Desperately need tips to reduce almost £800 per mth food bill.

[Mumof3almost4]

I am stressing about mat leave pay and how low it is.
Just going through my income/outgoings and my main drain is on food. We are a family of 5, two adults, DC 18, 15, 13.
I am spending between £700-£800 a month on food. Is this ridiculous?!
I do cook mostly from scratch but will use a few pasta jars etc. I shop at local market for fruit and veg and the butchers for meat. We all like a big evening meal usually with meat or chicken and I always make sure there's salad or veg on the plate. I shop at home bargains and Asda for cupboard stuff, mainly use the freezer for left overs and don't like to waste anything.
I do try and plan meals but I think I've got in a habit of not doing this properly and then money gets frittered nipping to the shop. I then spend £30 easily feather than just getting what I need.

Reading this back I know I need to get much much better organised but really need your tips on how??
How do you plan meals without getting bored of it being repetitive?
We all eat well, no fussy eaters apart from a dislike of cheese and eggs.
Any advice for me to save a massive chunk of money please??

Also I hate Aldi. I'd never get a full shop in there

I've recently brought our supermarket bill down from £850 per month (for just 3 of us 😯) to £450. Main changes are:

• STRICT meal planning (I did it before but it was quite loose)
• batch cook and freeze

-switch from asda/tesco to Lidl (probably a 10-15% saving). I still go to Tesco or Asda for the bits I miss

• trade down to own brands. If I really dont like something, I go back to the brands but most things are fine.
• bulk out meals for example I used to get 2 dinners out of a 500g mince portion turned into bolognaise. I now add 150g of lentils and can get 3 dinners from it ( and I prefer it)
• have one or two "cheap nights". Fish fingers, potatoes and veg is a cheap and cheerful meal that does no harm once a week (own label fish fingers, obvs!) Or jacket potatoes and toppings or omelettes and chips. You get the idea.

I think eating chicken or meat every day is £££

Doing things like veg-egg-fried rice, lentil veg stew with bread, big veggie pasta dish can balance out the budget

Other good economy meals:

Pasta pomodoro: onion, peppers, tinned toms or passata, pinch of herbs and squeeze of garlic paste. Grated cheese on top if people want it. About £3 for a family of 5.

Sausage, beans, mash, peas - look out for special offers on nice sausages.

Egg, chips and peas.

Baked potatoes with beans/ cheese/home made coleslaw/tuna and sweetcorn mayo - whatever people like.

Everyone loves these simple dinners if they aren't every night.

Dried pulses are usually cheaper than tins. Lentils don't need to be soaked. Sometimes I'll cook up a big pan of pulses and freeze some portions to add into veg or meat stews / casseroles / pasta sauces.

I don't eat tons of meat. Meat once a week, maybe sometimes twice. Chicken once or twice. Fish once or twice. At least 2 vegetarian and pulse based. Lots of veg in every meal to bulk them out. Porridge or eggs on toast for breakfast, or yogurt. 500g mince is 4 portions, if you want to follow government guidelines on portion size. I add lentils often, plus a carrot and celery.

When you say food, are things like toilet rolls, cleaning stuff and laundry detergent included in this? If so, groupon combined with Quidco is your friend.

If the veg is not keeping well at your local aldi, tell the manager. The one near mine was too hot by the veg for a while. Its fixed now.
There was a time that everything i bought fresh from my local asda was crap too.

Doesnt mean its always like that or its every store

I’d be interested to know where these so-called reasonably priced butchers are. ESP if there’s an online one which would deliver in my area, because I spent lockdown looking for one and still am and the only ones I have found cost the absolute earth compared to supermarket prices.

Similarly fish. I did buy from a fishmonger recently but it wasn’t cheap by any stretch.

I do buy orange juice but I buy the shop’s own brand one. I can buy three bottles of Tesco own brand orange juice for the price of one innocent one and the difference in taste is unnoticeable.

Agreed re soups. I make a lot of soup with varying veg and some is really filling e.g. chicken soup or broccoli soup, or leek and potato with bacon. For me that’s a whole meal.

Also if you’re thus inclined you could buy bread mixes for crusty bread, they’re cheaper than ingredients in fact it’s essentially the right amount of ingredients but the baking process is still done at home. That’s a personal choice though, and I buy bread more often than not.

There's a couple of cheap butchers shops in my town. Local markets also have butchers that are usually cheaper than the supermarkets.

The cheap butchers shops are often imported meat though, so the provenance is not always good. If a butcher doesn't shout about free range, red tractor, locally sourced etc then it probably won't be.

