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

Would love to the food plan to feed a family of 5 on £60 (or the £30 that the poster said was possible)

We had this yesterday. All from Aldi and the recipe makes double sauce to be frozen. Everyone loved it. Cheap and delicious.
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/blender_beetroot_pasta_96501/amp

Add at least one veggie day a week. Dont tell anyone just do it.

Fruit and yoghurt for dessert in the week something more exciting at the weekend.

Menu plan.

I would say that in lockdown my food bill went up a fair bit as we were all at home for every meal.

30£ a week would be loo paper and washing powder alone in my house...

What on earth are you buying - diamond encrusted toilet paper?!

I think reducing the amount of veg in each meal is a good way or using cheaper cuts.
E.g - 1kg of chicken legs is £2 and cooked in the slow cooker, comes off the bone super easy. Can then be used in stir fry, curry, pie, soup etc.

Bolognese - bulk out the mince with veg and lentils - a 750g one with grated carrot,lentils, mushrooms and onions would probably do enough for spag bol, and a lasagne.

The book feed your family for £20 a week is great for similar tips.

I made a list of all the things I use regularly
(bread, cheese tomato sauce,cereal, freezer stuff etc) and laminated it, now when I'm doing my list for the big fortnightly shop I go through this list and check what I have in and what I need, i have found that this has reduced the number of times I go to the shop for topups. I also check expiry dates on meat etc as I put it away and make a note on my phone calender so that if something gets forgotten I have time to freeze it.

Both of these have reduced my food bill and food waste

Do you have pets, sometimes cat food for example, can be expensive

Liver is really cheap and really good for you. Lots of people don't like it, but you could make a batch of fancy pate for literally pennies and have that with bread and salad. I tend to spend more on meat because I prefer organic free range etc, but I do go for the cheaper cuts and eat less.

Get a slow cooker and cheap cuts of meat are miraculously transformed. You can also use it to make meat or veg stock.

Tinned fish like mackerel and sardines are also really cheap and versatile. Much cheaper than tuna.

Make sure you don't throw away veg, but make a big soup once a week to use everything up, then have that with bread and cheese.

Don't buy the jars of pasta sauce etc - way cheaper to make your own and you can always cook up big batches and freeze it.

I spend between £60 and £80/week on myself, almost vegetarian, small dog who eats fresh veg and chicken, and elderly mil who eats like a sparrow.

Would love to the food plan to feed a family of 5 on £60 (or the £30 that the poster said was possible)

I'm guessing that they have young children, and at least some of the children get free school meals (infants). And potentially one or both parents get free/very subsidised meals at work. Or they have ready access to cut price food on a regular basis. That's generally what comes out when you see the food plan. 3 meals a day, 7 days a week for effectively 5 adults can be done more cheaply than OP is doing it; but there is a realistic minimum below which it's not really very nutritious.

give yourself a figure of how much you want to spend per month on food (for me it's £200, we are a household of 2 adults... but I think I'm quite stingy😁) and then split that down into a per-day budget (for me £6.66 per day) and then you've got a guide to plan your meals within - for instance I can't spend £6 on meat for the evening meal ... that would take up my whole day's budget!

Breakfast usually comes in under £1, and lunch £1-2, so I can spend £3-4 on the evening meal in total. If you go over on one day, make yourself rein it in on another day. I batch cook from bulk ingredients and am a terror for grabbing reduced meat/fish... but this allows us to have a good standard of eating and balanced diet while cutting costs.

Just come to mind, Asda did a series about '1 basket 5 meals' I found that useful for efficiently using the ingredients bought each week.

Hope that helps...

We plan 2 weeks worth of meals and make sure we're always going to use all we buy. Eg, we'll do a veggie and cashew nut stir fry then a veggie and chick pea Thai curry a couple of nights later so all the veg gets eaten. I have a few cook books and a lot of Pinterest pins so we have a huge range of meals and never feel repetitive or bored. We very rarely throw food away, if we've got any veg that's beginning to look a bit sad I'll make a soup for my husband or have some roasted for lunch. We buy enough milk for the fortnight and freeze it. This all stops us doing the expensive top-up shop.
We also eat meat very infrequently and use a lot of lentils, chick peas, beans, cheese, etc. I'm allergic to mushrooms but they're a good protein if you aren't!
Cutting out snacks is also good for the budget but I love snacks so should follow my own advice there.

