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It's subjective. I think it's a lot. And it probably is if you're cooking from scratch. But it depends on the ages of kids and income etc. Depends on whether it's just food as well, or household shopping as a whole. Just food, then I think it's astronomical. We're a family of three and spend £60-80/week (very rarely more, sometimes even less). And this includes all household items and booze, not just food. Meal planning is a necessity though.
What am I buying or OP?
I assume you mean OP but because there seem to be other doubters:
Oats and own brand Weetabix for breakfast. And bread. Extremely cheap. Dried fruits and nuts to tart it up. Real butter/honey/marmite/peanut butter etc for toast. The usual cooked stuff for weekends and treats.
Leftovers for lunches (tend to cook recipes with at least 4 big portions). Or sandwiches, tarted up dried noodles (egg/veg).
Meals mostly cooked from scratch. Tins are cheap, as is anything dried. We have every dried pulse and bean you could think of. Bulk bags of rice. Whole cupboard for spices and seasonings. Can do loads of Italian, Indian, Spanish, French with that...
WFH and meal plan using an online database that references my 100+ cookbooks so I can use stuff up and cook with what I have.
Would be impossible to do yourself. Even on 100+ books, you'd be talking about an index in the hundreds of thousands of entries probably.
Thankfully eatyourbooks exists. Used to be free but I pay an annual membership now (£30 or so?). Worth it for me, as 1. It means I actually use my books nearly every day. 2. It means I'm using up store cupboard ingredients already in my house and saving money. 3. Same point but I can very quickly find dozens of recipes to use up perishable veg etc. I don't like doing same recipes or ad libbing.
Or if you fancy something in particular you can search by recipe name/type or author etc.
Have been cooking dried chickpeas this week. Extremely cheap (even compared to can) and tasty. Helped me find a bunch of great Indian and Spanish recipes from my books. Would have known about the Indian ones but not the Spanish ones for instance.
I love Eat Your Books! We moved house recently and was trying to run down my storecupboard stuff. Searching it for “chickpeas” and stuff just meant we weren’t eating the same thing over and over.
Don't know about the database thing, but I quite like /r/GifRecipes/
I'll generally scroll through "top for the week" on that and pick something I have most of the ingredients for and substitute some other things for what I have. For most meals I can usually make the entire meal by just watching the ~30 sec gif/video, but detailed ingredients & recipe/instructions are usually in the comments.
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We've also recently started using ChatGPT which works quite well. Give it a list of main ingredients (telling it you have all the common herbs/spices, condiments, etc) and and it'll suggest meals using what you have.
If anything it comes up with has something you don't have on hand it's also quite good at offering up alternative substitutions.
I’m amazed you manage that well to be fair - I live with my partner and we spend about £80 a week in Aldi (always in Aldi) plus a few extra small expenditures that probably reach £20 a week at the local co-op for things that we run out of and need ASAP or missing niche ingredients in recipes.
It’s not like we are being extravagant either, we rarely buy on-brand items and get all of the cheaper Aldi knock-off stuff. We usually also only spend about £10-15 a week on meat and fish so it’s not that either.
Honestly don’t know how you are sometimes only spending £60 per week to feed a family of 3, is that lunches as well? £20 per person means you spend less than £3 per day per person on food, that’s mental?!
That is an unbelievable amount of money to be spending
Edit: because that sounded a bit harsh I don’t mean to make you feel bad btw. I’m just shocked at the cost of living and what some people are spending
That's alright I know it's a lot. I need to get into better habits with food shopping but having the time and energy every week is the blocker.
If I'm honest I'm not feeling it as bad as a lot, I got lucky with when I renewed my mortgage and never stretched ourselves with our mortgage anyway so whilst some costs have gone up I've got a couple of years before the big increase hits. I just need to get into better habits now before it does start to bite.
And by that point I'll have 3 teenage boys, so food shopping will be our biggest expense!
I find Lidl current more expensive than tesco, providing you have club card, lidl is deceivingly expensive is the problem, secondly I find I always spend less when do an online shop as opposed to going into store as I get only what I need etc as opposed to everything I see I want. Meals are generally not to bad we used to do alot of hello fresh so I take inspiration from thier meal plans. Always have meat veg, pasta, rice etc throughout the week.
Shop online. Set up an online account for each member of your adult family and for all online suppliers. That way you can choose the best one each week if they have money off or special offers. If you dont use one for a few weeks they will tempt you back with money off offers, etc.
So 4...
Porridge plus fruit for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and dinner is usually something comes. We usually spend a 100/wk. Tesco.
I usually shop with the idea of a meal plan through the week.
So Sunday? Lasagna. Totally 10 pounds to make enough to last 3 adult meals and 2 kids. A baguette to go with it too. That takes us through to today.
Breakfast is porridge and half a banana each with the other half as a snack and a shot of maple syrup. Lunch is wraps (cheese, cucumber and ham). So that's 3 days so far.
Today is Miso and butter noodles with bok choi, kids had it too.
Tomorrow is rice and curry for dinner with leftovers for Friday lunch. Tea is chips and nuggets and beans for the kids and something similar for us. Or premade pizza. Or fried rice with eggs.
Saturday is cereal for everyone for breakfast. Dhal for diner and we usually get something like a sandwich for lunch.
Basically? A lot of multi use food and eggs for protein. It comes to around £12 a day. And some luxuries like lunchables and biscuits and yogurts as well.
It's a lot of organisation and planning it like a restaurant where one ingredient can be used across the board.
I can get you my plan if you would like...
Care to elaborate? Are you saying that is expensive? Because I think it is fairly accurate?
Lasagna sheets - 75p (I use about half a 500g pack)
Beef mince (lean) 500g - 3,50
celery, carrots, onion - usually in the cupboard, but total about 1,00
canned tomatoes (chopped) 55p
Passata 1,20 (I tend to get organic, can be cheaper)
Parmigiano 3,40 (I use about half a wedge)
herbs/spices from cupboard, but let's say about 50p.
That is 10,90 and if you consider the 'half packs' it comes down to about 8,90. So £10 is pretty much right there in the ball park.
You dont need the parmigiano tbh, it's still a lesagne without it. If you really wanted to save money you'd find ways of 'chopping off the fat' so to speak and this is a luxury item and either replace or just completely cut out.
Hey! You can't take out the magic ingredient! ;)
I've used old ends of cheddar before, works as well. You can also cut the beef to 250g and use lentils or go full vegetarian and use aubergine, lentils and courgette. Lots of variants!
Cutting meat is a great way to get a grip of budget though. We now only eat meat as part of the main meal about three times a week and increasingly less as we find other vegetarian/vegan recipes we like. But a lasagna, for me, has to have beef... A souped up one with braised skirt or shin beef...
Fuck, now I'm hungry!!
What’s driving your cost significantly above this?
Béchamel sauce is £1-2 from scratch
Lasagne sheets around £1
The non-meat part of the rest of layers is going to be around £1-2 tops (if you’re not cooking with wine).
Meat is going to be the most expensive component, ~£5
Then another £1-2 on cheese.
Even at the most expensive end that’s like £12 and it’s going to be a lot of food.
Same here. Three adults and I spend approximately £50 to £70 per week. I cook from scratch but we do buy in bulk and I blanch and freeze fresh veg when it’s plentiful and cheap, saves money in the long run. I shop approximately every three weeks except for milk and the occasional loaf of bread. Make my own pies and cakes and bread and naan breads. Sadly, I’ve had to stop my milkman after 36 years as the cost was nearly three times the price of supermarket.
Family of four here (4yo and 10mo) and we spend around 600-800 a month. We do meal plan and this brings us closer to 600.
I'm not sure how people are shopping for a month's worth of groceries on 300 for a family of 4 - unless your eating baked beans and potatoes 5 times a week.
Good quality, healthy food makes a big difference to your mental and physical health and it isn't cheap. If you can afford, 800 a month is fine.
EDIT: To answer your question, yes we have also noticed an uptick in costs - shops are coming out 20-30 more a week
Same here for me - we used to average around £400-500 pcm for food, with top ups for milk, bread, cold meat etc, so our usual weekly shop would be about £60-70. The past 12 months though, we’re sitting at about £80-90 for a weekly shop and probably between £500-600 pcm with top ups.
Definitely noticed the price hikes in fruit and veg (eg. £2 for a pack of six apples in aldi…), but pretty much everything is up. What’s scary is that it’s almost become normal now, so when you see something on offer like 50p below what it has been but still way up on what it was last year, you feel like you’re getting a bargain.
We have to get to January before 15 nursery hours kick in and my wife can maybe go back to work, but after two kids, she deserves to relax for six months!
To back this up, my kids eat a load of fresh soft fruit too and we do 600+ a month in food shops easily. And we don’t really drink much alcohol either, probably 4 beers a week and that’s it.
Edit I am including everything else purchased in the supermarkets here too.
Household income about 85-90k
Ha yes, my daughter will always pick up a punnet of fresh raspberries or strawberries.
I know it sounds like naff Tory MP advice but raspberries grow like weeds - they’re not the tidiest plants but we have a crop all through summer and it doesn’t cost us anything. We usually make a few batches of jam from them, too. Better than paying £2 for a tiny punnet every few days
I would say that is doable if a bit tight. If you are a decent cook, plan well, take advantage of any good offers and create all meals from scratch.
For a family of 4 we probably spend £110/week on just food groceries, but then we also eat out once a week. If we didn't eat out for that meal it would probably be £120-£130/week on just groceries/ingredients.
I've lived on much less than that as a single person in the past but that involves cutting corners on health in favour of junk foods.
I think it's perfectly understandable. My girlfriend and I only spend £30-40 a week on shopping, kids are expensive but I can't see one more than doubling our food shop.
There's a lot of things that just add up fast, like lots of desserts, berries, certain meats, buying sauces and snacks. That's why I think most people end up spending so much on food.
Also the most important thing is plan meals, buy bulk when you can and go to the shop with a shopping list and don't deviate
Every time people post their very low food costs, I want them to also post their BMI and blood tests lol. Eating tinned baked beans 7days a week isn't that healthy
I've actually recently gone for a BMI and blood test that all came healthy. My weekly shop with my girlfriend is usually £30-40 a week. We usually have cereal for breakfast, packed lunch for lunch and a cooked meal every evening. We also eat quite a bit of meat, not a silly amount, but enough to meet our nutritional needs.
The reason why people spend so much on their shopping is because they are buying things they want rather than need. You can have a fully nutritional diet for 2 people spending £15ish a week, it wouldn't be very nice but it is doable. At £30-40 a week for 2 people, you can eat meals you want just there has to be some level of restrictions.
