Cost of weekly shop?

[flowwithit]

How much is yours?
We are family of 4 dc 11 and 13yrs and ours is £150 ! I think that's too much so I must be going wrong somewhere.

Well obviously, I'm not some kind of slattern!

I do of course buy one enormous chicken every seven weeks. I have a freezer full of chicken stock to make soup with as back up. It's lovely with oats.

We total about £150, too, but that's for everything (including cleaning stuff and booze) and we rarely eat out.

Two adults and a cat - £55-ish.

We spend £70 a week for 7 of us and pets and that includes cleaning stuffs and toiletries.

Yes.But we shop monthly.Lidl for most and market for fruit and vegetables so much cheaper than any supermarket.Have potatoes delivered 25KG for £6 and 30 Free Range eggs for £3.We did spend £680 a month with Asda and no meal planner.

Advic, you cannot spend £30 a week and have that cover three meals a day for the whole family. If people are having a free hot lunch at work/school and eating at a relative's house at the weekends for one or two meals, then possibly it can be done. But the absolute minimum I could manage for a healthy diet without making my own nut butters and so on (as in the £26 a week diet) was around £35, for a sustainable meal plan with sufficient nutrients and calories.

I did not do that underline thing that is banging on about belly fat, btw, if you are getting that link. Don't know what is going on.

What's the belly fat thing?

It keeps coming up underlined on my PC and taking me to a cartoon about tips to lose girth. Does it on yours?

Ahhh that thing, yes - I know it. I think it said something like 'stop eating sugar' or some other wondrous tip.

I used to work for the supermarket that must not be named doing market research and a lot of people would not really know how much they spent each week.

We ould ask them to give us a rough average, they would say £40 for my family of 4.

Then you would ask them how much they spent on the last big shop, and they would say £40, three days ago. The you wuold ask them how many top up shops they had done in the past week and they would say 2. They spend £20 on one and £20 on the other. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

So I do take these threads with a pinch of salt.

I have a milk man and pay him about 20 quid a month

I shop at Lidl and Sainsbury, as I love the fresh fruit and vegetable selection at our lidl, but there are a few things I can't get at lidl for example decafe coffee - as I get ground and I like the dowegberts make. I also like the boxes of tomato at Sainsbury and they add olives and garlic which I use with a tin of tuna to add to spaghetti or use as a pizza base.

I use lidl liquid soap as at 55p it is nice and a bargin compared to Sainsbury liquid soap at 1 quid. I bulk buy soap powder at Tesco or Sainsbury when it is on offer - that way i know I am getting a good deal and I am fickle which ever soap powder is on offer will be fine - four large boxes will last me a year.

I have dd14 and ds4 so for the three of us I usually spend about 80£ a week on food maybe a extra 10£on cleaning products and toiletries. My children eat for England so i do tend to bulk buy fruit and veg and I generally cook from scratch. The other week they literally ate everything in the house but are thin as rakes

We spend around £200 per month for me, DH, DD7 and DS4, oh and a small dog. We can do a £30 per week shop but thats only if we have store cupboard essentials. We eat very well on this amount. I cook most things from scratch and we only eat meat 3-4 nights per week. Most of our meat is free-range or at least rspca monitored standard. This amount is not only food but loo rolls and cleaning items too, and we dont have any free school meals in this house either.
Feeding a family healthily on this amount can be done but its not easy, it takes up a lot of time cooking, meal planning and shopping around. This is not a matter of choice for us after all the bills are paid we only have £200 per month to feed us. If we had more to be honest I would spend more, but please dont think that all families with a small food budget eat crap, if fact we eat a lot better than others I know that have double our shopping budget!

So much of it comes down to knowing what to do with random pieces of cheap but wholesome food. Very many people from all backgrounds simply can't open a fridge and think, "Ah, yes, root vegetable and lentil curry tonight, omelettes with bacon bits tomorrow night, home made pizza Wednesday and toad in the hole Thursday, yes, I have enough food in for the moment".

I cant just open the fridge and think up recipes off the top of my head either! I have to meal plan before I go shopping so that I know I will have enough food to get us through the week. I have loads of family cookbooks (which I got from charity shops) that I have marked the pages of good wholsome family meals. I agree that a lot people may find what I do hard, as I do, but i'm just saying with a lot of hard work I can feed my family on a small budget with out giving them fish fingers and chips every night.