I know you said you hate it but as a recent convert to Aldi shopping and beginning to get to know my way around its produce, I would seek to persuade you to take another look. As a rough and ready estimate, it saves me about 25% on shopping at my local supermarkets, Sainsbury's and Waitrose. I buy organic vegetables such as carrots at 93p for a bag compared with £1.20 for the same thing at Sainsbury's; organic broccoli at £1 to Sainsbury's £1.20, and organic eggs, I forget the exact price but it's substantially cheaper. Granny smith apples (about 30 - 40p saving per bag of six), peppers, tomatoes, celery are not organic but very good quality and similar levels of savings. I buy manuka honey, brazil nuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, fruit and nut muesli. Their wholemeal pitta bread ( I normally buy in Sainsbury's Waitrose or M& S) is very good, made by Village Bakery and yet much cheaper. Cheddar cheese and butter similarly. I now buy toilet rolls there instead of my usual purchase (in Sainsbury's or Waitrose when on its reduced price rotation) and is massively cheaper in a large pack of 24. There are loads of other goods I haven't even looked at yet both fresh and tinned, bottled or prepared. I've asked myself why haven't I been buying there all these years when it is so good.

Yes I suspect so too.
My teenagers are skinny so eating less food is not an option.

I think until you are feeding large, active teenagers you don't appreciate just how much they can affect your food buying. In both the amount and in some of the habits they can lead you into!

I aim for 1 pasta dish a week but cook extra to freeze, 1 rice dish a week, 1 homemade pizza day a week, 1 fish day and the 3 I do dinners like toad in the hole, roast chicken, mince and dumplings, pork steaks if you buy in bulk its cheaper ie 5kg chicken breasts for £22 normally 17ish breasts a full pork loin for £20 cuts into steaks and diced for sweet and sour ect buy bulk rice and pasta i bulk potatoes ie 25kg sack for £8 i also buy 20kg sacks of flour to make pastry and cakes ect i buy a whole salmon instead of portioned that will do a few meals you can easily half your budget

OP I don't know if someone else has suggested it and I have no time to RTFT unfortunately but I've got a friend who swears by a meal planning app to save her money. It's called Mealime which is a terrible name but it gives her loads of ideas for different dishes then a shopping list. She uses it for the whole week and says the planning saves her a ton of cash. It may be a German app but there will be ones just like it available wherever you are. An app takes some of the fuss out of deciding what to cook and means you try out stuff you might never have thought of.

My family composition is similar and so is my food bill if I just buy what we fancy. Food has gone up a lot in price since coronavirus so anyone rolling their eyes at what you're spending is out of touch, I reckon. Eating some veggie meals is one thing but I don't recommend quorn or other meat substitutes as my experience of having my eldest, who is a strict vegetarian, home from uni atm is that special vegetarian food is massively overpriced (and also not very nice imo, if you look at what actually goes into it).

If you're all omnivores, that makes it way easier. The recipe book that changed my life is the Jamie Oliver Save With Jamie one, which uses a Sunday roast as the key meal of the week and then has a section for each type of meat full of recipes to make with the leftovers. I can easily get to Wednesday doing that and/or put some meat in the freezer for another time, and then finish the week out with veggie/beany/salad type things, something nice on Saturday and start again on Sunday. I have a huge stash of recipes torn out of mags, I don't just use the Jamie Oliver ones over and over. I basically try to make every meal go the distance for two or three days, using a few added ingredients. It saves on oven electricity too. I also use a slow cooker as you can use cheaper meat cuts for stews and curries that way and it's cheap to run.