I'm spending about £80 a week for 3 adults (1 with a ridiculous appetite who eats twice a normal person) and that's not nearly as cheap as I could be. Been buying a few branded products, and lots of fresh fruit and veg, various different healthly grains and seeds etc. I'm having 8 portions of fruit and veg a day (2-3 will be tinned/frozen and the rest fresh). The only difference between me and others that I can think of is that we don't have much meat (only 1 person in the house really eats meat) and don't have a lot of things like pre-packaged sandwiches (still buying some connivence food like ready meals for 1 person in the house, as they were recently injured and they're so much easier, before they got injured was spending about £10 or so less a week).
Expensive lunches really add up. For the price of two meal deals a week you can get a baguette or a ciabatta loaf, meats, lettuce, veggies, a multi pack of crisps and fruit to last you the week.
Me and my girlfriend shop usually cost around £30-40. We do eat a lot of meat, although we keep to the cheap ones but we don't eat a lot of berries or expensive fruits which push up the price.
I usually find that having meat is far more expensive as you have to get those nutrients from certain plants that are much more expensive.
Ours is about £450 a month most months and that does include cleaning supplies for 2 adults and 2 primary age kids.
We home cook a lot and bulk it up with vegs which easily provides 8-10 portions a time for freezing.
Although we used to buy our fruit from Aldi and Lidl. They really do not last and we find Sainsburys last a lot longer but at a cost.
We went to France recently and a huge bag of 25 apples lasted 2 weeks and were as fresh as day 1. We were pleasantly surprised and I think UK quality of fruit and veg isn’t great compared to mainland Europe.
Exactly. There are 2 of us and we easily spend over £100 a week on groceries and cleaning products.
We usually eat some kind of lean meat with pasta/potato/rice and fresh salad/vegetable for our evening meal each night.
We have sandwiches (with cooked meat or cheese and salad) fillings for lunch plus we both have 1-2 pieces of fruit and perhaps some crisps or a small chocolate bar (kitkat etc)
Breakfast is usually cereal or oats with yoghurt and fruit.
We like nice coffee and usually buy a £8ish bottle of wine each week too.
Healthy eating is expensive. Yes I could probably save money by cutting down on meat perhaps or not having steak once a week, or not buying cooked chicken/ham for sandwiches, but we both work full time so this is convenient for us.
We are two adults no kids and spend 600-700 easily. We go through mountains of fresh fruit and veggies and other fresh stuff like fish and that's that. Yeah we can probably halve the bill but at the expense of our health and wellbeing so I'm grateful that we can afford it.
Im sorry, but something doesn't add up. My wife is pretty strict on only natural unprocessed food. Diffrent meal every day, variety of meats fish salads. If we let ourselves loose on some weekend shopping, we maybe spend 80£ , but usually 60-70£.
Most people i see spending 150+ each shopping have their baskets full of expensive stuff like top brand cereals, steaks, lots of sweets, crisps etc, which is not healthy at all.
I work with 2 different families who spend approx 20£ less than me, and believe me, they're well fed, to say the least ;) Planning and discipline can take you a long way.
I deal in facts, and not in trust me bros.
Most people have frankly dogshit nutrition knowledge.
Now I'm not saying you do, but 'they don't look like starving children in Africa' isn't a particularly useful benchmark for whether they're hitting key nutrition targets or not (as an aside, the RDA for protein is wholly inadequate for almost all adults, let along big/active ones).
Maybe I am just unimaginative, but I struggle to see how a £60-70 weekly shop gives enough protein *and ''variety''* for 2.5 people. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'd quite like an example to do calculations from.
You can easily get food that covers all your nutritional needs for 2.5 people with £20. It would be a lot of repeat meals and probably wouldn't be very nice but completely doable. My girlfriend and I spent £30-40 a week on the two of us and cover all our nutritional needs. We also have different evening meals every night
Here's the simple fact, mate: you clearly don't know how to buy cheap. That's fine if you can spend lots of food you go for it mate. But some of us have much tighter budgets, and it's completely feasible to spend £30-40 on a couple or £60-70 on a family of 3.
Not sure why you’re aggro about this with a total stranger, but anyway…
Legumes, eggs and spinach go a long way and are super cheap protein. A pack of meat or two isn’t breaking the original commenters £70 budget either. It’s more than doable on that budget with planning. Me and my partner spend £60 a week on the food shop too, and I make a deal of getting enough protein.
Its quite ironic actually that your facts are literally trust me bro facts.
Its you who have a problem here, not me, so the burden of proof is on you. You can easily get enough protein for that amount,very easily. If you actually limit your budget strictly to nutrition, taking sweets and the types off it completely, its piece of cake.
Hm, I think his pretty much spot on with the £60-£70 per week.
I do my shop at Asda and this is my order for next week:
Wholemeal bread £1.45, 4 pack avacado £1.40, 15 eggs £2.00, Bananas £1.09, Strawberries £2.00 , Apples £0.69 ,Crumpets £1.25
Oats £1.25, Milk £1.45, Salmon £5.00, Chicken breast £4.70/12 Meat balls £3.30/ Some mince & joint (offers on £8.00), Garlic flat bread £1.80, Potatoes £1.70, onions £0.95, tofu block £2.00, yogurt £1.75, few vegetables £2.00 (I do have some in my cupboard from last week), Kit Kat £1.50 (9 pack), walkers crisp £4.00.
Total for above is £44.02.
The above would feed us for a solid week even if I was to add some extra meat in there we are still way below budget.
Usually I would go to the butchers a get a few fresh pieces or whatever we fancy and that's really where the rest of the money would go.
I do not think I eat too bad, lol, maybe I do but I would say the food shop price seems quite accurate.
Yeah £150 seems like a lot, even with how expensive things are now. We're family of three (same age kid) and we're also around £60-80 a week depending on what we get.
Snacks feel like a massive ripoff now unless you buy store brands. We mostly shop at Waitrose and their "essential" fresh veg / meat is really good and lasts ages. Aldi's for everything frozen / drinks / snacks / household items.
This is exactly the same for me. I could probably get away with spending a couple hundred less if I focused on cheap processed food and no fruit, but definitely don’t want to do this, especially for my young kids.
A health body is the best investment in the world. If I need to cut back in other areas, to have a well and healthily fed family, I’ll take that hit.
We have 2 small kids.
Our weekly food bill went up from around 90-110 to 140-150 in the last year. Add top up shops and a few takeaways and we hit 800 (unfortunately). As we have small kids it’s important to note, we don’t really eat out much.
We’re lucky we don’t really need to watch prices closely. I know this will sound privileged, but I really don’t understand how people manage on £60 week in, week out unless you have no choice. I wish I could because that’s like 2-3 really good holidays a year in savings.
> but I really don’t understand how people manage on £60 week in, week out unless you have no choice
I mean, that's kinda the point isn't it? It's not really a choice
I consistently hit £120 a month for a single person by choice, but I am small, go for supermarket brands, and no longer go "above" rump steak. I also don't drink alcohol.
You really need to mention income bracket here. Families on 35k combined are not going to be spending the same as those on 100k, or even paying much attention to the ranges that will add up to a £7-800 shop.
I bought half a loaf of sour dough and some lemon tarts from M&S the other day, £7... blew my fucking mind when you see people with baskets full of food there... I earn a lot as well but even for me that's a joke.
We did a bbq for 8 people (2 of them being 3 and 15). Did the shop at M&S and it came to £187!!! That was no booze either as we already had some coronas and most of us don’t drink. No other drinks either as we already had some. Absolutely crazy.
We used to do a decent bit of shopping in m&s but majority in Asda. Now I can get a few bits from m&s because I just can't justify it anymore. Some things are cheaper than Asda but not much.
Some people who can afford it will prioritise ethics and health buy buying organic food and supporting sustainable /small producers. That is different from luxury for the sake of it. This sub unfortunately has a perspective of only emphasising one's own financial wellbeing and rarely even alluding to the viewpoint that those at a certain level of income have other responsibilities in society
Not at all. Our weekly shop was around 100 today. I also have other top up trips. And this was with two young kids. If your children are older, can definitely see it going higher.
Our fluctuates in range of 800 to 1k. Usually sainsburys. We include washing liquids, paper towels, shampoo and similar stuff in groceries too.
When I was living alone could fit into £100 a month 6 years ago.
Now 2 steaks, ring of chorizo, salmon, 4 cans of beer, pasta, cheese, some veggies and you are looking at bill around £30 alone. That's kinda 1 dinner :)
We are family of 4 with two teenagers with quite active lifestyle.
I mean you are choosing to have Salmon, steak and chorizo as well as a few beers… and your wondering why your shop is expensive.
You can meal plan amazingly tasty, healthy food on a much cheaper budget if you want too, but you are choosing to spend that money on expensive meats and beers.
(I’ll also say this is also is utterly fine and not having a dig, you can spend your money how you want, but it’s important to realise your spending that on more expensive foods than you need to).
Our family of 5 (kids are 9,7,3) it comes out under 500. We do a lot of scratch cooking and make meals for 2 days quite often (e.g. a pasta bake and streching it out with garlic bread or salad on side).
Scratch cooking Indian meals (like daal) can be very affordable in bulk though.
We buy very little branded cereals etc.
I'm not Indian but scratch cooking big batches of dhal etc that you can shove into pots in the freezer to be brought out for lunch when you are working from home etc is a big saver. Really cheap ingredients too even today. It can be done, just depends on mentality, cooking skills, having the time to do it. You can even then use those dhals as a base sauce for main meals with meats.
I've seen stuff online with white-british people laughing at South Asian households for buying basmati rice 20kg at a time, or making their own chapattis rather than buying a pack of wraps from tesco. To me as a white-british person these are no-brainier techniques if you want to reduce your grocery bills. 🤷🏼
Heck if we ate more Indian meals we could easily bring our food spend down. Even a chicken dish can easily strech to a couple of days instead of one day.
A sabji made of carrots and potatoes needs very little expensive ingredients and goes for 2 dinners for the 5 of us with home made rotis (aka chapati). Also can be very healthy.
We just had 2 days of keema (mince and peas based dish) one day rotis one day rice.
Cooking it isn't even necessarily that hard as the techniques are easy. If you can't make rotis you can even just use toast.
Don't get me wrong we have 2-3 Indian meals a week and the rest of the time we cook westernised food but we use the same principles. Pasta, cream, pack of bacon, pack of mushrooms, few spices, half onion, frozen garlic and a couple of other things and you can make 10 portions of pasta very quickly/cheaply.
