Dreaded food shop!!

[Mumofboysteamginge]

Hey!

We are a family of 6, we have 4 boys that seam to never be full!

So our monthly food bill is coming out around £950 per month and it just isn’t feasible anymore!

We normally shop at Aldi for the majority of our food but go to farmfoods and home bargains for the bits we can’t get in Aldi. I go weekly and spend about £200 then we spend about £30 per week on bread and milk and top up stuff.

My boys are 10,9,4&2 but they have large appetites. We cook as mush homemade meals meat and veg as we can and the kids love their fruit!!!

Just wondering where people shop, where do you find is the best value and how much you spend roughly per month!

Seriously I must be doing something wrong 😂🤦‍♀️

Hit me with your ideas!

What is a typical day’s or week’s menu?
What sort of fruit do they eat? A bag of apples is a lot cheaper than a punnet of strawberries for example.

I shop at Lidl but spend less than 1/3 of what you spend for 3 adults.

I think the savings are going to be more around what you buy than wear you buy it, also managing waste

My mum made my teenage brothers fill up on bread and butter at the table and mash and potatoes as they had bottomless legs. Lots of veg too. No snack unless they bought them themselves - no pop likewise.

Fruit was apples, bananas and oranges.

this week for example
Monday - pasta bake and garlic bread
Tuesday - gammon egg and chips
Wednesday - jacket potatoes cheese & beans or tuna
Thursday - Midweek dinner - chicken, veg and potatoes
Friday - takeaway pizza and chicken nuggets wedges
Saturday Chilli and rice
sunday - beef dinner

Thats this week and most weeks are similar pasta dish, rice dish, 1/2 meetfree days.

On a Saturday we do a fry up, bacon sausage eggs beans toast.

Packed lunches for all 4 kids

I do buy a mixture of fruit such as apples, oranges, bananas, strawberries and grapes.

I don’t know where they put it all!!!

What about breakfasts and snacks?

We don’t have much waste at all, what I buy does get ate.
The only branded stuff I buy is the cereal from farmfoods because they are bigger box’s the box’s of cereal from Aldi are so small they last at most a day and a half.

They have cucumber and peppers, fruit, crisps, biscuits, crackers with soft cheese, yoghurts basically anything they can get their hands on!

I'm not surprised. I just did a shop (there's two of us eating two meals a day) and it came in at £110 (Tesco). No wine. £12 on meat. £30 was for pet food though (two dogs two cats) which will last 8 days. £25 on vegetables and fruit. The rest on tea, a couple toiletries, bread, milk, sponges, paper towels. Nothing extravagant. No desserts, no biscuits or snacks. It won't be the only food shop this week either - I'll have to spend another £30 I think topping up.
Four boys - ooff! When my son's at home he can eat what me and my DD do put together! When my stepsons lived with us we'd think we had a loaf of bread and a pack of bacon and eggs for breakfast, but Saturday night a couple their mates stay over and it's all gone on their midnight 'snack' when they got in!

I don’t think that’s particularly expensive to be honest. We easily do £500 a month with just 2 adults and DD, so add in 3 more kids and I’d say that is probably what it costs to eat well sadly.

950 a month sounds like a lot but by my calculations it's actually less than £2 per meal per person which doesn't seem like a lot, not sure this is actually helpful info though!

Watching with interest.

3 adults (one of whom is dd18, rarely eats at home), dd13, ds13.

Typical weekly meals:
Lasagna and salad
Spag bol
Chicken roast and veg, ypuds etc
fajitas
Toad in the hole, veg, mash
Chilli and rice
Chicken and bacon pesto pasta
Sausage pasta bake
Freezer tea (I get the 10 items for £10 from Iceland, so this covers 2 meals each)
Full English
Beans on toast
Eggs on toast
A 1.3kg gammon joint from Aldi for sandwiches mon-Fri.

We spend around £180 a week, shop Aldi or Asda. Always get laundry items and toiletries that are on offer.

We also go to our local shop (coop) 3-4 times a week for fresh produce and bread.

I feel our meals are boring and far from fancy but we are paying a fortune for it! Everything is homemade apart from freezer tea, wish I knew where I was going wrong.

That works out around £40 per person per week which I do think is on the higher side when you factor in the 4 and 2 yo will be having much less. Are you having big portions of meat and cheese - could you bulk out with more potatoes/veg instead?
Crisps and biscuits aren’t filling so I’d steer them away from those if possible. Can you buy popcorn kernels and pop them at home, or make homemade flapjacks? And swap them to porridge instead of cereal? Oats are cheaper and more filling. For yoghurt are you buying individual/kids’ ones - can you swap to the big 1kg tubs of natural yoghurt if you get through a lot? Could you reduce frequency of more expensive fruit like berries so they’re eating mostly cheap ones like bananas?

