Sick to death of grocery costs (1k/ month)

[Icannotbudget]

Our grocery bill has slowly increased and is now around 1k per month. This is for two adults, two very active teenage boys, and two dogs. This includes everything you would get from a supermarket eg personal care and laundry/ cleaning stuff.
Both kids are neurodivergent one in particular is very fussy and would rather go hungry than eat ‘cheap’ food. The older one just seems to need constant protein.
I am vege and pretty unfussy but don’t like freezer food. No alcohol and i shop at Aldi as much as poss but do use other supermarkets too.
DH works long hours and Ive just gone back full time and really struggling its impossible to cook from scratch every night.
Not sure if I want sympathy or strategies to be honest, its crippling me and im feeling really down.

This seems insane. Are there areas you can cut back? We shop in Asda and for 2 adults we spend £250 a month! The dog food is £50 a month on top.

White vinegar - much cheaper than soda crystals - works just as well and no, the laundry doesn't smell of vinegar when it's finished. I actually add a few drops of essential oil to the vinegar anyway, so the clothes have a nice 'fabric conditioner' sort of smell when finished.

How long would be acceptable for you, to believe that this is a real problem?

Sauces - if only!

IMO £250pw is excessive.
I would like to see a post where there are alternative good but cheaper products to the big brands, ones that are comparable in taste too.
For example M@S Mayo and Tomato Sauce are both just £1 and IMO are better in taste than Hellmans and Heinz. Their Baked Beans are 45p and better than Heinz etc. Waitrose now do a great value range and Pasta is so cheap. I regularly only cook every other day because I can make one meal and turn it into another the next day such as Spaghetti Bol to Shepherd pie. Roast beef dinner to beef curry. Roast chicken dinner to chicken fajitas. There are no such thing as leftovers in our house! The slow cooker and air fryer are your best friends. I also use the local market more than a supermarket for fresh fruit and veg, and there is little pre packaging.
I have gone back to using washing powder instead of pods, its cheaper. Daz is the best all round. Regards cleaning products we have been conned into thinking we need one spray for bathroom another for kitchen etc . Total nonsense one spray bottle with half bleach half water does it all, and a good old fashioned bottle of Cif does the rest.
Animals are problematic as they like what they like and it can be hard to find cheaper alternatives, but buying in bulk will save. We have 3 cats who were only Whiskers cats but I have fooled them with Aldi supreme...;))

'My child eats only President butter', 'my child eats only Lurpak', 'my dogs only eats that and that', 'my child wears only Nike trainers'.

I can't even. All I can say: you lot deserve everything you get. Bunch of ...

Melted butter is a pasta sauce right 😬

ODFOD

Iceland food warehouse is also reasonable prices and offers. Go with a pensioner on a Tuesday and it’s 10% off. They do fresh stuff too.
If you have a heron foods they sell yoghurts etc about to go out of date.
My dc has food texture issues (probably arfid) and doesn’t do sauces at all or mixed foods like bolognese, casserole, chilli. So I can understand how tricky it is.

Do you have room for a chest freezer? We have one in our shed. I go for yellow stickers (get to know what times reduce) and will freeze bread, meat, whole chickens etc.

We are a family of 4 adults and 1 asd child. I do a weekly online delivery from Asda which is usually around £100. Il then nip to co op or Tesco for top ups in the week usually around £30 a week. That includes all cleaning, toiletry's and alcohol.

Fill up with lots of slow cooker meals, beef chilli, beef stew, turkey chilli. Do some pastry to go with it which is simple and filling. Add bread with every meal. Rice puddings, custard and swiss roll. Boil eggs and keep them in the fridge for a protein snack, same with chicken breasts. Pasta, pasta and more pasta with pesto. Greek yoghurt with a spoonful of jam. Porridge and full fat milk. Pretty hard to keep the food bill low though I agree.

If you have a Costco near you (or even not so near, go with a near empty tank and fill up there as petrol is cheaper) it's worth getting a card if you can. We buy loo roll, laundry detergent/fab conditioner, cleaning products, pet food and cat litter, tinned goods, meat and chicken there. Also some treat things like their own brand of Nutella and giant boxes of Kelloggs cereals. Tofu too. A 1kg tub of Lurpak is a fiver. If you have space somewhere for a small chest freezer it's worth investing.

I shop the yellow stickers in M&S and Tesco express daily, today I picked up mince, salmon fillets and Jolly Hog sausages for less than half the original price. Again, you'll either need freezer space or you will need to adapt to cooking with what you find on the day (I do a mixture of this, for instance if we have leftover mushrooms and cream in the fridge I'll make a sausage stroganoff with the yellow sticker sausages I've picked up) but I know you say you're tired of the slog and I understand that too. So much of my time is taken up by shopping/prepping/finding a recipe but meal planning does help with that.

We are a family of 5 and one of the kids has ARFID and is insanely restricted in what he will accept but luckily one of those things is 99p Aldi frozen pizza. It's hard, and food costs have rocketed.