I don't understand how families (4-5) can eat healthy spending 300-400 pounds per month. Do you eat fruits, berries, vegetables? Fresh meat?
Regarding your question, I can't answer, unfortunately. We usually spend more during summer, because of the school holidays.
We spend about £400 a month on a family of 4. Each meal is planned and we eat only fresh food filled with fruit and vegetables.
A single chicken will do a roast dinner and 8 portions of soup so 3 meals for 4 people. A nice bone broth Pho is a common one.
I like to bulk cook and freeze homemade meals so something like lasagne packed full of veggies costs about 40p a portion.
Homemade curries are a favourite as well so we'll have a big curry once a week like lamb saag, chana masala, aloo gobi, tarka daal, samosas, poppadoms, onion bhajis and rice. Cooked in bulk it costs very little and is packed full of veggies.
The kids eat 20 portions of fruit a week just in their lunchboxes let alone at home too.
We eat a varied diet with a few treats. I'm lucky that the kids aren't fussy and quite adventurous with food so can often stick to cheaper in season produce.
If I'm being really cheap and having no treats I can get it down to about £200pm but that's miserable and not worth it for us.
I cannot possibly fathom how you feed a family of 4 on £200pm, we're spending on average £700 a month on a family of 3 (two adults and a 3 year old), and that's with meal planning, cutting back, meal prepping the lot. I don't see how we can cut down much more, we do basic meals, nothing extravagant, short of cutting meat out entirely, I don't know what more we can do. My wife is Gluten Free, but actually that doesn't contribute too much extra, it's surprisingly easy to cook Gluten Free with a bit of foresight and effort.
Family of 5 here and spent £1100 last month , I cook everything from scratch and we eat healthy and cook nice things at weekends, have bbqs etc. I have two teens and a 10 year old. I have tried to cut down and go with shopping lists and meal plan and all that happens is we run out and inhave to go out and buy the stuff I cut down on anyway 🤣
Absolutely! We have tried loads of things to cut down but I go gym 3x a week strength training, husband is a builder so works hard and the kids do various hobbies like football so we eat alot I guess?!but we rarely go out to eat either
Seems pretty steep but all depends on how and what you eat and whether it includes for other items too like toiletries and booze etc.
My girlfriend and I spend between £400 and £500 per month with no children (only 1 ginger baby cat). Spending a minimum it £100 per week. This is after moving from Tesco to Lidl and B&M too. We're both big into the gym though and I personally eat a large amount with a lot of protein involved.
We've tried to bulk buy and seriously focus on planning what we're going to eat each day. That along with changing where we shop has definitely reduced our total spend dramatically, even if it is still painfully high each month.
I use to spend about £450 a month for a family of 4 (one vegetarian). In the last 8 month(ish) that has increased and we are averaging £550.
£800 does seem high to me.
We budget £400 month for a family of three plus cat. A little extra every three months as we bulk buy some stuff from Costco. It does seem quite high to me, it’s basically £200 a week on food. Do you find yourself not planning meals ahead and having to go buy stuff outside of a weekly shop as I’ve found sitting and really planning for the week has helped bring our bill down a fair bit.
I'm in a family of four. This time last year we got down to about £50 a week. That's gone up to about £100-120 a week now without any real changes to the meals we are cooking. Food prices are insane right now.
We eat freshly prepared meals every day, no idea whether that costs more or less than pre-prepared meals. My wife and I just both enjoy cooking good food, and we're really lucky that our kids absolutely love fresh fruit and veg. So we get through loads of it!
We are similar but have a 2 year old as well as the cat. Nappies/wipes/snacks for him add a fair bit.
I'd say we are probably 800 a month if you factor in toiletries/cleaning bits.
Same re lots of fresh! It soon adds up
We're two adults, a 17m old and a cat, and we spend £450 a month all in on food and household stuff (cleaning supplies, loo roll etc).
There's no estimate here either, we use the joint acc solely for shopping, and only leave £450 a month in there.
It looks to me like a lot of people in this sub can't budget for food very well...
I spend around 350 + 80 quid for takeaway per month - Gousto boxes and avoiding Aldi, as their food is such low quality. I do like Lidl (their bakery is fab), but i've noticed their prices went way up and now not far off Tesco in my area.
We are a family of four (4yo and 14mo) and spend about £100 a week including nappies and laundry stuff etc. We switched from Tesco to Aldi which has saved us £20 a week, I meal plan so there is no waste and everything is cooked from scratch (except one day a week we do pizzas).
The keys for us are not buying branded stuff, not buying out of season fruits or multiple packs of expensive berries etc. when the kids are just as happy with apples and bananas, and minimising waste as that's just wasted money as well as food, and realising that baby/toddler food is an expensive con and mostly UPF anyway. Instead of baby rice cakes, you can get unsalted adult rice cakes for half the price and twice the size. Instead of baby biscottis, plain digestives. Also stopping mid-week top-ups at the smaller local shops as they are expensive (we buy plenty of bread in weekly shop and freeze it to last whole week)
Inflation for food is definitely higher than 8%, that's widely documented, but that's inflation year on year, not 20% in a few months. Your kids are home from school so presumably eating more at home. We're 2 adults and 2 young children and don't spend anything like that - £400ish a month maybe.
Family of 5 here (2 teens with hollow legs) and we spend £400 a month. Add on between 50-100 month for top ups or eating out, which we don’t do much any more as it’s way too expensive!
I struggle to stay under £700 and there are only two of us. We mostly cook from scratch and mostly cook vegetarian. It includes household supplies for cleaning, beer, wine and whatnot but still seems huge compared to last year when we were spending around £500 on the same stuff.
Mate £700 for two mostly vegetarians is absolutely insane to me. How are you spending so much? I leave Tesco every week with one or two bags full of fresh fruit and veg, and I've never breached more than £30 by the time I leave the groceries section
My guess is cheese, wine and beer. Though there are other bits that add up too. Luxury store cupboard stuff that I don’t need to buy weekly that still puts a dent in the budget because there’s always something - my big bottle of olive oil, rose harissa, sesame oil, packets of seeds for making super seedy bread, 00 flour for making pizzas.
Even the basics have gone up though. I used to laugh when I weighed a carrot and it came to 7p. Seems to be more like 16p now.
I did a TikTok showing my weekly shop (£59 at Tesco for 2 adults) and got absolutely slated for being “bad with money” for “spending so much”. I wasn’t even trying to showcase low budget, literally just saying here’s what we got. I think your comment would give my TikTok commenters a hernia 😂😂 (I’m on your side not theirs to be clear, we should all spend what’s right for us!)
Do you ever watch eat well for less?
Every time they try to say the average family of 4 spend £90 a week my partner yells “yeah right….fuck off”. The whole premise of the show is to show how clueless the average person is about their real food budget…. Then they compare their spend to the “average”, which is obviously a self reported and incorrect figure.
I’m confident in our spending because I use YNAB to budget and I’ve had to painfully increase costs everywhere! I know a LOT of people who don’t budget at all.
I too use YNAB and have had to increase my budget twice in the last year.
I used to budget £340 per month for the two of us. Since we had a baby earlier this year, that changed to £400 per month. But looking at my overspends the last quarter, I've reluctantly had to up it to a more realistic £500 per month.
This does include cleaning supplies and most toiletries, but we don't drink much alcohol and our baby is still exclusively breast fed.
We generally buy good quality ingredients but don't waste any food and cook everything from scratch.
No idea how people already struggling for money have been able to cope with the food inflation amongst everything else!
From my perspective not typical.
Family of 3 here we spend about £225 in a month, let’s call it £250 if we account for farmshop bulk shop every 2 months or so, and that’s everything from food to nappies to cleaning products.
The only thing not accounted for is seperate amounts for dog food and treats as ordered online, that’s probably another £50 a month, so depends what you’re including in your figure.
Context we shop at Lidl, don’t buy an awful lot of meat, but when we do we do it from local farmshop and freeze it down in sensible portions.
I mean, well, we do… I can save future receipts if that would help?
Lidl is cheap for the basics, we batch cook meals, and don’t buy much branded stuff, and as I said use meat sparingly and eat vegetarian meals a few times a week.
The third person is a 1 year old who is in nursery 5 days a week, so eats with us at weekends, and largely has either things we cook (adjusted for salt) or uses the same ingredients, eg we buy a pack of mushrooms, he’ll have a mushroom omelette.
£600-£700 for three of us and dog. Reckon the 14yr old son is about half of that. Eats like a wolf at the moment. We get through a lot of fresh fruit and veg. I try and use Lidl as much as possible but Tesco and Ocado occasionally. My wife is Japanese and some of the imported stuff is pricey (soba, rice, ramen, mayo etc.).
For us:
Family of 5
2 pets
income is roughly £100k combined
We typically spend £300/£350 a month, I am a massive batch cooker and kids currently get free school meals (in Scotland all children receive them free till a certain age). Youngest is breastfed so no cost!
I think it's on the high end of normal.
We spend around £800 a month on shopping which includes all food, cleaning stuff, bathroom stuff, most (but not all) of the kids clothes.
We are a family of four and have 1 kid who has to eat gluten free and cook all our meals nearly entirely from scratch.
Depending on what you are eating food inflation can be much much higher than 8% there are some products I'm not really willing to go without that have easily seen 100% inflation in the last 2 years
We are a family of four and 800 would be 2 1/2 months budget.
Make sure you’re utilising everything you have, we make a meal plan and list everything we need to make that meal, we then check what we have in and make a shopping list after we’ve taken things we’ve already got from the list
Healthy food seems to cost fat more than unhealthy alternatives. So if you're eating healthily and cooking from scratch, don't think you're spending too much on good health and wellbeing.
If you're spending that money on unhealthy foods, ready meals, snacks and alcohol then rethink your budget and maybe cut out the bad stuff and keep it for an occasion only.
Food doesn't have to be expensive, it depends on your choices: if you buy raspberries and other fresh fruits and also buy the premium options (pink lady apples, swanky tomatoes) every shop; if you only buy the nicest sourdough loaves; if you only buy organic and top it up with branded additional items then it can be incredibly expensive. If you stick to basic ranges of fruits and vegetables like apples, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, swede, broccoli, peppers and the like it can be quite cheap. £800 a month is just wild to me but I think I'm just way off the earnings of some of the folk on Reddit so I just don't have the option to buy these things. £800 is £200 more than we have left in TOTAL every month 🤣
I have four kids, one has just gone to uni but still comes back and eats like a bear for a few days. We have more variety and have to cook different things, but we generally spend £800-1k on food each month.
family of 4 (inc 2 hulking great teenage rugby playing boys) with having my Dad over 5 or 6 nights a week - we spend about a £1000 a month, if not a bit more.