We spend about £110/week on 2 adults and 1 DC. That does not include our two cats who we have to order specialty food for as they have some medical issues 2 bags of food every 3 months for the cats is £80! We also eat out at least 1 day a week. On top of that we do a major Costco staples shop once a month for £175 (boxes of wipes, nappies, meat, etc). This does not include alcohol as we seldom drink, but will include a couple of newspapers and a magazine in the shop.

However we do eat well and I have seen some of the menu plans for the meals that involve serious food budgeting and they are usually things that would never be eaten in my household.

An example of our meals during the week:

Monday - BBQ - Rack of Ribs for hubby, pack of Organic beef sausages for DC and me. Marinade for Ribs. Salad (Advocado, tomato, onion, rocket, homemade dressing), Jacket potato with butter and sour cream

Tuesday - Falafel wraps -Falafels, Homemade Tztatziki, mixed leaves, cabbage, carrots, lemon

Wednesday - Turkey Stir-fry - Turkey breast strips, bok choi, garlic, ginger, onion, pea pods, water chestnuts, mushrooms, bean sprouts, soy, chili. Rice with egg, peas, spring onions and Shaoshing Rice wine.

Thursday - Pork fillet for hubby, Beef Fillet for DC and I. Homemade herb butter. Baby asparagus with Hollandaise. Potato Dauphinoise.

Friday - Homemade burgers topped with mushrooms and cheese. Oven wedges.

Saturday - Eat out

Sunday - Roast organic lemon chicken, Roast carrots, onions, potatoes. Homemade Yorkshire puddings. Homemade stuffing (bread, celery, mushrooms, onions, fresh herbs). Homemade gravy.

So this is an example of our meals for a week, an impossibility on a small budget. An organic beef fillet steak cost £7.00 for 1 and I am buying 2 and pork for hubby that is about £18 on meat for 1 meal alone...not to mention the other stuff that goes with it.

I also shop around and buy stuff at a range of supermarkets including Lidl.

I think it is all relative on what you like to eat. There are other things I would sacrifice before good food.

I had cauliflower, celery and a lone onion left in the fridge so made cauliflower soup and added garlic and stock. Put on some bread to make in the machine and that saves having to go shopping for another day.

I hate shopping for food, so rarely do top up shops and have my milk delivered to help prevent this having to happen, I make my own bread and have the flour delivered in 12kg bags (it is cheaper)

Keeping a good stock cubboard means I can delay shopping for two days if I really want to and probably would get by with 4-5 days with a visit to a greengrocer if I am skint.

It is only though as I detest shopping and see it as a waste of time, probably why I like lidl as it is quick and easy 20 minutes and I am home again. Go to Sainsbury about once a month to top up seriously.

Can I ask a kind of related question, how much food do you throw out per week. Have been watching this programme on TV Too good to waste, it is about food, heating and petrol etc, the second episode really looked at food waste and was quite interesting. I throw out next to nothing and know if I spent £150 on food and wasted none I would run out of space quickly so do people throw out at lot or are people like me?

£150 if includes everything is reaonable mine run around the same to .me , ds 1 who is 18 , ds2 is 15 , dd i 9 and ds3 is 6

£100 a week for the five of us (including a teen and nearly teen with huge appetites).

Can probably add another £30 or so to that weekly for mini-shops for bread/milk/fresh veg etc.

We waste virtually nothing. Things that are really uneatable by humans - peelings, two week old leftovers, gristle etc from meat, all go into various familiars that we have hanging around.

Bones from meat get boiled for stock several times before being fed to the dogs or composted. Most leftovers go into soup or "leftover buffet lunch" which is Saturdays or get re-used in other meals. Very rarely things go mouldy (that makes me mad!!) like some tomatoes that went mouldy near the stalks in the fridge this week. I cut out the mouldy bits and stuck them in the oven last night with the pork fillet and new potatoes, spot of salt and pepper, some olive oil, yum.

Have to throw away 3 satsumas that had gone mouldy this week and fed a little leftover rice to the chickens. Some peelings to the guinea pigs.

£150 a week for 6 of us. Add top ups of £10 a week for milk, bread etc. Includes packed lunches, nappies, cleaning stuff etc. Does not include alcohol, we don't buy it regularly. I expect this to rise by at least 25% as the little ones get bigger. We eat well, plenty of fruit and veg, but not organic. We eat massive portions too!