a cat, and our weekly shopping bill is usually around £100. At times it might push £120 if it's a week where we need cat litter AND soap powder AND toilet rolls etc, but usually comes in less than that. That doesn't include the odd takeaway - maybe once a month - but does include household products, wine, and a few snacks or treats.
I can't imagine what on earth you could spend £400 on!
At Christmas, I'd saved up supermarket savings cards all year and had around £250 to splurge on a big Christmas shop. I bought absolutely all kinds and still only spent about £190, and we were eating it all until well into the New Year!

Family of 4, £100 per week.
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