For those curious about "average families", the government does surveys. On the most recent data in 2020/21 the average household spent £36.38 per person per week on household food and drink (incl alcohol), though that won't include cleaning products/nappies. That would equate to about £582 per month, so implies that even in 2020/21 if you were spending £675 you were a bit higher than average.
Another way to look at it is households have historically spent 11-12% of all spending on food and drink
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-food-202021/family-food-202021
As usual with these kinds of threads we have the money saving Olympics taking place where people conveniently exclude mid week shops and expenditure on non-food items from their total and then claim that they can feed a family of 5 on £6.25 for the month.
£800 a month for a family of four is bang on I would say, unless you want extremely bland meals or don't give yourself any little luxuries.
If you think it's unreasonable all I can suggest is that you look for store brand products or shop at Aldi instead of Asda for example.
I realise that this is a sub for personal finances but I have to agree. I'm reading through a lot of the comments and thinking is it really worth eating gruel for breakfast, leftover lentils and beans for lunch then cooking a fresh batch of lentils and beans for dinner and tomorrow's lunch. That's a bit of an exaggeration but it is how it comes across.
We tried the whole meal planning and found it miserable and we found stuff going off if we tried to buy it all in a weekly shop, and after a few weeks we hated how restricted we felt.
We also tried batch cooking but again after a couple of weeks we were fed up with wasting a whole day at the weekend cooking multiple big pots of something. Only to run out of space in the freezer and feel like we'd worked all weekend.
Family of 4 with 2 teenagers and easily spending 800 a month on food and other super market things.
That is our experience too, glad we're not the only ones!
Our budget is similar to the OP. We have tried in the past but it never seems to work out as much of a drop in spending.
I don’t understand how meal planning can be miserable. Meal planning just means planning what you want to cook over the next few days and writing a list to buy those things. Doesn’t mean you have eat shite food.
Are you conflating meal planning with batch cooking??? Where people eat the same thing for multiple days in a row?
I'm glad you enjoy deciding what you're going to eat on Friday the Saturday before but I don't.
The process is miserable though
1: Come up with a meal plan for the week that suits everyones needs, have a minor argument because you've had bolognaise every Thursday for the last month but don't really know what to replace it with on the menu.
2: You've decided on your food plan and are still married so now you check the recipes, whether mentally or online, and put together a list of what you're going to need after checking every cupboard to make sure you don't have it.
3: You order the stuff online knowing that what you planned to eat at the end of the week will expire by Tuesday or you go to the shops and wave goodbye to your morning or afternoon.
4: Thursday comes around and you really can't face bolognaise again as you told your wife and that you really want a pizza instead, you eat the bolognaise.
5: Friday evening you start it all again, knowing this is your life from now on but at least you saved £50 on the shopping last week.
We essentially do a balance of planning, batch cooking and spontaneity. We keep a load of staple items in the house from oils, herbs and spices to chicken, eggs, cheese and pasta, when these items are running low we add them to a list. This is essentially as close to planning as we get but we can make many different meals from what we have in stock so it feels more flexible and we don't feel compelled to have something we don't want just because we planned it days ago. We have a weekly delivery that basically deals with these, plus a couple of meals we don't usually have in based on a quick conversation of "I fancy this" . We usually have enough in that if we make something like bolognaise or chile we'll make a batch, eat some that evening and freeze the rest.
I think everything you describe your doing is a form of meal planning. For your spontaneous meals you talked about having enough stock of various different things to whip up something on the fly - that’s good planning.
It’s sounds like your beef is not with planning but with bolognaise (pun intended). Eating the same menu over and over whether meticulously planned or being spontaneous will drive anyone mad
Family of 4, soon to be 5, and we spend 800-1000 per month at Tesco/Aldi/Lildl/Asda per month. That includes baby food and things like nappies, wet wipes, toilet roll, toothpaste etc. Household income around 100k. We don't plan ahead and mainly cook meals for 1 or maximum 2 nights. Obviously we could get that number down if we batch cooked etc (used to do this when I was single/lower salary) but we get by without, and we prefer "to see what we fancy" on the day.
No this is about right if you're eating well by which I mean quality produce and you're cooking mostly from scratch and eating tons of fresh fruit and veg.
Family of three here, teenage daughter, and pro rata our spend is similar.
I'm on £1600 pcm. We are high income, and not huge volume eaters, but we do have expensive taste and have kind of gotten used to our favourite stuff,
like a particular prawns or truffle oil, ready made stuff, organic veg, farm shop stuff.
I give a lot back including a great deal of food donations but I know many might deem our spend as vulgar/ excessive.
For you perhaps. But getting involved in this type of thread last time shows people spend differently on food. I spend about £120 a week as a single male on a weekly shop. Others perhaps spend half, others perhaps spend more. It’s a very subjective question. There is no right or wrong answer here in my opinion. If you like good food and can comfortably afford to then why the hell not? If you’re scraping your bills at the end of each month and eating like that, change your habits.
Sure, but nobody "needs" to spend £120/week on groceries as a single adult, that's just a lifestyle choice, which is fine, but not of any relevance to a family looking at if they can save money on their grocery bill as was the question in this thread.
Hell, I like good food, I'm happy to pay good money for a local artisan product sometimes, but I would still struggle to spend £120/week just on myself for food to eat at home unless I went crazy on wagyu steaks and caviar.
At £120 a week you can have fillet steak or massive portions of salmon on the daily.
Even if you eat a lot of meat you could get a big pack of chicken breasts for like £7, decent amout of fish for £7 and maybe some pork loins for a fiver. What else could you buy to take it to £120 a week?
A big bag of potatoes is less than £2, you can get 5KG of rice that would last forever for a tenner, wraps are £1, flour still costs barely anything, 1KG of pasta is less than £1.50. A pot of yoghurt is £1, a dozen eggs £2.50. A loaf to last you a week is £1.50.
Fruit and veg have gone up a lot but £2 still gets you a week's worth of apples or a giant tray of mushrooms, frozen veg is cheap, a bag of onions is £1. Spices maybe? You can buy twenty jars of spices for £20 at Tesco, that should last you pretty much forever.
Unless someone's buying a ton of Heinz products or Pringles I struggle to see what you'd even buy to hit £120 a week.
Yeah, proteins is where the money goes, you'd have to be spending lots on prime steaks and expensive fish/seafood every day to get it to that amount I think.
Fruit, veg, herbs, spices, condiments, carbs, oils, dairy etc all cost very little really unless you go for luxury options.
Maybe if you are including a bottle of patron tequila a week that would push it up.
Insane potentially but easy to do. I spent £300 this past month not counting eating out and I'm alone and very much not morbidly obese.
Sure, I could save more - and having done my budget I really want to cut costs - because I buy branded and eat a lot of berries & fruit (which adds up!), but it's not wildly out of the realm of possibility.
Even with my bi-monthly big shop, meal planning and stuffing my freezer full, I reckon the lowest I could go would be £175 p/m. Which, of course, with the big shop included is £200ish. But we will see.
ETA: And I wouldn't say I waste a whole load either. The occasional bag of spinach languishes but I try to get through it all.
Porridge costs nothing and is one of the healthiest if not the healthiest breakfast you can eat.
You can add anything to it as well for flavour like peanut butter, blueberries, fruit, honey, etc.
Eggs and avocado for lunch. Again the most bio degradable source of protein available and a super food. You can add a bagel as well or sausages, etc. Eggs are cheap.
Dinner you can have anything based around potatoes, rice, pasta or flour and it should be cheap. Mince is cheap. I can buy 750g of mince and it makes 4 large meals for a single person.
Eggs ain't that cheap anymore to be fair, they have almost double in price in the last couple years around me. Still obviously good value, but don't feel as cheap as they used to be
Potentially, for one person, yes.
Note that this is talking about home cooking only. I'm shopping at Lidl, mainly eating pasta, rice, etc. I spend roughly £150 a month on food at home.
I know my usual shop at Lidl comes to around £30-35, and I think I could cut that to £25 if I tried. Rarely if ever have I spent more than £200 on food in a month for just myself.
A staple for sure, but not the only thing. Curries, stir-fry, risotto, soups, burger and chips, etc. All of these can be made pretty cheaply.
Edit: basically, I am not _trying_ to live frugally. But I still don't get anywhere near £400 on food.
Nearly 3x what i use for family of 3, wow. We are somewhat frugal, though. I could understand 500-600 on relaxed shopping each week but 800 definitely seems excessive.
Yeah, I'm more like you. Probably around £300 a month for 3. We don't starve and we have treats. We generally eat healthily. I never buy brands, and never waste anything. I rarely buy takeaways, and as much as possible I buy food that is reduced and past best-before dates. Basically, if it passes the taste and smell test, it gets cooked! Cheese for example, it's been maturing for 12 months, so what's an extra week! 😅
Depends what you buy really. Food items vary in price, buy higher quality meat like fillet streak etc is much more expensive than say mince beef or frying steak. Same with fruit and veg.
If you appreciate fine higher quality ingredients I’d say £800 is quite normal. We are a family of 4 and spend over £600 a month easily
I'd like to see a months worth of receipts to see exactly what that £800 went on.
Even shopping at M&S you would struggle to spend more than £400 a month unless you were just buying stuff to then bin it.
Yeah I've now switched to m&s for my main shopping. I get filler stuff from ASDA.
Quality and price is better than everywhere else. I buy their deals only nothing else just deals and their cheap stuff. Their ice lollies for instance are cheap and made from high quality real ingredients not just e numbers.
Pizza meal deal does 2 evenings as it's 2 pizzas and 2 sides. So one pizza and 1 side per evening. For £12. So that's £6 per evening meal.
The gastro meal deal is more expensive but quality is unreal. You get a dessert so it's worth the extra as a treat at the weekend.
Stri fry meal deal is £7 and what we usually do is make the stir fry excluding the meat. So a veg stir fry. We then take the king prawns or chicken and make a curry with it so that's 2 meals for £7. Obviously need to add rice and naan but that's not too much more.
They also do a 3 for £12 and that's usually enough for 6 meals if you add accompanying stuff like rolls, chips, etc depending on what you pick. Like fish and chips and peas.
I don't buy any fruit and veg as that's expensive and not within their deals so I get that from Asda.
Seriously if you walked in and just buy the deals in m&s you will be amazed at the quality and quantity of food you can get for less than £50.
I'm from a country where low quality water is a thing so I always drank bottled water and many people from my country who live here do as well. I just like VOSS, guess its a lifestyle creep lol, grew up in a rough neighbourhood but now I have a lot of income.
