Eating healthy is too expensive

[ByLoudSeal]

Big shop just cost £150. I don’t buy organic, and I will go for own brand if the taste/quality is fine. Includes fresh veg, tinned fruit, meat, eggs, milk, bread, a box of cereal, tinned meals, healthy snacks, toilet roll, fabric softener, disinfectant spray and washing up sponges, It won’t even last the full week and is unsustainable

I got Colgate toothpaste for 80p
Sainsbury's do a colgate toothpaste for £1. that the usual price. I don't know why people buy the £4 - £5 ones.

Also, which supermarket was this from and do you buy brands or own brand/whatever's on offer.

For example, a tin of Heinz soup can cost £1.70 or is frequently on offer where the price per can is £1. Or you can get cheaper soup, eg M&S tomato is nicer than Heinz and 70 p a can. If you're buying so much soup, the savings can really add up.

You could also make soup of from leftover vegetables and dried pulses, bits of spare meat etc and the price per large portion will likely be even less.

It's not the volume of fruit, it's the fact its in a tin!!

Why not just buy fresh, seasonal or frozen?

Maybe it’s something that can be cut but I wanted to give a variety of fruit and it doesn’t go off in a tin

Still don't understand why people go on about fabric softener. It costs nothing over a year and such a tiny percentage of the average grocery bill that it's not worth worrying about.

Everything adds up and the easiest way to save is to just leave out unnecessary stuff. Also builds up in your machine, causing mold, and in the fibres in your clothes, meaning they don't get clean when you wash them.

To be honest, I do sometimes buy brands for example, heinz was on offer for £1 a tin and the idea of batch cooking soup is a good idea but I don’t have much freezer space so once I’ve bought the frozen veg there isn’t the space for batch cooking unless I buy a new freezer which I can’t afford right now

You can do variety over a month, just buy a few kinds each week.

We are the same, end up spending up to 150 for lots of healthy food and there is only two of us plus a baby. Really need to rein it in.

Of the type of fruit the OP is buying, tinned probably isn't more expensive than fresh and probably not a significant component of the bill, that's probably £10 at most on fruit. Mangoes are expensive full stop. Plus hard to judge ripeness.

At least she's not buying a punnet of blueberries per person per day and claiming she's only buying basic essentials.

I'm spending at least £160 a week at the moment, for 2 adults and 5 children. That doesn't include the 2 dogs and the cats food.
I have 1 autistic child with ARFID, so he's very limited on what he'll eat, I'm celiac and diabetic, so my diet is quite strict amd expensive, and my husband eats 5 eggs just for breakfast each day! We must go through at least 70 eggs a week with everyone else eating them, baking, and yorkshire puddings on a Sunday. Lots of meat too, though I'm vegetarian. I meal plan and have stopped buying snacks, but things are still definitely going up when I thought it was meant to be reducing a bit at the this point.

I do a weekly Waitrose shop for that including alcohol and cook healthy meals from scratch. With a bit of planning I could do it for less.

If you are buying 8 tins is that soup twice a week? Just cook soup for 8, you eat half, half in the fridge.

The mangoes were £1.20 like the other tinned fruit

Pears are certainly cheaper fresh

For how many people? Do you meal plan? I find if I don’t meal plan to the absolute T my shopping ends up costing £££.

I’m vegan so we don’t buy meat so I do get this impacts the total a bit but I do buy the occasional meat sub as a treat and £60 a week does us great. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners. We eat really healthy but this does mean I have to cook a lot. I do the main bulk of my shopping at Aldi and then nip to Tesco afterwards to grab a couple of branded bits that you can’t usually get there.

😂

It would be healthier to focus on seasonal fresh fruit and frozen for berries/more exotic. Hopefully the tinned fruit is not in syrup or even juice because the sugar content will be sky high. Your kids health is unlikely to be negatively affected for want of mango......

Eggs are probably a cheaper and much healthier alternative to tinned soup for a quick meal. Even baked beans likely healthier.

I would look st the receipt, see what are the most expensive items and try to do some swaps.

That is an awful lot to spend op, we spend around £100 a week for two adults, a child, baby and cat including all nappies, formula and cat food. I also wouldn’t call your list that healthy, with tinned meals, tinned soup and tinned fruit. I’d cut the tinned stuff and make fresh instead. Buy apples and bananas and one other type of fruit a week for variety. Cut out some of the more expensive meat, you don’t need beef and lamb in the same week, use cheaper meat like mince and have a couple of vegetarian meals a week as well as one very cheap meal such as jacket and beans, beans on toast or homemade tomato pasta. Add fillers to meals like cheap garlic bread (38p for a baguette in asda).

Also you really don’t need fabric softener or to buy sponges each week.

A whole mango is £1 and will serve more than 2 people. It’s definitely not cheaper or healthier to buy tinned.

I went to Sainsbury’s the other day for a top up shop and spent £100 on 2 bags of shopping! It’s crazy how much more expensive everything is now.

For us it’s more expensive to buy fresh in case it goes off

My thought would be it's the meat driving it. And maybe the tinned meal, especially if branded, driving the price up. Heinz are so expensive these days, even when offer a lot of the time and 12 tins could be astronomical. I'm vegetarian and do most of the cooking, so most of our meals are meat free This is my meal plan for the week (five days, we're away his weekend) for two adults and at Lidl the shop cost under £60 - including fabric softener! We have milk delivered and will top up with eggs from a local shop so maybe another £10 on that. Weekday lunches this week are omelettes, and snacks are nuts roasted in herbs/spices. We generally skip breakfast.

Would it be worth adding costs from your receipt to the shopping list so you can see where most of the money is being spent? Then that might give you a focus area, than everyone guessing where the spend is really coming from.

I don’t know if it’s just my connection but the photos you have attached are blurry and unreadable