What are families honestly spending on their weekly food shop?

[Catty21]

cost of weekly food shop - Our food shop cost is crippling me. Our weekly food shop is £300 for 2 adults , 14 year old and a cat. My husband thinks that’s normal and is just the cost of living when I know my friends are paying half that. His response is well they are not being honest and they are actually paying more.

I can’t continue paying £300 a week, it’s insane I know . I’ve tried talking to him that it’s too much and he’s blaming me stressing over it on “ time of the month” as usual.

My question is , honestly what are families spending on their food shop weekly.

I'm assuming they divided the cost if herbs, stock, garlic etc.

I use 500g beef £5
2 large onions 40p
2 tins toms £1
1 tin lentils 50p
Grated carrot 8p (60p per pack)
Tom puree 20p
Stock, herbs, garlic £1
Wholewheat pasta £1 (if that)
Cheese 50p

I might add other veg. Cook low and slow. Served 4 adults plus 3/4 extra servings. Not difficult at all.

Ok you are spending £40 a WEEK on food.

For 42 meals and snacks. For a whole week.

Come on.

You are getting 42 meals from Marks and Spencer’s for FORTY POUNDS?

Can you explain this to me please. Thanks.

AI agree this can’t be possible. This sounds like a top up or luxury shop! Or snacks and breakfast for a family who eats out a lot!

this can’t include three meals a day for seven days for two people plus cleaning and toiletries!

£40 in marks and Spencer’s wouldn’t possibly cover 14 main meals, never mind breakfast and lunch!

Ok but they added a side salad plus mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes and it cost £4 for the whole thing. I understand the concept of dividing the cost but I absolutely don’t believe £1 can cover spaghetti, salad, onions, garlic, tomatoes, sun dried tomatoes, mushrooms, lentils, stock etc! No matter how many times you divide it up!

And yours has already come in at a tenner, proving my point!

Its ok, didnt take it as rude or goady lol
Well in the week we are at work/school so packed lunch for kids or school meals twice a week and we get fed at work luckily!
How though?
We eat a mostly vegetarian diet for health reasons, but do have a sunday roast. So this clearly cheaper with not much meat.
We meal plan and cook a meal on a saturday like Thai curry or spag bol or something which does us 3 seperate nights (as kids have lots of clubs so need something quick on some nights)
Other meals are like jacket potatos, some type of salad (or soup in winter)
We dont drink alcohol.

It occurs to me that portion size is also a factor here. My late MIL ate very sparingly. We eat loads, masses of fresh fruit and veg etc. Someone managing lunch as half a tin of soup, half a slice of bread and an apple is not going to spend all that much.

Because pp got mince for £3. A jar if sundried toms can be about £1.25, mushrooms often discounted, as are salad bags. Salad leaves are £1 full price, mushrooms the same. Again, you don't need the full amount.
I also only guesstimated the cost of mine, I know if I wanted to I could easily get it to £1 per portion. For example the pasta is more like 70p, tomato puree 5p, stock etc is probably closer to 20p.

I don't generally serve salad with mine so didnt include it.

The point is, for around £1/1.25 per person you can serve a filling, healthy meal easily.

Don't overlook Waitrose/Ocado.
I go into the app and click on 'offers'. I can pretty much get all I need from 'offers' and 'meal deals'. It usually costs 2/3 of the actual total.
They want your custom.

My Spag bol (not including the meat, because I'm assuming your jar of pre-made sauce does not include meat):

1 onion (15p)
1 carrot (7p)
1/2 a courgette (the other half goes into another meal later in the week) (26p)
1 tin of chopped tomatoes from Asda (46p)
about a quarter of a tube (Asda own brand) tomato puree (18p)
couple of cloves of garlic (5p)
Teaspoon of marmite (Asda own brand) (6p)
Dash of Lea and Perrins (5p)
sprinkle of herbs (Asda own brand) (5p)
Dash of red wine or balsamic vinegar (Asda own brand) (6p)
Handful of porridge oats (Asda own brand - stretches it out and also is very nutritious) - (3p)
Total: 1.42, but it makes 2 servings for our family of 4 (2 adults and 2 young children) so it works out as 0.71 per meal.