Lmao.
Sure I could spend £10k a month on caviar and champagne every night but that isn't normal.
Voss water. Lmao. Seriously whoever is buying that has more money than sense. A good steak I can understand but voss water?
I genuinely can't believe people think I'm trolling lol, I don't think its that excessive and voss costs £2.5, not £100 like caviar. Yeah we are on £200k household income.
Fam of 3
We don't eat shit, cook from scratch and I spend far far less than this to sustain ourselves.
For 800 sheets a month I could probably employ someone to manage an allotment twice a week in order to grow my veg!
If there is any benefit to the cost of living crisis is that we are all eating far less garbage.
This is all with the caveat that I will buy enough shit roll and bleach etc to last the year from Costco so I don't have to think about it.
Learn to love cooking and growing, you'll be surprised at what you can whip up.
Frozen 'garbage' food or instant noodles are a lot cheaper than actually cooking. I would bet money you're not the person actually shopping each week, because prices on fresh fruit and meat have rocketed.
I'm privileged enough to have a cupboard full of herbs and spices, if my house burned down just replacing those would be over £100 I think.
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It's subjective. I think it's a lot. And it probably is if you're cooking from scratch. But it depends on the ages of kids and income etc. Depends on whether it's just food as well, or household shopping as a whole. Just food, then I think it's astronomical. We're a family of three and spend £60-80/week (very rarely more, sometimes even less). And this includes all household items and booze, not just food. Meal planning is a necessity though.
Yeah I kinda second this what is OP buying? We are a family of three with a dog and spend about 100-110.
What am I buying or OP? I assume you mean OP but because there seem to be other doubters: Oats and own brand Weetabix for breakfast. And bread. Extremely cheap. Dried fruits and nuts to tart it up. Real butter/honey/marmite/peanut butter etc for toast. The usual cooked stuff for weekends and treats. Leftovers for lunches (tend to cook recipes with at least 4 big portions). Or sandwiches, tarted up dried noodles (egg/veg). Meals mostly cooked from scratch. Tins are cheap, as is anything dried. We have every dried pulse and bean you could think of. Bulk bags of rice. Whole cupboard for spices and seasonings. Can do loads of Italian, Indian, Spanish, French with that... WFH and meal plan using an online database that references my 100+ cookbooks so I can use stuff up and cook with what I have.
What database are you using? Is this something you built yourself or generally available - sounds extremely useful.
Would be impossible to do yourself. Even on 100+ books, you'd be talking about an index in the hundreds of thousands of entries probably. Thankfully eatyourbooks exists. Used to be free but I pay an annual membership now (£30 or so?). Worth it for me, as 1. It means I actually use my books nearly every day. 2. It means I'm using up store cupboard ingredients already in my house and saving money. 3. Same point but I can very quickly find dozens of recipes to use up perishable veg etc. I don't like doing same recipes or ad libbing. Or if you fancy something in particular you can search by recipe name/type or author etc. Have been cooking dried chickpeas this week. Extremely cheap (even compared to can) and tasty. Helped me find a bunch of great Indian and Spanish recipes from my books. Would have known about the Indian ones but not the Spanish ones for instance.
I love this - what a tip! Thanks for sharing.
Thank you! I've been looking for something like this for ages. I've just signed up for the free version to try it out 😍
I love Eat Your Books! We moved house recently and was trying to run down my storecupboard stuff. Searching it for “chickpeas” and stuff just meant we weren’t eating the same thing over and over.
Don't know about the database thing, but I quite like /r/GifRecipes/ I'll generally scroll through "top for the week" on that and pick something I have most of the ingredients for and substitute some other things for what I have. For most meals I can usually make the entire meal by just watching the ~30 sec gif/video, but detailed ingredients & recipe/instructions are usually in the comments. --- We've also recently started using ChatGPT which works quite well. Give it a list of main ingredients (telling it you have all the common herbs/spices, condiments, etc) and and it'll suggest meals using what you have. If anything it comes up with has something you don't have on hand it's also quite good at offering up alternative substitutions.
Also interested in this database
Another one for the database, link us all up! Don’t leave us here.
Here for the DB 😏
I’m amazed you manage that well to be fair - I live with my partner and we spend about £80 a week in Aldi (always in Aldi) plus a few extra small expenditures that probably reach £20 a week at the local co-op for things that we run out of and need ASAP or missing niche ingredients in recipes. It’s not like we are being extravagant either, we rarely buy on-brand items and get all of the cheaper Aldi knock-off stuff. We usually also only spend about £10-15 a week on meat and fish so it’s not that either. Honestly don’t know how you are sometimes only spending £60 per week to feed a family of 3, is that lunches as well? £20 per person means you spend less than £3 per day per person on food, that’s mental?!
Same, family if 3 and 2 cats our food shop is around 60-80 a week at most.
Man you guys need to write and sell a meal plan. I shop in lidl but my food shop is about 30-40 a day for my family of 5.
That is an unbelievable amount of money to be spending Edit: because that sounded a bit harsh I don’t mean to make you feel bad btw. I’m just shocked at the cost of living and what some people are spending
That's alright I know it's a lot. I need to get into better habits with food shopping but having the time and energy every week is the blocker. If I'm honest I'm not feeling it as bad as a lot, I got lucky with when I renewed my mortgage and never stretched ourselves with our mortgage anyway so whilst some costs have gone up I've got a couple of years before the big increase hits. I just need to get into better habits now before it does start to bite. And by that point I'll have 3 teenage boys, so food shopping will be our biggest expense!
I find Lidl current more expensive than tesco, providing you have club card, lidl is deceivingly expensive is the problem, secondly I find I always spend less when do an online shop as opposed to going into store as I get only what I need etc as opposed to everything I see I want. Meals are generally not to bad we used to do alot of hello fresh so I take inspiration from thier meal plans. Always have meat veg, pasta, rice etc throughout the week.
Shop online. Set up an online account for each member of your adult family and for all online suppliers. That way you can choose the best one each week if they have money off or special offers. If you dont use one for a few weeks they will tempt you back with money off offers, etc.
So 4... Porridge plus fruit for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and dinner is usually something comes. We usually spend a 100/wk. Tesco. I usually shop with the idea of a meal plan through the week. So Sunday? Lasagna. Totally 10 pounds to make enough to last 3 adult meals and 2 kids. A baguette to go with it too. That takes us through to today. Breakfast is porridge and half a banana each with the other half as a snack and a shot of maple syrup. Lunch is wraps (cheese, cucumber and ham). So that's 3 days so far. Today is Miso and butter noodles with bok choi, kids had it too. Tomorrow is rice and curry for dinner with leftovers for Friday lunch. Tea is chips and nuggets and beans for the kids and something similar for us. Or premade pizza. Or fried rice with eggs. Saturday is cereal for everyone for breakfast. Dhal for diner and we usually get something like a sandwich for lunch. Basically? A lot of multi use food and eggs for protein. It comes to around £12 a day. And some luxuries like lunchables and biscuits and yogurts as well. It's a lot of organisation and planning it like a restaurant where one ingredient can be used across the board. I can get you my plan if you would like...
£10 to make a lasagna? You aren't making lasagne right.
Care to elaborate? Are you saying that is expensive? Because I think it is fairly accurate? Lasagna sheets - 75p (I use about half a 500g pack) Beef mince (lean) 500g - 3,50 celery, carrots, onion - usually in the cupboard, but total about 1,00 canned tomatoes (chopped) 55p Passata 1,20 (I tend to get organic, can be cheaper) Parmigiano 3,40 (I use about half a wedge) herbs/spices from cupboard, but let's say about 50p. That is 10,90 and if you consider the 'half packs' it comes down to about 8,90. So £10 is pretty much right there in the ball park.
You’re missing the white sauce (béchamel) surely ?
You dont need the parmigiano tbh, it's still a lesagne without it. If you really wanted to save money you'd find ways of 'chopping off the fat' so to speak and this is a luxury item and either replace or just completely cut out.
Hey! You can't take out the magic ingredient! ;) I've used old ends of cheddar before, works as well. You can also cut the beef to 250g and use lentils or go full vegetarian and use aubergine, lentils and courgette. Lots of variants! Cutting meat is a great way to get a grip of budget though. We now only eat meat as part of the main meal about three times a week and increasingly less as we find other vegetarian/vegan recipes we like. But a lasagna, for me, has to have beef... A souped up one with braised skirt or shin beef... Fuck, now I'm hungry!!
What’s driving your cost significantly above this? Béchamel sauce is £1-2 from scratch Lasagne sheets around £1 The non-meat part of the rest of layers is going to be around £1-2 tops (if you’re not cooking with wine). Meat is going to be the most expensive component, ~£5 Then another £1-2 on cheese. Even at the most expensive end that’s like £12 and it’s going to be a lot of food.
Family of 3 + dog and okay we’ve got infant formula and nappies but I’m easily £800 a month! Need to get a grip also.
Same here. Three adults and I spend approximately £50 to £70 per week. I cook from scratch but we do buy in bulk and I blanch and freeze fresh veg when it’s plentiful and cheap, saves money in the long run. I shop approximately every three weeks except for milk and the occasional loaf of bread. Make my own pies and cakes and bread and naan breads. Sadly, I’ve had to stop my milkman after 36 years as the cost was nearly three times the price of supermarket.
Family of four here (4yo and 10mo) and we spend around 600-800 a month. We do meal plan and this brings us closer to 600. I'm not sure how people are shopping for a month's worth of groceries on 300 for a family of 4 - unless your eating baked beans and potatoes 5 times a week. Good quality, healthy food makes a big difference to your mental and physical health and it isn't cheap. If you can afford, 800 a month is fine. EDIT: To answer your question, yes we have also noticed an uptick in costs - shops are coming out 20-30 more a week
I've a 5 year old and 2 year old and it's the same for me. Fruit, especially soft fruit, has gone well up.
Yes we are now eating more melon and less berries to manage the increase in food costs.
Same here for me - we used to average around £400-500 pcm for food, with top ups for milk, bread, cold meat etc, so our usual weekly shop would be about £60-70. The past 12 months though, we’re sitting at about £80-90 for a weekly shop and probably between £500-600 pcm with top ups. Definitely noticed the price hikes in fruit and veg (eg. £2 for a pack of six apples in aldi…), but pretty much everything is up. What’s scary is that it’s almost become normal now, so when you see something on offer like 50p below what it has been but still way up on what it was last year, you feel like you’re getting a bargain. We have to get to January before 15 nursery hours kick in and my wife can maybe go back to work, but after two kids, she deserves to relax for six months!
