To not be able to food shop for cheaper?

[cheesetriangles]

I’ve tried all the supermarkets possible but can’t manage to get our weekly food shop for less than £100.

(£100 is inclusive of all food, toiletries, cleaning products, detergent, vitamins, kitchen/loo roll, tin foil etc)

It’s only two adults eating but we do have to buy some free from products in that. We don’t buy alcohol. I’ve been to all the supermarkets and just can’t do it for cheaper at any. We eat very little meat, maybe the weekly shop includes two meat products that’s it. I wish I could save on this but maybe that’s just not practical with the cost of living? AIBU?

2 adults and 3 children here. No formula, nappies or wipes - but we have a toddler in reusable nappies still and so I have to factor in all the extra detergent.

Ours is about £150 per week and we don’t shop carefully (as in, we don’t have to count pennies but we do shop at exclusively in discount supermarkets). This figure doesn’t include any booze but does include toiletries. We eat meat for 6 meals per week (6 dinners - meat free on Mondays and we don’t have meat in our lunchboxes)
Some weeks it is closer to £180, when there is Fairy washing powder to be bought. I usually get this in XL packs on Amazon or eBay.

Some things we do to keep it down:

1. Lentils, lentils, lentils baby. I put them in with mince for bulking, I toss them through warm salads. I add them to all curries, tagines etc. I am mad for lentils.
2. No expensive fruits. We’re apples, oranges and bananas all the way. Once I ditched the berries, I sliced about £40 off my shopping each month. I do still allow grapes. Haha. I miss melon.
3. I wash my hair (and that of my children) every 3 days instead of every 2.
4. We keep our potatoes and onions in the fridge now, against generalised advice.

We also use no kitchen roll, order our loo rolls online in bulk (good if you have the space) and we only buy 1 kind of cheese now. The all-purpose cheddar in mega-block size.

What the dickens are you eating?

I think you are spending a lot, I don't spend anywhere near that.

Give you an example though, my dad and I both eat a lot of rice. He buys those Uncle Ben's microwaveable sachets, very easy and convenient, about £1.40 a go but that's not very much in the grand scheme of things is it?
I have a 10kg bag of basmati rice that costs £13.50 and works out at 8p a portion.
Could you look at bulk buying?

If you're a coeliac, then possibly prepared in an environment where there may be some slight cross contamination means that to you, it contains gluten unless proven otherwise (i.e. labelled gluten-free having been tested as containing <20ppm).

What bothers me is that precautionary labelling of that kind (may contain, produced in a facility which also, etc.) is optional, so even if I buy products with no gluten-containing ingredients and no may contain warnings, it might still theoretically have been trailed through a pile of wheat flour anyway. The only thing that's truly safe is items labelled gluten-free, or which can be adequately washed. But we can only do our best, and check everything. Even fucking prawns.

I mean, seriously, FFS. You can't go all "well actually" on the prawns containing gluten, then follow it up by admitting the label says it might be just a teensy weensy bit contaminated — or, you never know, maybe not! — with the protein that prompts our immune system to attack our internal organs. I don't care how many "slight"s and "possibly"s you put in there, the medical instruction is to avoid it altogether. The damage may not be immediately obvious for some, but it can have serious long-term consequences regardless.

Think id start meal planning sort whats in cupboards and make a list, stick to it, buy mince and veg make cottage pies bulk up with lentils one to eat one for freezer, omelettes with peppers and bit of cheese, home made soups from left over veg ,i made a roasted tomato ginger and orange soup the other day it was delicious, wish i could remember how i made it😀for lunches.
There are web sites that offer vouchers off ect may help a little, i find going shopping rather than online you can get better bargains especially late evenings.

Can you buy in bulk? Most supermarkets now have a huge bulk section for foods and things where I am, eg a jar half the size of my body

Do a weekly menu plan and only buy what you need for the recipe.

Do jacket potatoes more often.
Make omelettes with egg and a bit of milk.
Batch cook spag bol and freeze in portions.
Make pastry and do a left over veg pie.
Make veg soup.

Buy plastic bottles and dilute shampoo.

If you have a garden, grow some veg when you can (not right now as It's not growing season, but maybe next year).

It's awful just now though. Every time we do a shop, things have gone up in price.

£80 per week one adult, two teens. You have to plan plan plan your meals. One mince split into two meals saves some
money. Don’t get sucked into buying the unnecessary crap. Tin foil? You should be using reusable Tupperware.
kitchen roll? Washing up sponges? Use a dish cloth and wash it. Asda rewards is pretty good. Even if I only have a few quid in my cash pot of a week it still makes a difference for when I’ve ran out of something.

Think I must be doing jacket potatoes wrong, my son says he hates them as they "taste of disappointment" 😂a shame as they are so cheap!

My husband and I can have a full shop for around £70. This includes meat every night, toiletries, household products and treats. I think you need to focus more on home cooking with fresh veg and meat, as this is much cheaper than buying pre packeted meals and free from stuff. If your cooking all your food yourself you don't need to buy much 'free from' foods, maybe apart from bread or whatever it is you cant eat. I don't drink dairy so this £70 includes dairy free milk and cheese alternatives. Also try Aldi or Asda, they are the cheapest from my experience. Sometimes we do spend over £100, its easy to do, but only when we are buying more convenience type foods, like ready meals or pre marinated chicken, stuff like that.

Sometimes shopping for cheaper means changing what you eat, or at least some of the time. No snacks as they are costly - or buy to make snacks rather than ready made.

@GetBackIntoBed They're lovely and cheap right up until the point you insert enough butter to turn it into potato and butter soup make them properly tasty.

