How much do you spend on weekly shopping?

[arabella36]

I'm amazed how much I spend each week. We are just 2 adults and one baby! What do other people spend weekly on food? I'm wondering what's average.

Ah, we definitely spend too much on booze. We drink about 3 bottles of wine a week plus there's always white wine in the wine cooler. We rarely drink white but I think it looks awful to walk into the kitchen and see it empty. It's door side of the island and just looks better in full. Maybe I should refill the empty bottles with water!

about £65 for 2 adults, 4 kids under 8

Corriewatcher, virtually everything is own brand, good proportion of it is value / basics. I only buy a few branded items regularly (diet coke, branston pickle, harpic loo cleaner, fisnish dishwasher tabs) and pick others up when they're on offer as they sometimes work out cheaper than own brand (e.g. kenco coffee in this week's shop).

Money savings expert web site have a downshift challenge. The aim is to buy a level below what you normally buy, so if you normally buy branded, try everything own label, if you normally buy own label, try value.

If you can't taste the difference, then carry on buying the cheaper product :) we've found we prefer some of the value items anyway (jaffa cakes!)

Around £200 for food and household stuff

Two adults, two children ...

It's amazing how much wine meat and fish actually cost!

About £400.

But we drink like fish.

I spend approx £80 per week on everyday stuff. This includes magazines, baby formula and cleaning stuff. I also do a large Costco shop once every two months and buy meat/ loo rolls in bulk.

Probably around £400 pcm.

Family of 5 and at the moment am averaging at about £500 a month. At one point it was around £700+ a month and then I did the The Grocery Challenge on the Old Style Moneysaving Board on the forums of Moneysavingexpert.com and got it down to £350 but it has crept up over the last 3-4 months I have to admit.Some is I have relaxed a bit and some is the price rises I think.

I menu plan weekly (am probably going to draw up a rolling 5 week plan with notes on what needs to be bought each week sometime in the new year.) I have 4 meals as slow cooker meals or prepped and ready in half hour meals for Mon-Thur. This saves time and money as I have a meal ready at evening meal time and I am not tempted by getting a take away as I have no time. I always try and make sure I make a bit more than I need and freeze any portions left over. These are good for end of the month, money is a bit tight meals or time is short and need a quick dinner meals. DH quite often takes one into work for lunch as well.

Although I menu plan I don't do it so Meal A in Mon, meal B is Tues etc. I just have the list of meals and decide which one I want as each day comes.

The children have lunch boxes to take to school as I have one who is gluten intollerant and one who is gluten/dairy intollerant. This is another reason why I cook and bake (cakes, bread, biscuits etc.) from scratch.

I do a food order online every week, though if I have a five week rolling plan then I hope to cut this down to fortnightly and then eventually monthly. I tend to go between Tesco and Sainsburys. I have had problems with short dates on Asda food delivery.

I also use Approved Foods as well

Two adults and one toddler, about £250 per week (more if buying Neals Yard toiletries). Our food is mostly vegetarian, organic and from Waitrose.

I think about £100 a week or maybe £120 for 5 of us. I used to do a big shop but now tend to shop about twice a week at Waitrose as my daughter works there and i also work in the area near the store.

i tend to buy mainly their own range. The fish in there is very expensive but some of it is very reasonable

how on earth do you make 1 chicken = 3 or 4 meals for a family of 3 - how big is the bloody chicken or do you all just sniff it ??
and 200gr of mince = 3 meals each of 3 people
please tell me what these meals are - i can make a damn good stew from a pound of stewing steak feed 3 people x twice but that's with chopping the meat into very small pieces are using LOADS of veg

We used to spend between £50 and £80 in morrisons before i started meal planning and shopping at Aldi and theres 2 adults and 3 DCs. Now we spend between £23 and £35 per week. I cook everything (more or less) from scratch and if its not on the list it doesnt go in haha!