If you can bring yourself to prep your own chicken, you can save a lot by jointing whole chickens into legs/wings/breasts etc, then freezing til needed, following the instructions in the same book. Part of what you're paying for is the labour that goes into it. I live near a port and also taught myself using youtube to gut and fillet fish so I could buy cheaply direct from the fishermen, but that's a bit niche probably. I also grow my own herbs and salad on the windowsill as that stuff is so overpriced.

Look at your receipts to see which outrageously priced things you're buying and try to find cheaper alternatives (e.g. own brands), make/grow it yourself (e.g. marmalade, hummus, pesto made out of wilty herbs), or just tell everyone they're going to have to live without it for a while (e.g. deli meats, posh cheeses). Puddings are massively cheaper if you make them yourself. A few cooking apples with a flour/sugar/butter crumble takes 10 minutes and costs practically nothing. Buy in bulk when things are on offer, except biscuits and chocolate, which never ends well. Farm eggs are way cheaper than supermarket eggs if there's anywhere near you, but check salmonella-free status (red dragon stamp) if you're pregnant. If you've got time to shop in person at different places, find out who sells what most cheaply, e.g. meat at the butcher, fresh fruit and veg from Tesco, bread from Aldi, or whatever. Price reductions usually happen at about 6pm.

Hope some of that helps.

Lots of good tips above. The only slightly controversial thing I'm going to throw into the mix is, if you have neither already, get an instant pot cooker / electric pressure cooker, instead of a slow cooker. Mine has a slow cooker function as well, but meat is so much flavoursome and tender pressure cooked vs when I would slow cook it in a crock pot. It can also do things like cook soaked chickpeas in 10 minutes rather than 60 minutes on the hob, which means if you cook with beans at all, there could be some savings in there too

Meal planning and batch cooking is the way to go

Buy a bigger freezer and buy any meat when it's reduced/close to sell by date (marks and spencer often have great yellow sticker reduction deals)

Plan meals around reduced fruit/veg - reduced veg can be made into soups and then frozen, fruit into crumbles and then frozen

Limit lunches to stock items - beans, eggs etc. Stuff that can be bought in bulk. Same with breakfasts - porridge, cereals etc

Limit treats to the weekends only

Where do you shop? Can you use a discount supermarket. Aldi/Lidl/Iceland for the majority of it?
Make sure the majority of days are meat free, pasta or rice based.
I think it will be a bit cheaper when they go back to school

OP Do you ever fall in the (expensive) trap that I do and make something completely different for the teen who has to eat later/earlier than the others? On those sorts of days you need a meal like spaghetti bol and use the same sauce but cook a small fresh batch of pasta for the person who has to eat early/late.

Following with interest!

Apart from diet and food tips given, there are lots of online and community sources of cheap food. For example, starbargains, approvedfood, bargainfoods are all online and do delivery...at the point of lockdown during a bit of a food panic, I searched for wholesalers and suppliers of close-to-date food who were local to me. I went to a place in Plymouth that had a warehouse full of cheap food. It was a bit of a trek out of the way for me, but I was amazed at the prices and will return in the future. Some of the stuff sold by these places is junk food, but a lot is just nice...I had a wholesale box of nice biscuits, a boot full of mixed drinks and a case of pancake mix for very little money that has been enjoyed by my family. It was called Rogers wholesale foods ltd, but there are others dotted around the country so look into that sort of thing to reduce your food bill without feeling you are on some Dickens workhouse diet. We had quite a bit of food waste at one point, but I reduced that by making a note of what was being thrown out...so it was not bought again. Supermarkets often have yellow ticket deals on meat, bread etc that is close to best before date. It can be helpful for some people, but supermarkets are marketed and designed to tempt you into buying stuff you don't want or really need. You have to be very strict to go into a supermarket for a bargain and not come out with a trolley of food...well that is me anyway!

Meal planning isn't about repeating the same meals!
We menu plan once a week altogether as a family (3 of us share the cooking) but we probably cook from a repertoire of maybe a hundred or so old favourite recipes and usually have one or two new recipes each week too. We certainly don't have the same meals every week although I know this does work for some people.

Big savings are possible from buying at Aldi, probably 30% off the normal bill so £240 a month for you.