As an example of what they sell Sirloin or Rib Eye at £12.50 a kilo, where in Tesco it's £16 to £34 a kilo depending on what type you buy.

Cheaper meat sources are not always low welfare imported meat though. There's a farm near us that rears it's own meat and while it's not organic, it's at least outdoor raised red tractor standard.

The real saving comes if you can buy in bulk. Buy 500 g of mince and its about the same price as the supermarket, but if you can buy a 5-10 kilo bag and portion it for the freezer, you can save around a third of the per kilo cost.

I spit my shopping going to the cheapest first.
So into Aldi for their cleaning products, loo roll, cat food and staples like bread, cheese, butter, eggs and juice.
I also buy their large packs on ham ends, frozen garlic bread, curly fries, chicken, pork and any veg or fruit that looks good.
I then drive on to Morrison’s to check out yellow stickers and buy Any bits I couldn’t get in Aldi.
I usually spend about £40 in Aldi and between £20 to £30 in morrisons depending on what they have in yellow stickers. I always buy a yellow sticker item if it is something we eat and freeze it for later use.
A new fat foods has just opened near morrisons so this week I will skip Aldi and give them a try and if they are decent then I will add them into my shopping rotation.

fat foods😩 FARMFOODS

Watch some of that show "Eat Well for Less" on BBC iplayer (if its there). Wouldn't be surprised if you're following some of the common tropes you see the families doing on there.

Couple of other things. If you are a big family, talk to your butcher about making you up a regular bulk/freezer pack I'm sure they would do that for a discount on individual prices. They may tell you what they have coming in cheap too.

Also,
In this as many other things you can have two out of Cheap/Quick/Good. But not all three. If you want decent food on a budget you have to invest some time prepping and shopping around. That's just life

We are a family of 3 adults and spend about £50 a week. Not because we are skint but because that is all we need to spend. Don't necessarily buy brand names.

Oh and get on the TV show 'eat well for less'

Thing is, there are people on this thread who say that it’s not a bad amount to be spending, but there are others who are spending half that amount and don’t feel they’re scrimping. So actually for a large part spending that amount on food is a choice not a necessity.

E.g. I choose to have my milk delivered through milkandmore (we don’t have any other local delivery here) and it costs me more. If I had to cut back then the milk delivery would need to go and I’d have to go back to buying it from the supermarket.

Also people who buy from the butchers, the butcher is more expensive than the supermarket, so choosing to buy from the butchers is going to push up the amount you spend, and you can buy meat in the supermarket which isn’t cheap cuts for instance chicken thighs aren’t that expensive, cheap cuts are fine for the slow cooker though.

And branded vs non branded, in most instances the non branded products are produced by the same manufacturer, it’s just that companies buy them in and put a name on them and push up the price by a substantial margin. Some non branded items aren’t as good, but some definitely are e.g. some breakfast serials. but you need to experiment to find the non branded items which work for you.

And look at what meals are nice-to-haves rather than necessary. E.g. steak is a nice-to-have meal, but you don’t need to buy steak every week for instance (not saying that you are but YKWIM) choose to have those kinds of meals as a treat when you can afford it.

How is it possible to spend this much on food?
Is it just meals you are buying, as in breakfast, lunch and dinner?
What do you buy for breakfast? Is it cereal or a fry up?
The last shop I did, about 10 days ago, cost around £60, there is me and 2 dc with my bf a couple of times a week. I cook "proper" food, spag Bol, chilli, shepherds pie. We have cereal or toast for breakfast, lunch is sandwiches or wraps with fruit and a yoghurt or something similar.
On a week where I need household goods such as washing powder or loo roll it can be a little more, but never close to £200 a week.

I cook "proper" food, spag Bol, chilli, shepherds pie

There's a lot of your answer right there, especially if those meals contain lots of vegetables, which tend to be the cheaper ones, ie carrots, onions and celery. Mince is much cheaper than steak or most fish and you might only have 100 g of it in a portion.

Whereas steak costs at least twice as much per kilo and almost no-one would serve a 100 g steak for a meal. So instead of there being less than £1 of meat in each portion, there's probably at least £4 of meat, maybe more on each plate.

Do that for other meals and - there was the thread last week where the poster was asking whether two small pieces of cod costing £5 was one portion or two - many said one portion and you can easily see how some people spend far more - accompany the fish or steak with asparagus and purple sprouting broccoli and you've got an £8 meal instead of a £2 meal for example.

I also remember someone saying that fish pie was an extremely expensive meal to make at home because they bought their fish from the Waitrose fresh fish counter and it came to £28. The fact that the same pie can be made from about a fiver's worth of frozen fish from Iceland or Aldi was completely outside their radar.