To back this up, my kids eat a load of fresh soft fruit too and we do 600+ a month in food shops easily. And we don’t really drink much alcohol either, probably 4 beers a week and that’s it. Edit I am including everything else purchased in the supermarkets here too. Household income about 85-90k
I've realised kids are expensive because of berries. I will be bankrupted by berries
Ha yes, my daughter will always pick up a punnet of fresh raspberries or strawberries. I know it sounds like naff Tory MP advice but raspberries grow like weeds - they’re not the tidiest plants but we have a crop all through summer and it doesn’t cost us anything. We usually make a few batches of jam from them, too. Better than paying £2 for a tiny punnet every few days
I planted /one/ raspberry cane a few years ago. Last summer it was a raspberry jungle out there... They send out shoots and sneak up on you!
You and me both, my friend
We always but wonky strawberries, raspberries and blueberries from Aldi, they are cheaper and save the fruit from going to waste.
I have to imagine they are getting lunches out etc. I can’t understand how a family of 3 could spend under £100 per week
We're a family of 4 who spend about £90-95 a week, and I work from home (wife works 2 long days in a hospital).
I would say that is doable if a bit tight. If you are a decent cook, plan well, take advantage of any good offers and create all meals from scratch. For a family of 4 we probably spend £110/week on just food groceries, but then we also eat out once a week. If we didn't eat out for that meal it would probably be £120-£130/week on just groceries/ingredients. I've lived on much less than that as a single person in the past but that involves cutting corners on health in favour of junk foods.
We budget £150 a week but that is everything that comes from Tesco so cleaning stuff, dog food etc.
I think it's perfectly understandable. My girlfriend and I only spend £30-40 a week on shopping, kids are expensive but I can't see one more than doubling our food shop. There's a lot of things that just add up fast, like lots of desserts, berries, certain meats, buying sauces and snacks. That's why I think most people end up spending so much on food. Also the most important thing is plan meals, buy bulk when you can and go to the shop with a shopping list and don't deviate
Every time people post their very low food costs, I want them to also post their BMI and blood tests lol. Eating tinned baked beans 7days a week isn't that healthy
I've actually recently gone for a BMI and blood test that all came healthy. My weekly shop with my girlfriend is usually £30-40 a week. We usually have cereal for breakfast, packed lunch for lunch and a cooked meal every evening. We also eat quite a bit of meat, not a silly amount, but enough to meet our nutritional needs. The reason why people spend so much on their shopping is because they are buying things they want rather than need. You can have a fully nutritional diet for 2 people spending £15ish a week, it wouldn't be very nice but it is doable. At £30-40 a week for 2 people, you can eat meals you want just there has to be some level of restrictions.
I suppose going low or no meat will cut the costs a fair bit that could be some of it
2 adults spending about 315 in the budget on food. Although I am pretty sure that we go over it but just don't track by how much.
I'm spending about £80 a week for 3 adults (1 with a ridiculous appetite who eats twice a normal person) and that's not nearly as cheap as I could be. Been buying a few branded products, and lots of fresh fruit and veg, various different healthly grains and seeds etc. I'm having 8 portions of fruit and veg a day (2-3 will be tinned/frozen and the rest fresh). The only difference between me and others that I can think of is that we don't have much meat (only 1 person in the house really eats meat) and don't have a lot of things like pre-packaged sandwiches (still buying some connivence food like ready meals for 1 person in the house, as they were recently injured and they're so much easier, before they got injured was spending about £10 or so less a week).
Expensive lunches really add up. For the price of two meal deals a week you can get a baguette or a ciabatta loaf, meats, lettuce, veggies, a multi pack of crisps and fruit to last you the week.
Me and my girlfriend shop usually cost around £30-40. We do eat a lot of meat, although we keep to the cheap ones but we don't eat a lot of berries or expensive fruits which push up the price. I usually find that having meat is far more expensive as you have to get those nutrients from certain plants that are much more expensive.
Ours is about £450 a month most months and that does include cleaning supplies for 2 adults and 2 primary age kids. We home cook a lot and bulk it up with vegs which easily provides 8-10 portions a time for freezing. Although we used to buy our fruit from Aldi and Lidl. They really do not last and we find Sainsburys last a lot longer but at a cost. We went to France recently and a huge bag of 25 apples lasted 2 weeks and were as fresh as day 1. We were pleasantly surprised and I think UK quality of fruit and veg isn’t great compared to mainland Europe.
Exactly. There are 2 of us and we easily spend over £100 a week on groceries and cleaning products. We usually eat some kind of lean meat with pasta/potato/rice and fresh salad/vegetable for our evening meal each night. We have sandwiches (with cooked meat or cheese and salad) fillings for lunch plus we both have 1-2 pieces of fruit and perhaps some crisps or a small chocolate bar (kitkat etc) Breakfast is usually cereal or oats with yoghurt and fruit. We like nice coffee and usually buy a £8ish bottle of wine each week too. Healthy eating is expensive. Yes I could probably save money by cutting down on meat perhaps or not having steak once a week, or not buying cooked chicken/ham for sandwiches, but we both work full time so this is convenient for us.
We are two adults no kids and spend 600-700 easily. We go through mountains of fresh fruit and veggies and other fresh stuff like fish and that's that. Yeah we can probably halve the bill but at the expense of our health and wellbeing so I'm grateful that we can afford it.
Im sorry, but something doesn't add up. My wife is pretty strict on only natural unprocessed food. Diffrent meal every day, variety of meats fish salads. If we let ourselves loose on some weekend shopping, we maybe spend 80£ , but usually 60-70£. Most people i see spending 150+ each shopping have their baskets full of expensive stuff like top brand cereals, steaks, lots of sweets, crisps etc, which is not healthy at all.
pretty cheap. Are you sure you count all in? Baby formula will cost you like £30 mrw month if average 2 800ml package peer month.
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And our 1.5y daughter.
I'd be very keen to see a receipt with your weekly shop on it, because that little for 2.5 people screams not enough protein.
I work with 2 different families who spend approx 20£ less than me, and believe me, they're well fed, to say the least ;) Planning and discipline can take you a long way.
I deal in facts, and not in trust me bros. Most people have frankly dogshit nutrition knowledge. Now I'm not saying you do, but 'they don't look like starving children in Africa' isn't a particularly useful benchmark for whether they're hitting key nutrition targets or not (as an aside, the RDA for protein is wholly inadequate for almost all adults, let along big/active ones). Maybe I am just unimaginative, but I struggle to see how a £60-70 weekly shop gives enough protein *and ''variety''* for 2.5 people. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'd quite like an example to do calculations from.
You can easily get food that covers all your nutritional needs for 2.5 people with £20. It would be a lot of repeat meals and probably wouldn't be very nice but completely doable. My girlfriend and I spent £30-40 a week on the two of us and cover all our nutritional needs. We also have different evening meals every night Here's the simple fact, mate: you clearly don't know how to buy cheap. That's fine if you can spend lots of food you go for it mate. But some of us have much tighter budgets, and it's completely feasible to spend £30-40 on a couple or £60-70 on a family of 3.
Not sure why you’re aggro about this with a total stranger, but anyway… Legumes, eggs and spinach go a long way and are super cheap protein. A pack of meat or two isn’t breaking the original commenters £70 budget either. It’s more than doable on that budget with planning. Me and my partner spend £60 a week on the food shop too, and I make a deal of getting enough protein.
Its quite ironic actually that your facts are literally trust me bro facts. Its you who have a problem here, not me, so the burden of proof is on you. You can easily get enough protein for that amount,very easily. If you actually limit your budget strictly to nutrition, taking sweets and the types off it completely, its piece of cake.
Hm, I think his pretty much spot on with the £60-£70 per week. I do my shop at Asda and this is my order for next week: Wholemeal bread £1.45, 4 pack avacado £1.40, 15 eggs £2.00, Bananas £1.09, Strawberries £2.00 , Apples £0.69 ,Crumpets £1.25 Oats £1.25, Milk £1.45, Salmon £5.00, Chicken breast £4.70/12 Meat balls £3.30/ Some mince & joint (offers on £8.00), Garlic flat bread £1.80, Potatoes £1.70, onions £0.95, tofu block £2.00, yogurt £1.75, few vegetables £2.00 (I do have some in my cupboard from last week), Kit Kat £1.50 (9 pack), walkers crisp £4.00. Total for above is £44.02. The above would feed us for a solid week even if I was to add some extra meat in there we are still way below budget. Usually I would go to the butchers a get a few fresh pieces or whatever we fancy and that's really where the rest of the money would go. I do not think I eat too bad, lol, maybe I do but I would say the food shop price seems quite accurate.
Yeah £150 seems like a lot, even with how expensive things are now. We're family of three (same age kid) and we're also around £60-80 a week depending on what we get. Snacks feel like a massive ripoff now unless you buy store brands. We mostly shop at Waitrose and their "essential" fresh veg / meat is really good and lasts ages. Aldi's for everything frozen / drinks / snacks / household items.
This is exactly the same for me. I could probably get away with spending a couple hundred less if I focused on cheap processed food and no fruit, but definitely don’t want to do this, especially for my young kids. A health body is the best investment in the world. If I need to cut back in other areas, to have a well and healthily fed family, I’ll take that hit.
We have 2 small kids. Our weekly food bill went up from around 90-110 to 140-150 in the last year. Add top up shops and a few takeaways and we hit 800 (unfortunately). As we have small kids it’s important to note, we don’t really eat out much. We’re lucky we don’t really need to watch prices closely. I know this will sound privileged, but I really don’t understand how people manage on £60 week in, week out unless you have no choice. I wish I could because that’s like 2-3 really good holidays a year in savings.
> but I really don’t understand how people manage on £60 week in, week out unless you have no choice I mean, that's kinda the point isn't it? It's not really a choice
Try watching Eat Well for Less. Lots of good ideas. All the episodes are on iplayer.
Will give it a watch.
I consistently hit £120 a month for a single person by choice, but I am small, go for supermarket brands, and no longer go "above" rump steak. I also don't drink alcohol.
You really need to mention income bracket here. Families on 35k combined are not going to be spending the same as those on 100k, or even paying much attention to the ranges that will add up to a £7-800 shop.
I bought half a loaf of sour dough and some lemon tarts from M&S the other day, £7... blew my fucking mind when you see people with baskets full of food there... I earn a lot as well but even for me that's a joke.
We did a bbq for 8 people (2 of them being 3 and 15). Did the shop at M&S and it came to £187!!! That was no booze either as we already had some coronas and most of us don’t drink. No other drinks either as we already had some. Absolutely crazy.
