the great food shopping budget challenge!

[Stargazing]

a few big expenses have forced me to take a look at whee we can cut back a bit... we spend, on average, £100 a week at the supermarket. There's me, dh, 22 mo dd and 6 mo ds. We eat very healthily - lots of fresh stuff, lots of organic, not much meat etc etc - but fruit & veg sure do add up, esp when you're buying all the organic stuff and have a penchant for things like mangoes and raspberries, rather than good old apples and pears.

So I have set myself a challenge - to cut our weekly expenditure in half. Who thinks I can do it? My husband doesn't!! I'm going to start by ditching Sainsbury in favour of Lidl and start simplifying our food choices - we can still be healthy without being gourmet, right???

Feel free to post advice, tips and words of encouragement!

soap nuts! Newspaper and home grown

I would second buying stuff like lentils, polenta, spices etc from an asian grocer rather than a health food shop. You get literally 10 times the amount or more for the same price.

Riven - we get through a loaf a day as well. i am seriously considering a bread maker - will need to save for it though.
My DS1 is 100, but the height of a 13 year old with an appetite to match. he can easily eat 4 slices of toast for breakfast.

I prefer Aldi to Lidl, don't know why i'm not keen on lidl though.Mind you, last time we went to Aldi we spent £80!

Obviously he isn't 100, the puppy jumped up on the keyborad. he is 10

Saltire your DS is doing well to have such a good appetite at 100

A breadmaker is a real winner if you are disciplined. We make a loaf every day and it works out cheaper than shop bought even though we use poncy organic stone ground flour from a windmill etc.

Unless you have your own allotment and or farm, I really dont see how you can be ethical on the cheap.
It isnt possible.

I did a shop on Saturday from Asda online. I also did one with Tesco at the same time and I wrote everything down that I bought, amount/size of product and price. I tried to get everything like for like and pretty much everything from Tesco and Asda was the same.

Asda came out £10 cheaper.

But I still spent £100 and that will last us a week.

The annoying thing too is that I know Aldi and Lidl are cheaper because we've used them when we have lived elsewhere but now we dont have them.

My mum swaers by Aldi. They are on a budget due to big cock up by her council with regards to her rent, plus my arsehole idiot youngest brother lives at home and doesn't work or contribute to the household in any way, but eats like any 6ft 4 man does!

tpl - how much would you reckon it costs to make a loaf of bread then? By the time you've costed up flour, yeast etc.

I reckon 80p max, plus the cost of electricity. That is using organic flour, butter and sugar and Dove's Farm yeast, all from our local health food shop (which is not the cheapest but I prefer to support them). A loaf of bread from the bakers costs £1.40 and is not remotely organic.

I have started to use Aldi for cleaning products, salami, mozerella, parmessan, sun dried tomatoes in oil, olive oil, and their version of lurpak spreadable. On the 1st week ,I came home and put the same items into the Sainsburys online page, they would have come to £51 there but from Aldi I paid £35.

We only have a tiny store near here, so the rest of the shopping is at Sainsburys or Waitrose.

I think there is a website where you can type in your bog standard shopping list and it compares the 4 major supermarkets and tells you which is cheapest, and then there is a link which directs you to the best price and submits your list for you.

I got my first veg, fruit and meat box delivered last Friday, following a mumsnetter's recommendation. I got:

1 big lettuce
8 medium tomatoes
1 cucumber
3 lots of broccoli
shedloads of broad beans
green & red peppers
carrots
garlic
mushrooms
6 eggs
tofu
big pot of yoghurt
small punnet of strawberries
5 bananas
4 oranges
6 apples
6 peaches

and in the meat box we got:
2 x bacon
2 x sausages
1 enormous chicken
big pork roast
800g cubed lamb
800g chicken breasts
600g mince
600g braising steak

For a cost of just under £92 for 3 of us (me, DH and 3.4 yr old DD) - now that may sound extortionate, but the meat will do us over 2 weeks and hopefully a bit longer, so that actually works out at c.£59 a week, which isn't bad for all-organic produce and my God, it's delicious!! The pork joint has done us 3 meals already and I reckon the chicken will make another 3 and some soup.. I'm gonna need a bigger freezer!

I buy all cleaning products from LIDL or pound shops, or wait til my friend is going to Costco/Makro and tag along to buy stuff like bin bags, kitchen towels, nappies (hopefully not for much longer, only nighttimes these days!) and wipes in bulk when they have offers on - we're not halfway through our loo roll stash that I bought in January! I also get a 38p bag of bread flour from LIDL (and free fresh yeast from Asda) once a fortnight to make bread (we don't eat a great deal of it, it's mainly for DD). Butter is Tesco value unsalted at 85p per 250g (cheapest I've found anywhere) and the fridge in the shed is currently full of Flora buttery as they've got it on BOGOF at the moment and I use it for all the cakes and biscuits I make. Sugar seems to be cheapest in Asda too, again I buy in bulk whenever there's an offer. I'd love to be organic with cakes and biccies but the difference in the cost of sugar and flour is astronomical, so I take the view that as they're not a major part of our daily diet they don't need to be top quality, iyswim...?

I've been trying out some own brand cereals on the family recently and here's what I've found.

My children will eat Tesco Cornflakes instead of Kelloggs quite happily but they won't touch the Tesco Rice Crispy alternative (are they called Rice Snaps?). They will eat Lidl Bixies instead of Weetabix; the taste is fine but the teture is slightly less crumbly. The Lidl Bixies Swiss style musli also got the thumbs up and is much cheaper than Alpen. I did try some Asda smartprice cornflakes but no-one would eat them. The smartprice musli wasn't that great either but dh ate it once I'd mixed it up with some other stuff.

That might help towards shaving a few pounds off the weekly bill.

which firm do you use, lovecat?

any new suggestions/updates?

Yes I'd be interested in looking at that too Lovecat.

i don't know if it will be helpful to you if you are particular about things being organic but i posted a few days ago asking for what i could buy on a budget of £15 and it's still lurking round the top of the board somewhere.

I don't buy organic as i can't afford to and found some very useful suggestions were posted through the week.

Also, I've started meal planning lately rather than just going and getting stuff, i don't plan as tightly as what we have on what day, just enough for a fortnight (we shop 2 weekly) and we eat what we fancy out of what we have in. i found that cut my costs quite a bit before my budget became sooooo tight.

I am glad to see I am not the only one who think farmers' markets are really expensive. I get quite annoyed when every so often there are articles in the paper, etc. about how everyone should save money and save the environment by shopping "locally". That might be true outside of London, but not in London. I have tried using my local butcher and farmers' markets, but it just ends up being too expensive.
I agree that local markets and greengrocers are cheaper than supermarkets - but it's sad that the reason why they are often so cheap is because the produce is from outside the UK.
We went to Borough market today, just for something different, but I was very disciplined and instead of buying the usual expenisve bits and pieces, I bought some yummy cheap fruit from the non-local/gourmet stalls - e.g. raspberries for £1 (from Holland).

I use www.mysupermarket.co.uk . Used it today and my shopping was £102 at tesco, compared with £104 at Asda, about £120 at sainsburys and £135 at Ocado. I always thought Asda was cheapest but has not been on last three shops. Also this book and website seem very good www.thekitchenrevolution.co.uk . You can use the principles if you don't want to splash out on the book.

I have posted this before, but this site is really good for meal planning and they show a shopping list and have some good tips on using leftovers.

ooh great link - i will use this. tried the kitchen revolution and love it but need to adapt it to make it a bit cheaper for our family of 5