So, 2p dearer per meal than the Tesco own brand jar, but absolutely delicious and more nutritious.

With the chicken pie, if you're buying ready made pastry that'll already bump the price up. It's £1.20 for Asda own brand pre-rolled pastry, but if you buy a 1.5kg bag of Asda flour at 70p, it's about 9p for 170g of flour to make pastry, and 67p for the butter, although you could go for lard instead to bring it down to 17p, so 27p total for the pastry. Chicken thigh meat is much cheaper than breast meat, you can make your own stock by boiling up the carcass every time you have a roast chicken, and the veg in a classic chicken pie is pretty cheap. If I was making a chicken pie it would definitely cost closer to the £4 than £8 mark.

The thing with cooking from scratch is there's no upper limit to the amount you can spend, you could buy all your veg and meat from a posh farmer's market or have kobe beef flown in from Japan by private jet, but if you're actually trying to get your costs down, then you can.

It also sounds like you're adding up the cost of buying a whole packet of each ingredient. But one important aspect of saving money on your shop is minimising food waste, so for example you buy a big pack of chicken thighs for your chicken pie but put half of it in the freezer. And if they only sell leeks in packs of three, you think of another use for the other two leeks later on in the week.

So your vanilla extract will cost £2 to buy, but then it will sit in your cupboard for 6 months to a year, so I doubt your homemade cupcakes actually do cost much more than £1.20 in reality (as long as you're not buying the expensive flour and the £5 pack of butter and the Clarence House eggs...)

£100 a week…2 adults, 2 toddlers. And I think that’s a lot if I’m honest!

@Greengage1983 nutritious? In what way? It’s 166 cal a portion and doesn’t even contain a serving of veg??
This is the jack monroe school of eating cheaply. Yes we can all eat for 70p if you don’t mind being malnourished. We need calories guys, the calorie intake on some of these super cheap meals is totally inadequate.

I was replying to the comment comparing homemade spag bol to a 69p jar of Tesco's ready-made bolognese sauce. I'm presuming she meant this one. So if you'd like to tell me how my sauce made almost entirely of vegetables contains less vegetables than this sauce... 🤔And I did very clearly say that that's JUST the sauce, so as to provide a like-for-like comparison with the jar sauce. You obviously then add meat and pasta, and cheese, and perhaps a side salad if you like too.

This is the jack monroe school of eating cheaply. Yes we can all eat for 70p if you don’t mind being malnourished.
Such a dismissive comment... has it ever occurred to you that not all of us have the choice..?

Because I have 5 portions at least and I said not much more then a £1 a portion
Tin of toms - 36p
stock pot - 30p
Pinch of herbs -5p - probably less
Couple of cloves of garlic - 30p?
Onion - 15p? ( in reality free as they were given to me )
Half a tub of mushrooms -37p
third pack of spaghetti - 25p ( only cooked two portions of that )
Garlic bread - 36p
Sun-dried tomatoes - £1.69 a pack, I used perhaps a 5th of a pack - 33p

And believe the price of the mince - I got it yellow stickered. Our Spars stock local butchers meats

Edit to add I forgot the lentils - handful - 10p?

