How much is your weekly grocery bill? Family of 5

[Glitterballofdreams]

Hey I’m just curious as to how much other large families spend per week on groceries. At the moment I do an online shop of around £120-30 and then we probably spend an extra £40 on top up shops.
whats everyone else spending?
thanks in advance 💜

Family of 3 and we spend £100 a week, sometimes £120. We cook from scratch and provide lunches for us all. It includes one treat item a week and cleaning supplies. I add and remove things to make sure I’m within budget. I could make better use of leftovers and cheaper brands if I wanted to.
I think for a family of 5 £140 a week is reasonable if not a little more

family of 5 - everyone takes a packed lunch and we used to spend about £200.

Thank you, it’s great to hear how other families budget. I have a hardworking hungry husband, teen, tween and toddler ☺️ I work 12 hour night shifts & our weekly budget covers breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for us all. I meal plan to make life easier and costs minimal.

I'm impressed you manage to keep it so low. We spend about £170 average with the odd top up week of over £200 and it never seems to go very far. Then the odd meal out on top. All have healthy appetites driven by size and activity level, including the 2 year old human hoover so I suspect a family of smaller more sedentary people could spend a lot less.

Our spending on all groceries averages £90 per week.

Family of four adults. DH works wfh, ds takes a packed lunch to college and dd 2 takes food to uni and her part time job. I'm a sahm / carer to disabled ds.
I cook from scratch and we try and minimise UPF.
I tend to shop at Asda, Morrisons, Lidl and Aldi
I batch cook and keep my freezer full. We eat meat but I tend to use a lot of veg and pulses to bulk out the meal.

If you want to spend less, determined efforts to cut top-up shops helps a lot.
We have a supermarket delivery on a Monday. There are fruits like berries, plus bananas, apples, tangerines and grapes. The berries go first. After that there are no more berries until the following Monday and people eat bananas, tangerines, grapes and apples. We order enough for the week.

Think about what you buy in top-up shops. People seem to ref fruit a lot and sometimes milk. Fresh stuff makes sense but there are ways round needing to do it as mentioned above.

Sekf duscuoline is needed to break a habit of nipping into the Express supermarket on a whim for dinner or something you haven’t got at home….esp if it’s a regular thing. £20 is v easy to spend. So, if an ingredient is missing, do without it until the next shop and use what you have to cook something different. Don’t allow impromptu meal switches unless everything is already in house …no extras allowed. Expect to plan the weekly shop to include stuff for the number of main meals you’ll be at home and lunches and breakfasts you need.

To start with it needs a mindset change and doing an effective weekly shop is a bit of an effort. It’s harder if both adults aren’t on board with cutting out or significantly reducing top-ups. But if both are on board, it quickly becomes the new norm and I think many families would save £100-£250 per month.

Of course, if you’re happy with what you’re spending through bigger shop plus top-ups, all fine. But it is an expensive way to shop and means you probably buy more and spend more in total.

When all 5 of us are home it’s about £250 per week. We eat a lot of meat and fish. So it’s not all from the supermarket; some comes from the butfhers/fishmongers.
Doesn’t include all meals though as I often get lunch out at work as does dh and we go out for dinner quite a lot.

5 adults 150 a week is budgeted. Some weeks we go over, some weeks go under. Doesn't include cat food, cat litter, loo roll or rice, which we buy on subscription

We spend about £300 per week but that doesn’t include cat food, all toiletries or school lunches. We don’t even drink alcohol.

£400 per week 2 adults 3 kids.

About £70 per week. We don't eag meat or fish though. No alcohol

I try for £150 for humans. We have 4 adults and 2 dogs.2 adults are gluten free and one of those cannot eat mustard,cellulose and another one cannot eat peanuts. 1 is vegetarian. I do bake as well. Dogs are around 23 a week which is separate. I do buy toile roll in the £150 but tend to use Savers for toothpaste/ toiletries etc. It is tricky and sometimes I am over by 20 quidish.

Genuinely interested in what you buy? I don’t even think our Christmas shop comes to that much.

You know it's funny because I always come onto these threads and wonder how on earth people can spend any less than I do with an equivalent family size. I shop in asda, aldi and lidl so I'm not going to an expensive store. I can't explain why my food bill is so high except to say we eat well, we eat meat almost daily, we eat healthily and the cost of food is high! This figure includes toiletries and cleaning products. Excludes dog food and we don't drink alcohol!

we eat similar, but it must depend on the age of your kids! Our spend is about £150 but all our kids are under 8. We always say we dread what our bill will be when they are teens. Eg last night we had sausage and mash, but got through 11 sausages!! We get about 50% of our meat from the butcher so could reduce some costs there I suppose.

Yes my two eldest boys eat like horses and they eat a lot of meat! They are very fit and active though! I can only see my food bills increasing whilst they grow!

I suppose it does vary a lot depending on age of kids, appetite etc.

People also eat differently - some families might eat cereal or porridge for breakfast whilst others might be eating eggs, bacon etc every day (eggs for example have gone up so much recently).

Whatever you spend hinges on whether can you afford that amount or not.
And how you spend it. I’m retired with 50 years of cooking experience having been professionally trained during college. We eat well but I’m used to working out the cost of the components to meals and find that a better guide. The other day we had a big sirloin, chips, mushrooms, tomato and peas. Steak were £2.57 each due to buying in bulk from an online butcher. Chips were Lidl’s as were the peas, mushrooms yellow label and tomato one of the last from the greenhouse. So a meal for around £3.50 per head - but if bought in a supermarket, easily double that. The next night I cooked for a social evening for £2.50 a head - cottage pie and peas, plenty of it and made about 50p profit per person served. Plenty of (cheap wonky) carrot, turnip (from a friend’s allotment) and potato (bought by 20kg sack at 63p per kilo).
We had lentil curry and rice the next night at roughly £1a head
I never not know what we’re going to eat the next day.