So OP, have a look at some of the typical meals that you serve and try and swap some of those that work out expensive for cheaper meals, or see if you can make the same meal using cheaper ingredients.

I read somewhere online quite recently, that a reasonable budget should be something like £120 per person, per month. So a family of 5 is £600 a month.

Something my mum always told me... "Shop from your cupboards and freezer before you shop from the shops!" Basically, look and see what you already have in the house to build meals from, and then supplement with things from the shop.

Other tips:

• Try for some meat-free meals... Meat is expensive, whereas something like a cheese and tomato pasta bake, with added veg and a garlic bread on the side, is really cheap per person.
• Utilise tinned and frozen veg. People get snobby over tinned veg particularly, but it works out a lot cheaper than fresh.
• Look carefully at your butcher... In my experience they're NOT the cheapest option!
• Stretch things like mince by adding some sort of pulses. Black beans or pinto beans have a good "meaty" texture and that sort of "protein-y" taste.
• Down-grade a brand at the supermarket. Instead of Kelloggs, get Asda's own. For baked beans, instead of 4 tins of Asda's own, try 3 of your usual, and one "basics" tin.
• For packed lunches, instead of everyone having a bag of crisps, get a sharer bag and divvy them out into plastic tubs for everyone. That could easily last you a week for the family, as opposed to maybe 25 individual bags.

@Barbaraofseville
My shop is also around £60 a week.
Can take it down to £40 but it's never over £70.
1 adult, 2 teens.
Healthy home cooked meals.

£28 on fish for a fish pie.... You can buy a 300G fish pie mix in sainsburys for around £3.50, that will serve two, so even if you’re serving a bigger family you can buy two of them, lots of mashed potato and serve with plenty of veg and you can still do it for about £12 max.

I do agree that we seem to have lost sight of what portion sizes should look like. I also think that too often we dish out too much and then food goes to waste. Better to serve what looks like a portion and then have some left if people want more, but if they don’t then that can be frozen for another day.

I have separate mini casseroles and lasagne dishes for lasagne and cottage pies, that way I cook an exact portion and add veg but then the ones that I don’t cook go into the freezer for another day. I currently have a lasagne, a cottage pie, and two chicken pies in my freezer which were additional portions in fact the chicken pies were ones I made from left over roast chicken. I made four and two went into the freezer. Similarly the cottage pies, DS already ate one of the extra ones and there’s another one left in the freezer for another day....

@Justpickaname

* How is it possible to spend this much on food? *

I’m a single parent of two primary.

I buy all organic fruit and veg, and a lot of it. Small punnet of blueberries is £3. My children will have a Punnet each a day!

I buy the best salmon etc. I shop at Waitrose and marks.

I’m not looking to reduce but that Is how one can spend a lot.

Since covid I'm spending much less.

What's helped me is having a supermarket delivery every five days.

I'm now not worried I'll run out of things and pick up extra.

I plan ahead for five days which is easy as I can see what needs using and add a few ingredients.

My shopping bill is now just £10-11 a day compared with before lockdown which was £650-700 a month. It's halved!

It also helps having things on my computer screen. So if my basket goes over £50 I go back in and trim it. It's working apart from birthdays when I buy a bit extra.

Today's shop was £49 and I have enough of everything until next Monday. If I was feeling thrifty the shop could stretch for 7 days.

I have one adult child (big eater), one fussy child who snacks and another older teen who is a big eater, me, my husband and two cats all fed.

Oh it’s incredibly easy to spend that much (and more even) but it’s also entirely possible not to spend it.

I could shop for a week and buy fillet steak/venison burgers/prime sausages/a whole free-range organic chicken and I would already have spent about £50 without even adding any extras.

Then add in organic veg, prime thick-cut ham, organic fruit, get the milk delivered from elsewhere in bottles, branded fruit juice, and branded yoghurts/breakfast serials and that’s before you’ve even bought any snacks...

@zingally I do all your tips. I budget £1.30 per person for each evening meal including pudding. It's all very good home cooked food.

I've noticed that if I shop at ASDA I can get an extra meal out of their meat packs as they are 1kg. Whereas Tesco and Salisbury are same price but for 750g.

500g of mince roasted with veg to bulk it out will make a pie to feed us all. So I have another portion to feed us all for the same price. 750g just doesn't feed 5 hungry people twice!

Bulking chicken curry out with slow simmered chickpeas is a firm favourite. They are really good in curry but need to be melt in the mouth texture.

My Tesco £shop is always creeping up.
Morrison's is expensive. Aldi or Lidl are my favourite but don't do online. Best value with careful shopping is Asda.