Where's the cheapest place to buy good healthy food?

[FrazzleRock]

ie fruit and vegetables, decent bread which doesn't contain eleventy billion ingredients, healthy snacks etc..

I've just changed careers and am going to be hugely struggling financially at least until May.

I'm a single mother with two very greedy boys and a cat and need to be able to spend less than half the amount I've always spent on food per week.
I usually use Ocado but realise I'll have to knock that on the head.
We have a gigantic Sainsburys around the corner and a Lidl a bus ride away (I don't drive) and a Morrisons and Tesco Metro a bus ride away (in other direction to Lidl)

I find morrisons very cheap for fruit & veg and meat, they have an alright butchers bit and often stuff on offer.

Whenever I do a shop on morrisons I am surprised how cheap it was.

I've been there a few times and left with the hump because I can't find anything. Is it really oddly laid out? Or is it me?

Lidl much cheaper than Sainsburys. Iceland actually sell Vogels and Burgen bread cheaply - most of their prices are £1 or £2 so are often cheaper than elsewhere and there is unadulterated food among the crap.

Can you start going to Lidl say weekly and then just top up from Sainsburys? Online shopping can save you a lot especially if you have storage space.

Lidl/Aldi for basics - pasta, cereals, cheese and so on. Local green grocer or market if at all possible for fruit & veg - nearly always works out cheaper than supermarkets. Indian or other Asian groceries for bulk buying rice, lentils (great for cheap, healthy meals) and much cheaper spices to liven things up. Lidl etc are OK for sliced bread, but for nice stuff it's cheaper to make your own.

No Aldi near me and I don't drive. In fact I hear so much about Aldi but I've never ever seen one!

Lidl I can definitely do and there's a fruit and veg market up the road from there plus lots of Indian grocery shops. I have barely any storage space (small under counter fridge and small under counter freezer) so buying in bulk would be a problem.

exexpat Re bread, I'm very tempted to buy a bread maker. Is it really cost effective? Or is there an easy way to bake bread by hand? I don't really have any space for one...

I'm just thinking it's about 50p for a loaf of wholemeal basics bread from Sainsburys.
But then I've not checked the ingredients so might not be all that healthy....?

Definitely have a look at the market - I always find this BY FAR the cheapest option, whatever volume I'm buying.

I don't have a bread maker, but things like focaccia and soda bread are very easy to make by hand, and you can do all sorts of cheap and easy variations like adding cheese, herbs, olives, sun dried tomatoes (Lidl/Aldi have excellent cheap jars of olives & sundried tomatoes etc) which makes them seem very posh.

If you bulk buy dried things like rice, lentils & pasta, you don't need to keep them all in the kitchen - just decant some for ongoing use into jars or ziplock bags in the kitchen, and keep the rest in a big plastic storage box somewhere else in the house. You really do save a huge amount by not buying rice etc in tiny packets.

I like the seeded wholemeal bread you can get from Tescos, between 89p and 99p a loaf (£1.50 plus in Sainsburys). Also their Creamfield milk, £1 for 2.2 litres versus £1.35 in Sainsburys. Tesco also do a 5kg bag of Basmati rice for £4 which is massively cheaper than the smaller packets. I don't work for Tesco, honest. :-)

oops - just saw you have very little storage. In that case it is little and often, so it must be Sainsburys as they are nearby. Go at the end of the day for the bargains - most 'use by' dates can be ignored by at least a week.

healthy snacks are sandwiches, good filling stuff. Own brand biscuits are fine. Buy whatever veg is seasonal and hence cheaper. Mostly stuff sold loose is cheaper per kg, but not always, so spend some time doing sums.

Try mysupermarket.com to compare supermarket prices. Basically it's usually Asda that comes out the cheapest, but if you find vouchers it can make the others a bit competitive.

Oh I used to use that. Then it was Tesco that came out the cheapest (a few years ago) I can't stand Asda food and have had a lot of trouble with online deliveries for Sainsburys and Tesco. This is why I have been using Ocado. No trouble whatsoever! Worth the small extra expense for decent food and excellent customer service. Unfortunately I don't have the money for it anymore

I LOVE my bread maker.

decent bread is much cheaper using it.... its only really good enough for sandwiches for 48 hours (but fine for toast) but as the loaves are smaller mine doesnt last longer than that anyway.

I recommend a decent bread knife as well so you can cut it more easily

I shop with ocado and find it cheaper than tesco / sainsburys.

I find the ocado organic veg boxes great value, and then top up with fruit and milk and bread rolls and crumpets and tinned tomato type stuff at the morrisoons 5 mins away.

also the ocado flash deals are great (so long as you have the space to store them)

Although you don't need a breadmaker to bake bread, I appreciate mine as you just bung the ingredients in switch on to the desired setting and then forget about it. Takes 2 minutes preparation and you can leave it to bake overnight. If I didn't have it I think laziness would take over and I'd get out of the habit of baking my own.

You'd save money over an equivalent quality loaf and also you know exactly what's gone into it.