And I also forgot the salad, probably about 60p worth , bit of iceberg, couple of tomatoes, cucumber, peppers - ( peppers and tomatoes were free to me )

Pie is so easy

I buy a good old reduced chicken, pressure or slow cook it saving the stock

Strip off all the meat

Chop some cooking bacon, cook till the fat renders and then add around a kilo of sliced leeks - if not in season a bag of frozen works just as well, soften really slowly with some tarragon - fresh or dried , salt and pepper, When soft, add a good size dessert spoon of flour and cook out. Add the chicken stock ( BTW you need a big saucepan for this ) , add back the chicken cut into chucks , and at this point you can add whatever other veg you like, when veg at biting point, fill pie dishes. Now you can top it however you like - short crust , puff, filo pastry or a potato or mash veg topping and shove in the oven

You can of course enrich it with creme fresh or cream

The original recipe is Jaimie Olivers Leek and Turkey pie. I just adapt to what I have . The original I still use at christmas. to use up all the left overs

About £70-£80 a week, depends how much we need from the butcher/greengrocer.
Once a month when we go to Aldi and stock up on certain things, then we spend c£115.
2 adults and a 10 year old, and until 2 weeks ago we had a cat to feed too.

Does that include things like laundry powder, toilet roll, alcohol etc.? Even then, it seems unreasonably high. Perhaps you can share a meal plan/ shopping list so we can see why it's so high?

We spend around £100 pw, do a Costco shop once every 2-3 months spending £300-400 and then maybe one of us will pop to the co-op or Spar to grab something we forgot in the big shop, but never more than £10- so total spend is not more than £150 pw for 2 adults and one child. The cat costs about £25 a month and we spend slightly more when my SD16 is visiting.

Its over £1,200 per month not £1k

It's very much do-able. Teen is at school 6 days a week where snacks and 3 course lunch is included. However, I dont increase my lists or budget over holidays.

We purchase Greek yoghurt, fruit and granola type thing for breakfasts,
I have salads for lunch or make a stew/bolognase.
Dinners are generally lighter, soups, toasties, crudites, beans on toast etc
Snacks are fruit, home made bits and pieces.

We don't generally purchase meat but if we do it's closer to the £50 budget.

We generally have lots left over. Have done this for many years and FYI I also put the shopping list into the other supermarket apps for reference each week.

You're most welcome to come shopping with me any time

❤️

Have responded to the other posts. Definitely don't eat out, if we do it comes from the same food budget so would be a £1 or £2 at most! And definitely don't have take aways, haven't had one in years and wouldnt really want to!
We dont need loads of snacks! A piece of fruit is fine as a snack when you're having 3 decent meals a day.

sorry to be a pain but can you actually list what you buy that feeds so many for £40 from M&S?

eg you say ‘salads’ what’s in them? Just leaves or any protein? And stew? I assume you make it but with what ingredients? And breakfast yes I can see fruit and yogurt and granola is doable but breakfast isn’t a main meal so £40 for 14 meals? Do you mean it’s 14 portions so for example 3 meals of 4 portions = 14? Or 14 actual meals for 4 people? If so what are you buying as we all want to do the same! Thank you

This is where a lot of people waste money! Throwing food away. I am quite ruthless as I hate waste. If I’m buying stuff that goes in the bin I stop buying it/buy less. We waste very little & I will change what i’ve planned for meals to use up what is in the fridge. I know from chatting to friends/colleagues that some people don’t do this & will go buy what they fancy that day even if their fridge is full!

500g of mince provides 7-8 portions? Glad I’m never coming to yours for dinner!

There is also the variety in cost of Ingredients on this thread. Someone buying £7mince, someone got it reduced from.the butchers, someone will spend more, I buy the cheapest full fat mince and drain it. I get the cheapest tinned tomatoes and would add 6 cans to 1kg of raw mince. However my husband would use 500g raw mince and one tin of tomatoes. I'm trying to bulk the meat out with veg, he isn't etc.

I think if someone said you only had £100 for food the bottom line is you'd have to make it work. Much easier if your willing to add a few very low cost meals. We do cheesy pasta with cooking bacon or something similar once a week. Even if where not skint it's good to have a few cheap recipes up our sleeve. Also do the chicken carcass soup.

If you do enough cheap meals in any week you can even loose the will to eat and revert to living on toast 🤣

That's fine, you weren't invited. The people who are are very happy with it.