Yes, it certainly is in this house 😂

Our groceries are about 1k a month. About £400-£500 per month eating out takeaways on top. Used to be about £600 groceries and £250 takeaways eating out.

Before anyone @me I don’t care and won’t respond. I’m responding to op to agree food has increased a lot. We work hard, earn a good salary and that’s our luxury. It’s not a race to the bottom.

OP it sounds like this is unsustainable for you. We’d save a lot by cutting out high end brands. Also, dare I say it, the fresh food and the nice meat is what costs ££££. You’ll have to tell them to stop. We could easily half our bill before even looking at anything else if we had to by doing this.

What prices are coming down?

The multiple high maintenance dogs with food intolerances each need to get a part time job and contribute to the household bills. They are so spoilt and indulged really and costing families a fortune.

I'm only buying essentials and its coming to £100 pw for 1 adult, 2kids (includes toiletries etc) . Cant afford meat. The last shop I had to choose between cheese or tuna for the weeks protein - its quite depressing really . Meals are dull. Today I made cost saving porridge and veg soup that were both rejected by DCs. YANBU.

It's very difficult to stop being vegetarian for cost issues. I wouldn't be able to at all.

To be fair, President butter is rather good. The only advice I can offer, however, is to invest in a butter dish.

I can totally see how your shopping bill can come to that, as a parent of two kids with food issues incl an eternally hungry teenager! It’s hard without knowing you all and seeing your shopping lists to see where you could cut back. I think the best thing would be to look at your receipts and look at alternatives. Are you using everything you buy? Or does some of it get chucked because you cba cooking it? (No judgment, that happens in my house!) If so, be honest with yourself about what will and won’t be eaten. Ready meals are so convenient, but it’s just as easy to boil some pasta or stick a jacket spud in the oven. The Aldi version of lurpak tastes the exact same to me. Snacks wise, it’s perfectly reasonable to get a couple of their faves and then some cheaper things and say “look, this is what you’ve got for the week, when that’s gone you can have a slice of toast and peanut butter”. It’s ok to eat the cheaper things they like twice a week too. If they like bolognese, one pack of mince can stretch to two meals with extra sauce.

I think a lot of people have different definitions of batch cooking. To some it’s preparing all the meals for the week all at once, say on a weekend afternoon.

To me, it means that when I’m cooking chilli, instead of cooking just for that meal, I quadruple the ingredients and cook a huge chill that I can then freeze three quarters and eat one meal there and then. So I have cooked once but made three other meals for the next three weeks.
It takes no more time than it takes to chop the extra ingredients. But you do need more freezer space.

The first definition means exactly the same amount of time spent cooking, but just a different distribution of time. Useful to some, but not giving the benefits of cook once, eat 4 times.

I do always wonder why anyone ‘has’ to have Lurpak. What’s wrong with British butter - don’t they feel like supporting our own farmers, rather than Danish ones? Aside from the fact that Denmark is pretty much Factory Farming Central.

IMO a lot of the popularity of Lurpak is down to their evidently massive advertising budget.

And yes, before anyone asks, I used to buy it when we lived in the Middle East and it was the only butter available. Never thought it anything special, though.

And if we’re talking CoL, U.K. brands are usually cheaper.

Because teenagers (boys in particular) have the greatest calorific needs of any age group. They need to eat.

DH (probably ND - he's an engineer!) didn't get enough food on his plates at meal times. I understand that careful budgeting by his mother was needed because of their incomes, but he was growing to become a broad-shouldered 6ft 4 man, much taller than his father and brother. He was shamed for eating too much, to the point where his nicknames were pig related and continued until after he'd met me in his 30s. He used to steal food from the kitchen, and never learned to stop eating when sated because he had to eat what he could when he could. This caused him to overeat as an adult once he could have as much food as he wanted. We've been working on this together for years.

We've just spent £225 in Tesco for a week's food for 4 of us today (with £40+ savings on Clubcard etc). Next week will be cheaper as we do a Asda/Tesco shop one week and Lidl/Aldi the next. Some meat (on clubcard offers) had gone into the freezer as I'd ran that down a little. We buy the premium Gourmet cat food, that our 3 cats like, in bulk online. We stock up on toiletries, family favourites and cupboard staples when they are on offer.

DD2 is ND and I involve her in meal planning as much as I can. I took her to Tesco one week and showed her how Clubcard savings worked and that week she was able to make a couple of switches as she could see the savings and likes a bargain. That might be worth a try - if it's control rather than AFRID it might help. She won't eat wet food or mash and only eats raw veg - including broccoli, cauliflower, swede, onions, most salad, and loves fruit.

I have a 20yo DS and honestly I try. He is at University half the time and our food bill virtually doubles when he is home ( DH, Dd and me the rest of the time). This Easter holiday just gone we had serious words about this, he thinks 2 eggs in the morning is a small portion and drinks a pint of milk a day. What I have started to do is refuse to buy certain things until what we have has been consumed. With the 4 of us home it is £160-£180 a week and I think I shop and cook carefully !