To give you an idea of my cheaper meals :

Yesterday had couscous, pork chops and salad (cost was £4.20 for 3)
Today we have paneer & spinach curry and rice (cost £3 for 3)
Tomorrow we have lasagna (also on Thursday as it serves 6 and there's only 3 of us) £4.10 for both meals plus remaining lettuce from yesterday.
Lamb mince and chickpea tagine comes in at £4. Dal and rice is 50p a head ... we don't each much in the way of English food I realise, roast pork maybe one a month and that costs £10 in total but I have leftovers for 2 more meals

I have 3 boys and spend about £100 a week on food(plus dc and I will usually have lunch out once a week, nothing expensive). I find shopping online makes me spend less because I can see how much I’m spending but also I can shop and plan meals around special offers I’ve tried Aldi but found it ended up costing the same/more as my weekly Sainsburys shop
I tend to add the bits for meals first and the add extras. Little ways to reduce costs are buying big share packs of things like crisps and yogurt and sharing them out instead of individual packs. We don’t have a roast every week and when we do it’s usually chicken which is usually cheaper than a joint of beef.

What kind of yogurt do you buy?
Individual pots are more expensive than big ones.

Also swapping things like beef mince for pork which is much cheaper. Or buy one pack beef and one pork and combine the both and make a big batch of bolognese (for example) then freeze half to use another time.

Omg!! Really!? That’s actually surprised me. Made me feel a lot better about it.

Exactly this… my older two boys and dh always complain that our teas are boring and the same stuff 🤦‍♀️

Thank You for the tip it’s really helpful 🙏 didn’t think of combining the mince.

I do buy the individual ones for packed lunch etc so I may try doing this and buy some smaller tub wear (which the boys will somehow loose the lids for!) 😂😂

😂😂😂 I’m going through a loaf of bread and 6-8pints of milk a day… it’s a killer. I must say I know when they are very poorly because they completely go off their food. X

Hi! When all 4 of mine lived at home i would make a pan of soup a couple of times a week, then give them that when they came in from school. It's cheap and more filling than just bread. Then they wouldn't be pestering for snacks before tea. I also found that the more food we had, the more they ate. So I bought less snacks, and less easy to cook food. Means they don't mindlessly rat their way through all the treats. Teach the older two how to quickly fry or scramble an egg, that makes a great filler too. Hummus and pitta is cheap, as are carrots to dip.

I shop online from tesco, it means I can really control what I spend. I'm really experimenting with more veggie stuff too, like bean dishes, veg curries, veggie burgers. Tonight we had paneer, potatoes, cauliflower and spinach curry served with chapatis, an egg, yogurt and mango chutney. Easy and filling. I find things like Greek yogurt, parmesan cheese, seeds etc make a boring meal a bit more interesting for not a lot of money.

Also being flexible with what you eat can help. I buy ingredients that can make several different meals. For example, minced beef might become bolognese, or cottage pie, or chilli, depending on what I have left in the fridge, or our mood.

Recently I've been ordering more frozen meat and veg too. Yesterday we had crushed broad beans and peas served on toast with ricotta for lunch. Sounds fancy, took 5 minutes to make, cost hardly anything and filled us.i found the recipe on Instagram, where I save loads of seasonal ideas from the likes of Jamie oliver, what your doctor eats, mob etc. The more I watch the more inspired and confident I become to.try new things.

For context, we are 2 adults, 2 teens (adult portions) 3 cats. Our food is around £85 a week. This includes breakfast x 3, lunch x 3, dinner x 4 and snacks for everyone.

Have you thought about buying the economy brand cereals at somewhere like Tesco. The Aldi brand cereals tend to be supermarket standard equivalents rather than the economy equivalents, if that makes sense. I bought Tesco’s cheapest Weetabix the other day and it was perfectly fine, but a lot cheaper than the normal Tesco or Aldi own brand.

I am not sure whether this is doable for you give the ages of your younger ones but buying fruit and veg at the market saves £££. You would also get more variety as it’s more seasonal. Last week on the market I got two massive mangoes for a pound, much bigger than the ones you get in the supermarket for about £1.80

Going pescaterian has helped a lot. We are a family of 2 adults and one child (who eats like an adult most days), plus a cat. We have fish twice a week. DC has meat at school, and twice a week we pay for an after school club which includes a hot dinner, and those nights we have a spicy but cheap adult-dinner, like kimchi with fried rice, or chickpea curry. School meals are free so that helps. DH and I go to the office once a week each and those days we get a free lunch on site. In that context, we spend about £450 a month, but we do buy nice bread from a local bakery, and sometimes fresh croissants.

I do agree that kids just eat whatever is there so maybe buying less snack stuff might be helpful. We buy big yogurt pots and mix it with fruit and honey for nice snacks. I also buy frozen berries for porridge which works out cheaper.