Need to cut food budget. Any top ideas welcome :)

[TheOriginalNutcracker]

Me and 3 dc, 13,11 and 8, 1 cat and 1 kitten.

I take a packed lunch 4 times a week and the dc take one every day.

Need to ideally be spending about £55 a week, but currently spending about £75.

I tend to shop online because otherwise I buy things we don't need.
Don't mind using Aldi, but not so keen on Lidl.

Help

Do you already meal plan?

Sort of yes. I make a vague list of meals for each day as I am doing the online shop, but we don't ridgidly stick to it, or i forget to get something out of the freezer and everything goes to pot.

Tbh it is stuff for the packed lunches and snacks for the kids that is sending the bill up alot.

What do you buy? Could you get big block of cheese and chop into cubes instead of babybel for example? Make your own bread? Decant yoghurt into reuseable pots?

TBH i am not sure you will be able to reduce by much.
Fresh fruit and veg is so expensive.
Aldi is good for fruit and veg, very reasonable.
Continue to meal plan and stick to it rigidly.
Buy the basic range of lots of things, especially biscuits, if your dc eat them.
Do you have time to make your own bread?
Buy reduced, close to date food and cook and freeze.

Tbh it is stuff for the packed lunches and snacks for the kids that is sending the bill up alot

This is what I found - so I spend a little bit of time making fairy cakes and freezing them, making biscuits for the week and hiding them, making cheesey balls, making bread and brought tiny tupperwares for sultanas to be decanted into as the sultanas for packed lunches where much more expensive than buying a large bag.

I make fairy cakes with a banana added and one extra oz of flour. I put one in pack-up box

I make cornish farthings something like this or use golden syrup. put two each in pack up box

cheese straws I make with half plain flour and half porridge oats, instead of rolling into straws I roll into balls Put two or three in pack-up box

sarnie with tuna mayo or marmite and grated cheese as it goes further. Or a pasta pot with pesto.

It is a faff getting it all made - but I can't afford to buy all the supermarket tuff any more so make the food instead

Try Aldi. We are in a similar situation as in having to cut food budget for family of 4. I went for the first time ever this week and got a weeks food for £55, with meal planning. I was really pleasantly surprised. I have ways been a Tesco girl and have found i can shop for about the same there if i buy the value range, particularly for snacks such as biscuits etc and the value fruit ( banans, apples etc.) does the dc's just fine. Have you tried the money saving exper thing of dropping a level so if you buy own brand buy value, if you buy branded by own brand etc. That can save money.

what sort of stuff goes in the pack ups?

I tend to look out for whats on offer cooked meats wise and buy that. Tuna and cucumber and grated cheese and carrot are my personal faves as i cant abide packed meats. DP will eat pretty much anything and will often have a pot of 'spread' like beef or sardine and tomato.

Thank's all

Thank you for those recipies ivy, they will be really useful.

They tend to have a sandwich of either tuna/mayo/cucumber or cheese and cucumber. Dd1 won't eat cheese though, well not on a sandwich, so i end up buying cooked meats just for her.
Then they have either flap jack or a cake bar, and grapes, and yoghurt.

I think one of my downfalls is not always checking what we always have in before i do a shop and then i end up buying stuff we didn't need, so i will make sure i double check now.

Will try doing my next weekly shop at aldi i think. I normally only go in for odd bits.

yogurts are not a cheap deal - make jelly or give rice puddng/custard form a large pot decanted into other pots, or omitt altogether and give soemthing else. Same with grapes - they are really pricy now and swapping for another fruit will cheapen your shop

I meal plan every week and cut my bill from £60 plus £10 for allergy boy cat to £30 and £6 for allergy boy cat.

I make use of the basic range where I can (sains basic tea is actually nice, DH hasn't noticed we don't have pg tips anymore) even for things like sandwich ham, chicken etc.

I get aldi vitacat premium cat food pouches and there £3 for a box of 12. The cat goes nuts for them and it's the first time he's ever licked his dish clean at every meal. He has the slightly cheaper £2.40 pouches too sometimes.

If you look on the credit crunch section you'll see the 'value products I reccomend...' thread.

£75 is a complete bargin!!!! I wish my bill was that cheap, I think your doing very well and totally unrealisic to take it lower.

Mine is around £120 and I buy good quality ingredients and cook proper meals.

Assuming now that the average item is around £2.

I dont think its possible at all. We all eat breakfast at home, packed lunches which have to be plentyful for the man as he works long physical hours and proper tea in the evening. Squash, loo rolls etc it all adds up.

You can do a quick equation that if you have a cooked dinner every night including a roast on sunday - no way can you do this for less than £7 per day (£49). A good packed lunch again would have to be £1.50 each - more for hubby (£22.50).

I dont find aldi/lidl that much of a saving the only reason for the saving is that they carry limited stock hence the chose dosent exist. Yes, I buy lots from there but still need to get loads of sainbos. I find some of it false economy like the frozen salmon fillets - they shrink to half the size and a packet feeds 2! The apples can be gross and end up being thrown out.

With 3 children to feed I think your expecting too much.

I manage to feed 5 of us, with 2 daily packed lunches, for about £50 a week, and we eat well.

Do you eat a lot of meat? SInce we have stopped eating meat 5 out 0f 7 dyas a week the weekly bill is much lower. Agree with rigid meal planning and once a month do an inventory of what is in the cupboards and freezer (boring I know!) and plan the week's meals around what you have got. I also find it economical to get a veg box delivered as this makes me plan the meals around what we have rather than buying random fruit and veg which don't get used (hope that makes sense!). As you run out of things put it on a list and avoid doing top up shops during the week as much as possible so you are not tempted to stray!

I can usually feed 5 of us (3 adult portions as my eldest DC eats a lot) for around £50 per week. My top tips would be:

Buy fruit and veg from markets or greengrocers. Also as someone else suggested the Aldi special offers each week are good. Buy some Lakeland Stayfresh bags which can keep fruit and veg fresh for several weeks.

Shop at Aldi or Lidl rather than the bigger supermarkets.

Reduce how often you eat meat. Pulses and vegetables are a lot cheaper than meat, eggs work out cheaper too.

Hi,

This recipe is a lovely meat free mid week meal. We are all meat eaters in this house, but neither my growing boys - nearly 14 and 11 along with DH mind having this. I bought a pack of lentils that needed cooking rather than ones that were already cooked as it worked out cheaper - I got 3 meals (x4 people) out of the pack.

Soya mince is good for bulking out meals like bolognaise or meat stews.

Sandwich
Value apple
Homemade fairy cake/flapjack
Chunk cucumber
Juice in a bottle

Can they have jam sandwiches once a week? or peanut butter? Cheap bread is quite yucky but Tesco always have a stand with reduced bread on it which i buy and freeze and that saves me a fortune.

Cook meals in bulk (curry, chilli, casserole etc) and freeze. Put in loads of beans/lentils to bulk out the meat and top up with fresh veg when you serve it.

have a look at www.approvedfood.co.uk it's a lot of end of line/near best before date stuff but some stuff is remarkably cheap. you need to buy quite a bit though to make the delivery worth while.