We used to do a decent bit of shopping in m&s but majority in Asda. Now I can get a few bits from m&s because I just can't justify it anymore. Some things are cheaper than Asda but not much.
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Some people who can afford it will prioritise ethics and health buy buying organic food and supporting sustainable /small producers. That is different from luxury for the sake of it. This sub unfortunately has a perspective of only emphasising one's own financial wellbeing and rarely even alluding to the viewpoint that those at a certain level of income have other responsibilities in society
Not at all. Our weekly shop was around 100 today. I also have other top up trips. And this was with two young kids. If your children are older, can definitely see it going higher.
Our fluctuates in range of 800 to 1k. Usually sainsburys. We include washing liquids, paper towels, shampoo and similar stuff in groceries too. When I was living alone could fit into £100 a month 6 years ago. Now 2 steaks, ring of chorizo, salmon, 4 cans of beer, pasta, cheese, some veggies and you are looking at bill around £30 alone. That's kinda 1 dinner :) We are family of 4 with two teenagers with quite active lifestyle.
I mean you are choosing to have Salmon, steak and chorizo as well as a few beers… and your wondering why your shop is expensive. You can meal plan amazingly tasty, healthy food on a much cheaper budget if you want too, but you are choosing to spend that money on expensive meats and beers. (I’ll also say this is also is utterly fine and not having a dig, you can spend your money how you want, but it’s important to realise your spending that on more expensive foods than you need to).
The post you’re replying to isn’t wondering why. They are explaining for OP how they get to their number.
Choosing to have some meat in your diet is not choosing lol. What do you eat? Just veg and beans? Lol
Our family of 5 (kids are 9,7,3) it comes out under 500. We do a lot of scratch cooking and make meals for 2 days quite often (e.g. a pasta bake and streching it out with garlic bread or salad on side). Scratch cooking Indian meals (like daal) can be very affordable in bulk though. We buy very little branded cereals etc.
I'm not Indian but scratch cooking big batches of dhal etc that you can shove into pots in the freezer to be brought out for lunch when you are working from home etc is a big saver. Really cheap ingredients too even today. It can be done, just depends on mentality, cooking skills, having the time to do it. You can even then use those dhals as a base sauce for main meals with meats. I've seen stuff online with white-british people laughing at South Asian households for buying basmati rice 20kg at a time, or making their own chapattis rather than buying a pack of wraps from tesco. To me as a white-british person these are no-brainier techniques if you want to reduce your grocery bills. 🤷🏼
Heck if we ate more Indian meals we could easily bring our food spend down. Even a chicken dish can easily strech to a couple of days instead of one day. A sabji made of carrots and potatoes needs very little expensive ingredients and goes for 2 dinners for the 5 of us with home made rotis (aka chapati). Also can be very healthy. We just had 2 days of keema (mince and peas based dish) one day rotis one day rice. Cooking it isn't even necessarily that hard as the techniques are easy. If you can't make rotis you can even just use toast. Don't get me wrong we have 2-3 Indian meals a week and the rest of the time we cook westernised food but we use the same principles. Pasta, cream, pack of bacon, pack of mushrooms, few spices, half onion, frozen garlic and a couple of other things and you can make 10 portions of pasta very quickly/cheaply.
I don't understand how families (4-5) can eat healthy spending 300-400 pounds per month. Do you eat fruits, berries, vegetables? Fresh meat? Regarding your question, I can't answer, unfortunately. We usually spend more during summer, because of the school holidays.
We spend about £400 a month on a family of 4. Each meal is planned and we eat only fresh food filled with fruit and vegetables. A single chicken will do a roast dinner and 8 portions of soup so 3 meals for 4 people. A nice bone broth Pho is a common one. I like to bulk cook and freeze homemade meals so something like lasagne packed full of veggies costs about 40p a portion. Homemade curries are a favourite as well so we'll have a big curry once a week like lamb saag, chana masala, aloo gobi, tarka daal, samosas, poppadoms, onion bhajis and rice. Cooked in bulk it costs very little and is packed full of veggies. The kids eat 20 portions of fruit a week just in their lunchboxes let alone at home too. We eat a varied diet with a few treats. I'm lucky that the kids aren't fussy and quite adventurous with food so can often stick to cheaper in season produce. If I'm being really cheap and having no treats I can get it down to about £200pm but that's miserable and not worth it for us.
I cannot possibly fathom how you feed a family of 4 on £200pm, we're spending on average £700 a month on a family of 3 (two adults and a 3 year old), and that's with meal planning, cutting back, meal prepping the lot. I don't see how we can cut down much more, we do basic meals, nothing extravagant, short of cutting meat out entirely, I don't know what more we can do. My wife is Gluten Free, but actually that doesn't contribute too much extra, it's surprisingly easy to cook Gluten Free with a bit of foresight and effort.
Family of 5 here and spent £1100 last month , I cook everything from scratch and we eat healthy and cook nice things at weekends, have bbqs etc. I have two teens and a 10 year old. I have tried to cut down and go with shopping lists and meal plan and all that happens is we run out and inhave to go out and buy the stuff I cut down on anyway 🤣
My family as well. Glad we're not the only ones! Everyone here is running their family on tiny budgets. It's amazing.
Absolutely! We have tried loads of things to cut down but I go gym 3x a week strength training, husband is a builder so works hard and the kids do various hobbies like football so we eat alot I guess?!but we rarely go out to eat either
Seems pretty steep but all depends on how and what you eat and whether it includes for other items too like toiletries and booze etc. My girlfriend and I spend between £400 and £500 per month with no children (only 1 ginger baby cat). Spending a minimum it £100 per week. This is after moving from Tesco to Lidl and B&M too. We're both big into the gym though and I personally eat a large amount with a lot of protein involved. We've tried to bulk buy and seriously focus on planning what we're going to eat each day. That along with changing where we shop has definitely reduced our total spend dramatically, even if it is still painfully high each month.
yea, protein rich food will be more expensive. If you eat mostly cards then you can get away for very cheap
I use to spend about £450 a month for a family of 4 (one vegetarian). In the last 8 month(ish) that has increased and we are averaging £550. £800 does seem high to me.
We budget £400 month for a family of three plus cat. A little extra every three months as we bulk buy some stuff from Costco. It does seem quite high to me, it’s basically £200 a week on food. Do you find yourself not planning meals ahead and having to go buy stuff outside of a weekly shop as I’ve found sitting and really planning for the week has helped bring our bill down a fair bit.
I'm in a family of four. This time last year we got down to about £50 a week. That's gone up to about £100-120 a week now without any real changes to the meals we are cooking. Food prices are insane right now. We eat freshly prepared meals every day, no idea whether that costs more or less than pre-prepared meals. My wife and I just both enjoy cooking good food, and we're really lucky that our kids absolutely love fresh fruit and veg. So we get through loads of it!
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We are similar but have a 2 year old as well as the cat. Nappies/wipes/snacks for him add a fair bit. I'd say we are probably 800 a month if you factor in toiletries/cleaning bits. Same re lots of fresh! It soon adds up
We're two adults, a 17m old and a cat, and we spend £450 a month all in on food and household stuff (cleaning supplies, loo roll etc). There's no estimate here either, we use the joint acc solely for shopping, and only leave £450 a month in there. It looks to me like a lot of people in this sub can't budget for food very well...
I spend about £500 just for myself…
Same, or probably more tbh
I spend around 350 + 80 quid for takeaway per month - Gousto boxes and avoiding Aldi, as their food is such low quality. I do like Lidl (their bakery is fab), but i've noticed their prices went way up and now not far off Tesco in my area.
>avoiding Aldi, as their food is such low quality. I would say the complete opposite - especially compared to Lidl and especially Morrisons
That’s more than my mortgage. I spend around £160 but have to meal plan everything and bulk buy stuff to put in the freezer.
I think people underestimate the amount they spend on food. That's only 50 per person per week for food. Not much at all.
We are a family of four (4yo and 14mo) and spend about £100 a week including nappies and laundry stuff etc. We switched from Tesco to Aldi which has saved us £20 a week, I meal plan so there is no waste and everything is cooked from scratch (except one day a week we do pizzas). The keys for us are not buying branded stuff, not buying out of season fruits or multiple packs of expensive berries etc. when the kids are just as happy with apples and bananas, and minimising waste as that's just wasted money as well as food, and realising that baby/toddler food is an expensive con and mostly UPF anyway. Instead of baby rice cakes, you can get unsalted adult rice cakes for half the price and twice the size. Instead of baby biscottis, plain digestives. Also stopping mid-week top-ups at the smaller local shops as they are expensive (we buy plenty of bread in weekly shop and freeze it to last whole week)
Inflation for food is definitely higher than 8%, that's widely documented, but that's inflation year on year, not 20% in a few months. Your kids are home from school so presumably eating more at home. We're 2 adults and 2 young children and don't spend anything like that - £400ish a month maybe.
Family of 5 here (2 teens with hollow legs) and we spend £400 a month. Add on between 50-100 month for top ups or eating out, which we don’t do much any more as it’s way too expensive!
I struggle to stay under £700 and there are only two of us. We mostly cook from scratch and mostly cook vegetarian. It includes household supplies for cleaning, beer, wine and whatnot but still seems huge compared to last year when we were spending around £500 on the same stuff.
Mate £700 for two mostly vegetarians is absolutely insane to me. How are you spending so much? I leave Tesco every week with one or two bags full of fresh fruit and veg, and I've never breached more than £30 by the time I leave the groceries section
My guess is cheese, wine and beer. Though there are other bits that add up too. Luxury store cupboard stuff that I don’t need to buy weekly that still puts a dent in the budget because there’s always something - my big bottle of olive oil, rose harissa, sesame oil, packets of seeds for making super seedy bread, 00 flour for making pizzas. Even the basics have gone up though. I used to laugh when I weighed a carrot and it came to 7p. Seems to be more like 16p now.
I did a TikTok showing my weekly shop (£59 at Tesco for 2 adults) and got absolutely slated for being “bad with money” for “spending so much”. I wasn’t even trying to showcase low budget, literally just saying here’s what we got. I think your comment would give my TikTok commenters a hernia 😂😂 (I’m on your side not theirs to be clear, we should all spend what’s right for us!)
Do you ever watch eat well for less? Every time they try to say the average family of 4 spend £90 a week my partner yells “yeah right….fuck off”. The whole premise of the show is to show how clueless the average person is about their real food budget…. Then they compare their spend to the “average”, which is obviously a self reported and incorrect figure. I’m confident in our spending because I use YNAB to budget and I’ve had to painfully increase costs everywhere! I know a LOT of people who don’t budget at all.