Mollymole

Chicken day 1: Roast chicken/ pots/veg/yorkshires
Chicken day 2: Chicken curry with rice/ popadums
Chicken day 3: Stir fry inc loads of veg and rice or noodles

200g mince/ couple of handfuls of lentils/3 tins tinned toms/loads of grated veg inc mushrooms/wine=

mince day 1: spag bol
mince day 2: lasagne
mince day 3: +beans and spices = chilli con carne

The chicken was roasted and then 1/3 of the meat frozen in two portions. Meat sauce made as a huge vat and then made into 3 different meals and frozen.

Have a look at MSE Old style forums or Economy Gsstronomy

Gastronomy

I do find that buying a joint can do 2/3 days where as buying separate meat for those nights is much more expensive.

The chicken is a standard sized chicken. It is known as rubber chicken on MSE as it stretches over 3 days!!

Peachybums you are a shopping/cooking genius!

mollymole, I can make a chicken feed my 5 kids (20, 18, 13, 11, 8) for a least 3 meals and soup.

I buy a standard free range chicken and cook it in a big pan of water with a carrot, onion, celery, salt, pepper and bay leaf. When it is cooked, I split it into 3 or 4 portions depending on what's on my menu. Usually I would make a portion from 1 breast or leg. The meat from the bottom of the carcass and wings gets set aside for soup, then the carcass goes into another pan of water with a carrot, onion, celery, seasoning etc and simmered for 24 hours to make another batch of stock.

The chicken would be turned into things like pasta bake, chicken and veg pie, chicken and veg casserole with dumplings, spicy chicken tortilla bake, risotto, curry, creamy apple juice chicken and veg, potato bake.... You only need a relatively small amount of chicken to make any of those.

The 2 lots of stock get turned into soup, a chicken, rice and veg type one and a cream of chicken or chicken noodle type one. Usually a pan of either does 2 lunches, so 4 dinners and 4 lunches for 5 from one chicken.

I can also spin out 1lb of mince to feed them 2 or 3 times like Ben10 above. Cook the mince onions and oxo cube, add tinned toms, frozen peppers, other veg. Then divide up and use as the base for meals. You could make shepherds pie, chilli and pasta bake by adding a few more basic ingredients. Or you could make tacos, spag bol and dirty rice or any number of other things.

I spend a maximum of 90pounds a week on our shopping, all in for 7 of us, so I have learned to be creative.

Haha i need to be a shopping/cooking genius im skint this year!! Amazing what you can do when you have little money lol. The amount of food we bought before and just threw away was discusting, now we use everything up, bulk out, batch cook, freeze you name it. My nan bought me a slow cooker and bread maker for xmas so il be locked in kitchen from next week, DP wont see me for a month pmsl

£100 for 5 big uns and a dog.

2 adults, 1 DC, 2 cats - spend about £100 per week at Sainsbury's.

We buy everything we can from sains as i can't be arsed to go shopping in town. Cook almost everything from scratch, eat mainly veggie food. All dairy, most veggies & any meat we get is organic.

thankyou ben10 and stressedHemum - very good ideas - i shall give this a try although I am still a bit worried about there not being enough protien for a balanced diet if this is main meal

mollymole, we don't need to eat as much protein as most people think, certainly not at every meal (I think that WHO recommend 10-15% of nutritional intake.) There is plenty of it in the meals that I put up, especially as the chicken is usually combined with a grain component (like brown rice/wheat flour/pasta) or a dairy product which are also good sources of protein.

THe body is able to store protein so as long as we eat a good, varied diet it's all fine because we will be able to get/assimilate all the nutrition that we need. In here, the children would eat the soup at lunchtimes but alternate the chicken meals with vegetarian ones like mac and cheese/lentils and rice/tomato pasta with some cheese on top/some kind of beans with either rice or tortillas/scrambled tofu/nut burgers or whatever, so they get plenty protein in their diet. It works the same with the mince meals or whatever meat I happen to cook (4 meals plus soup from a lamb joint/3 or 4 from a pork roast etc.) I haven't eaten meat for over 30 years so all my protein comes from alternative sources.

Someone should explain that meat-fact to my husband!!