Food Shopping

[cookiecrunch94]

Hi all, I'm looking for some advice please of how to get my weekly food shopping bill down.

There's just me and DH and we spend around £80-£100 a week on food shopping, including alcohol (ciders, lager), which my DH drinks (usually about £15-£20 worth). He thinks our weekly bill is a bit too much so I've recently been trying to get this down.
I've been making 'family favourite' type dinners and have frozen stuff like fish pie, lasagne, curry etc but I'm still finding that our weekly food shopping is touching the £100 mark most weeks. I think this may be because I buy fresh fruit, nicer meats/fish and the odd bar of nice chocolate/biscuits/cake but I don't feel that this is unreasonable. We very rarely get takeaways etc and eat out probably about once a fortnight.
I plan every meal we are going to have and buy the ingredients, so I'm at a loss of how to squeeze this down further.
I've tried to say to my DH that £80-£100 a week is normal for two people and the new normal (not sure if I'm just trying to make myself feel better and I'm delusional/just used to spending this amount) but I'm unsure of how to squeeze this down further. Thank you.

I think you're correct about this being just the normal range now. For just myself, I spend about 180 pounds a month on groceries (not just the food shop, but everything together in supermarket and grocery type shops, including toilet paper and washing products etc.). So it's not odd to me that for two people you're spending twice that.

Perhaps you need to make him go shopping or take him with you so he can actually see how much things add up .

Sed him to a branch of Tescos where they have athose self scan devices or get him to do an online shop. He'll soon start removing stuff from his basket. Make sure he also has a shopping list.

It depends on what he drinks, but generally I would be really concerned if my partner was drinking £15 - £20 worth of booze week by himself. Three packs of beer cans (£15) would be 21 units and two bottles of average wine (£7.50 a bottle) would be 20 units.

I think with minimal takeaways and the booze the budget is realistic.

Frozen food might help reduce the budget or
Switching to Aldi.

Monitor food waste.

Does it include lunches? If your not spending on lunches either overall I think it's pretty good.

You certainly could spend less / survive on less. But it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable budget. So the main question is whether you need to reduce it. If you do, then you need to sit down together with a few weeks’ worth of receipts and generally agree what can be reduced. But yes everything is more expensive now; for us - some things we suck it up, some things we’ve downgraded a brand/level, some things we’ve more or less stopped buying. Depends on your individual preferences and finances really

My dh now only drinks on weekends and that's helped
Plus we've now done

No fizzy drinks (just squash)
Meal plan every week
Treats such as sweets or crisps for Saturday night only
Supermarket brand toiletries
No kitchen roll
I have soup for lunch
Dh makes a veggie curry and adds protein for his lunch
Frozen veg rather than fresh
Veggie meal one night - squash curry or similar
Beans on toast (or similar one night)

That has helped. It it does just seem to be going up at the moment. We would spend 50/60 a week, it's now 100 ish.

When you do the shop put the booze through separately.
That wasn't becomes more obvious to him that the food shop is reasonable. Keep a spreadsheet to show how much you are spending on booze.

Our food shop is much less than that rate and we have two kids aged 8 and nearly 4. The key rings we do -

1. neither DH nor I drink except for the odd one at a Work Xmas do - so no alcohol budget at all.
2. Every single dinner is home cooked on a Sunday and DH takes them in smaller tubs for his lunch.
3. Every dinner of those dinner is scratch cooked - so no ready foods are involved. This week’s meals include - chicken casserole, beef kofta curry, chicken tandoori tray bake, a veg-heavy bolognese
4. Fruits and veg are seasonal and hence cheap. Currently this means the table is piled with satsumas, apples, bananas and pears and veg includes broccoli, swedes, carrots, squash etc.
5. Milk and cheese are heavily involved as kids consume these lots. There’s always milk, goats cheese, cheddar.
6. Eggs are used fairly frequently- it’s DS’s after school snack on toast, his mid morning snack of choice (hard boiled), we are partial to a Bengali egg curry, and I can’t deal with gluten so almond flour quick chocolate cakes are standard.
7. Sunday roasts are largely chicken or a side of salmon which is a big treat for us as DS and I love salmon.

This doesn’t actually come to a lot of money, because of 1) absence of alcohol entirely 2) lots of chicken and eggs 4) basic even boring seasonal fruit and veg and 5) hardly any pre prepared/processed foods.

@Combusting yesterday you cooked…

chicken casserole, beef kofta curry, chicken tandoori tray bake, a veg-heavy bolognese

correct?

Yep!! Correct. Sunday mornings cookathon mornings. It’s dramatically reduced the mental load of what shall we have tonight evenings and resultant takeaways/freezer food in the week. Why?

the amount of washing up!!

and you have space to store all these meals for 4 plus lunches in your fridge and freezer? wow!

My shop is £60pw for just me (I don't drink)
So no, I wouldn't say your spend is high once you take the alcohol off

We spent £85 a week for a small family with DC and a cat. but we don't drink alcohol.

We do lots of one tray baking and slow cooked meals. and I make dessert every Sunday which uses up all the leftover fruit from the week before.

Banana loaf, crumbles, pies etc

I don't batch cook. What a palaver that would be. small kitchen, small freezer and whatnot.

We spend about £150 a week for 3 of us it’s Dh, me and a very hungry 15 year old! That does include alcohol and all cleaning/laundry products as well. We cook everything from scratch and only eat meat twice a week.
prices are high unfortunately.

mine is £86 per week, just worked it out
use frozen meat/fish/veg