And also until the point where you blast them in the oven for a bit to give them proper crispy outsides. (I'm all for starting them off in the microwave, but if they're only microwaved, the disappointment vibes are strong.) Maybe some people put them in an air fryer instead? I haven't got room for one unfortunately 😓

£5 worth of mince is a lot for two ppl tho. Wouldn’t that be about 500g? I would easily stretch that for five ppl so your £10 dinner would do two dinners.

I'd love to go through your £70 shopping list (including brands) and see how that would cost out if I tried to do the same shop, but swapping out items to the nearest alternative based on my household's medical requirements (gluten free for both of us to minimise home cross-contamination, low sugar for me, SLS-free for toiletries or cleaning products with sustained skin contact for DP). It would probably still come out lower than what I actually spend, because we don't cook from scratch every day and do buy snacks and treats, but I bet it would be a lot more than £70.

Reading the whole thread …. Wow @Spirro 200g of red meat a day?? The NHS (I just looked it up) advises no more than 70g and if you are eating more than 90g each day then you should cut down.

Red meat esp if processed is a massive probable cause of bowel cancer among other nasties.

@Spirro
It's a false dichotomy to say that we eat EITHER lots of protein OR cheap unhealthy carbs. There are alternatives. What about a mediterranean-style diet with lots of vegetables (fibre, vitamins, minerals- also taste and cheapness etc ), some pulses (protein, fibre, minerals, also very cheap) plus a very moderate amount of fruit, fats, and wholegrain carbs. I have cooked that way for at least 15 years for someone with T2 diabetes and the GP calls his blood-sugar levels 'exemplary'. No medication has been needed, his levels are controlled by diet alone.

Also, where are you getting your suggested daily protein consumption figures from? They are more than DOUBLE what (for example) the British Heart Foundation recommends for healthy eating: https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/nutrition/protein

The science-based British Nutrition Foundation says the same as the BHF:
https://www.nutrition.org.uk/healthy-sustainable-diets/protein/?level=Health%20professional

So, in the USA, does Harvard Medical School:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/how-much-protein-do-you-need-every-day-201506188096

Re Gluten Free

On a different topic, gluten-free cakes are easy to make and taste good. For example:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/gluten-free-lemon-drizzle-cake

or this:

And this is dairy free, as well as gluten free:
https://www.nigella.com/recipes/chocolate-olive-oil-cake

There's even a gluten free Christmas cake:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/fruit-filled-clementine-cake

@Clary - sorry - cross posed. Great minds think alike!

Gluten Free

Link to this cake mysteriously did not appear. I'll try again:
https://www.nigella.com/recipes/lemon-polenta-cake

For us, its a only a seasonal cheap meal.

Potatoes are shockingly expensive here at the moment, we can get baby potatoes reasonably priced, but not a nice big one suitable for a jacket potato meal.

I have been very creative with baby potatoes, but not quite creative enough for a loaded jacket spud.

If you tell your ds they are a serious treat in some places right now, maybe he will look at them as as 'taste of excitement' 😀

(I am bloody craving one now.....)

I made a fantastic tasty vegetarian lentil shepherds pie yesterday (Sophie Dahl recipe) I'm not veggie by the way

There's only 2 of us but I would say enough for 5 large portions- used those merchant puy lentils and very nice mutti tinned toms and it still only cost me £6.50 to make - totally gluten free - about £2 a portion max

Sorry Crikey, those lentils say "May contain traces of a gluten containing cereal".

Yes, I know there are many other lentilly options — I'm just trying to really hammer home how having a medically-required diet means constantly rethinking, finding alternatives which aren't exactly the thing you want — less convenient, not quite the right thing, more expensive, etc. etc.

£100 a week for 2 of you? I manage to feed me my other half and 2 kids for £120 a week and that includes nappies and bulk oat milk and all of our lunched! We do a lot of hello fresh and alternate with gousto. Maybe give that a go.

Again back to what I said about living on cheap carbs and developing diabetes. It’s not healthy to have 100g of meat and 300g of pasta to fill you up cheaply.

A portion of protein should be the size of your fist. You should be having a 200g portion of meat and maybe 50g of pasta. Not cheap white pasta either - good quality whole grain pasta. And not cheap fatty mince - the expensive 5% fat mince which is a fiver for 500g.

Nothing wrong with carbs, they can make up up to 65% of our calories perfectly healthily, although I wouldn't do that myself as protein is more filling and kind-of more nutritious. A mince portion isn't 200g, it's 90g, the size of a pack of cards. https://www.bda.uk.com/resource/food-facts-portion-sizes.html The best way to pad out meat to make it stretch financially and nutritionally is probably cut it with lentils, for instance. Although most people can benefit from having plenty of other veg in there instead/as well.

Of course it pays to buy a larger container of meat- they are slightly cheaper than the same stuff in a smaller packet per kg. Bulk batch cooking is very organized and convenient; for her 10 meals the pp only has to actually full-on cook once (unless you count reheating the meal and cooking the pasta.) The person doing 2 portions at a time would have to cook-cook 5 times for the same amount of meals.

Potatoes are shockingly expensive here at the moment, we can get baby potatoes reasonably priced, but not a nice big one suitable for a jacket potato meal.

Are you in the UK? The four packs of things that call themselves 'deluxe (or maybe large) baking potato' or something are somewhat expensive. But a big bag of baking potatoes at 64p per kg is 31p cheaper per kg than baby potatoes, and makes a perfectly reasonable baked potato https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/en-GB/p-natures-pick-baking-potatoes-25kg/4088600188669