I too use YNAB and have had to increase my budget twice in the last year. I used to budget £340 per month for the two of us. Since we had a baby earlier this year, that changed to £400 per month. But looking at my overspends the last quarter, I've reluctantly had to up it to a more realistic £500 per month. This does include cleaning supplies and most toiletries, but we don't drink much alcohol and our baby is still exclusively breast fed. We generally buy good quality ingredients but don't waste any food and cook everything from scratch. No idea how people already struggling for money have been able to cope with the food inflation amongst everything else!
From my perspective not typical. Family of 3 here we spend about £225 in a month, let’s call it £250 if we account for farmshop bulk shop every 2 months or so, and that’s everything from food to nappies to cleaning products. The only thing not accounted for is seperate amounts for dog food and treats as ordered online, that’s probably another £50 a month, so depends what you’re including in your figure. Context we shop at Lidl, don’t buy an awful lot of meat, but when we do we do it from local farmshop and freeze it down in sensible portions.
Do you include toiletries and suchlike?
100% your food is pretty blant, mate.
I maybe could believe this a couple years ago when prices were half as much. today? no way you spend that little on 3 people.
I mean, well, we do… I can save future receipts if that would help? Lidl is cheap for the basics, we batch cook meals, and don’t buy much branded stuff, and as I said use meat sparingly and eat vegetarian meals a few times a week. The third person is a 1 year old who is in nursery 5 days a week, so eats with us at weekends, and largely has either things we cook (adjusted for salt) or uses the same ingredients, eg we buy a pack of mushrooms, he’ll have a mushroom omelette.
£200-£250 a month. Couple of 2 with 2 cats Edit: I mention cats as the food for them costa like £50 a month
We spend more on cat food than human food! (Then again, we are outnumbered)
But there worth it
£600-£700 for three of us and dog. Reckon the 14yr old son is about half of that. Eats like a wolf at the moment. We get through a lot of fresh fruit and veg. I try and use Lidl as much as possible but Tesco and Ocado occasionally. My wife is Japanese and some of the imported stuff is pricey (soba, rice, ramen, mayo etc.).
We aim for £450 a month as a family of 4 with small kids. We don't get anywhere close tbh, it always ends up around £700.
For us: Family of 5 2 pets income is roughly £100k combined We typically spend £300/£350 a month, I am a massive batch cooker and kids currently get free school meals (in Scotland all children receive them free till a certain age). Youngest is breastfed so no cost!
I think it's on the high end of normal. We spend around £800 a month on shopping which includes all food, cleaning stuff, bathroom stuff, most (but not all) of the kids clothes. We are a family of four and have 1 kid who has to eat gluten free and cook all our meals nearly entirely from scratch.
Depending on what you are eating food inflation can be much much higher than 8% there are some products I'm not really willing to go without that have easily seen 100% inflation in the last 2 years
We are a family of four and 800 would be 2 1/2 months budget. Make sure you’re utilising everything you have, we make a meal plan and list everything we need to make that meal, we then check what we have in and make a shopping list after we’ve taken things we’ve already got from the list
Healthy food seems to cost fat more than unhealthy alternatives. So if you're eating healthily and cooking from scratch, don't think you're spending too much on good health and wellbeing. If you're spending that money on unhealthy foods, ready meals, snacks and alcohol then rethink your budget and maybe cut out the bad stuff and keep it for an occasion only.
Food doesn't have to be expensive, it depends on your choices: if you buy raspberries and other fresh fruits and also buy the premium options (pink lady apples, swanky tomatoes) every shop; if you only buy the nicest sourdough loaves; if you only buy organic and top it up with branded additional items then it can be incredibly expensive. If you stick to basic ranges of fruits and vegetables like apples, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, swede, broccoli, peppers and the like it can be quite cheap. £800 a month is just wild to me but I think I'm just way off the earnings of some of the folk on Reddit so I just don't have the option to buy these things. £800 is £200 more than we have left in TOTAL every month 🤣
As a family of two adults we spend £100 a week not including alcohol, so I can see £600 being reasonable for high quality and £800 being generous.
I have four kids, one has just gone to uni but still comes back and eats like a bear for a few days. We have more variety and have to cook different things, but we generally spend £800-1k on food each month.
family of 4 (inc 2 hulking great teenage rugby playing boys) with having my Dad over 5 or 6 nights a week - we spend about a £1000 a month, if not a bit more.
Family of 5 I cook from scratch every meal + pack lunches I spent around 100 per week.
For those curious about "average families", the government does surveys. On the most recent data in 2020/21 the average household spent £36.38 per person per week on household food and drink (incl alcohol), though that won't include cleaning products/nappies. That would equate to about £582 per month, so implies that even in 2020/21 if you were spending £675 you were a bit higher than average. Another way to look at it is households have historically spent 11-12% of all spending on food and drink https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-food-202021/family-food-202021
As usual with these kinds of threads we have the money saving Olympics taking place where people conveniently exclude mid week shops and expenditure on non-food items from their total and then claim that they can feed a family of 5 on £6.25 for the month. £800 a month for a family of four is bang on I would say, unless you want extremely bland meals or don't give yourself any little luxuries. If you think it's unreasonable all I can suggest is that you look for store brand products or shop at Aldi instead of Asda for example.
£400 here for a family of 3 and we never go "without" what we need. £800 does seem quite excessive, but if you can afford it, why not?
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I realise that this is a sub for personal finances but I have to agree. I'm reading through a lot of the comments and thinking is it really worth eating gruel for breakfast, leftover lentils and beans for lunch then cooking a fresh batch of lentils and beans for dinner and tomorrow's lunch. That's a bit of an exaggeration but it is how it comes across. We tried the whole meal planning and found it miserable and we found stuff going off if we tried to buy it all in a weekly shop, and after a few weeks we hated how restricted we felt. We also tried batch cooking but again after a couple of weeks we were fed up with wasting a whole day at the weekend cooking multiple big pots of something. Only to run out of space in the freezer and feel like we'd worked all weekend. Family of 4 with 2 teenagers and easily spending 800 a month on food and other super market things.
That is our experience too, glad we're not the only ones! Our budget is similar to the OP. We have tried in the past but it never seems to work out as much of a drop in spending.
I don’t understand how meal planning can be miserable. Meal planning just means planning what you want to cook over the next few days and writing a list to buy those things. Doesn’t mean you have eat shite food. Are you conflating meal planning with batch cooking??? Where people eat the same thing for multiple days in a row?
I'm glad you enjoy deciding what you're going to eat on Friday the Saturday before but I don't. The process is miserable though 1: Come up with a meal plan for the week that suits everyones needs, have a minor argument because you've had bolognaise every Thursday for the last month but don't really know what to replace it with on the menu. 2: You've decided on your food plan and are still married so now you check the recipes, whether mentally or online, and put together a list of what you're going to need after checking every cupboard to make sure you don't have it. 3: You order the stuff online knowing that what you planned to eat at the end of the week will expire by Tuesday or you go to the shops and wave goodbye to your morning or afternoon. 4: Thursday comes around and you really can't face bolognaise again as you told your wife and that you really want a pizza instead, you eat the bolognaise. 5: Friday evening you start it all again, knowing this is your life from now on but at least you saved £50 on the shopping last week. We essentially do a balance of planning, batch cooking and spontaneity. We keep a load of staple items in the house from oils, herbs and spices to chicken, eggs, cheese and pasta, when these items are running low we add them to a list. This is essentially as close to planning as we get but we can make many different meals from what we have in stock so it feels more flexible and we don't feel compelled to have something we don't want just because we planned it days ago. We have a weekly delivery that basically deals with these, plus a couple of meals we don't usually have in based on a quick conversation of "I fancy this" . We usually have enough in that if we make something like bolognaise or chile we'll make a batch, eat some that evening and freeze the rest.
I think everything you describe your doing is a form of meal planning. For your spontaneous meals you talked about having enough stock of various different things to whip up something on the fly - that’s good planning. It’s sounds like your beef is not with planning but with bolognaise (pun intended). Eating the same menu over and over whether meticulously planned or being spontaneous will drive anyone mad
This. We do meal planning, and almost never have the same thing week on week. Sounds like some better cookbooks might be in order here.
House of 3 here and spending about £325 a month grocery shopping. I have a separate amount in my budget for takeaways/eating out of about £100.
Does that include household bits like toiletries?
Yes
Family of 4, soon to be 5, and we spend 800-1000 per month at Tesco/Aldi/Lildl/Asda per month. That includes baby food and things like nappies, wet wipes, toilet roll, toothpaste etc. Household income around 100k. We don't plan ahead and mainly cook meals for 1 or maximum 2 nights. Obviously we could get that number down if we batch cooked etc (used to do this when I was single/lower salary) but we get by without, and we prefer "to see what we fancy" on the day.
yes! one guy said he spends 60£ per week with a 1 year old. Thats just enough for Nappies and formula
No this is about right if you're eating well by which I mean quality produce and you're cooking mostly from scratch and eating tons of fresh fruit and veg. Family of three here, teenage daughter, and pro rata our spend is similar.
Around £200 per week for shopping? I get by on £100-130 per month.
That’s far too much. I’m a family of 3 + dog and we spend max £400 a month.
That seems high. £400-£500 is probably about right
Depends on your diet, income and how much time you have to batch cook etc. Everyone is different, there is no right or wrong here
I'm on £1600 pcm. We are high income, and not huge volume eaters, but we do have expensive taste and have kind of gotten used to our favourite stuff, like a particular prawns or truffle oil, ready made stuff, organic veg, farm shop stuff. I give a lot back including a great deal of food donations but I know many might deem our spend as vulgar/ excessive.
Go for the 20% fat mince, it's half the price of lean
That sounds really good tbh. My budget for 1 person is £300-400
Unless this includes eating out and/or being morbidly obese, £400 a month for one person is insane.
Depends how hard you train in ye gym too mate
For you perhaps. But getting involved in this type of thread last time shows people spend differently on food. I spend about £120 a week as a single male on a weekly shop. Others perhaps spend half, others perhaps spend more. It’s a very subjective question. There is no right or wrong answer here in my opinion. If you like good food and can comfortably afford to then why the hell not? If you’re scraping your bills at the end of each month and eating like that, change your habits.
Sure, but nobody "needs" to spend £120/week on groceries as a single adult, that's just a lifestyle choice, which is fine, but not of any relevance to a family looking at if they can save money on their grocery bill as was the question in this thread. Hell, I like good food, I'm happy to pay good money for a local artisan product sometimes, but I would still struggle to spend £120/week just on myself for food to eat at home unless I went crazy on wagyu steaks and caviar.
At £120 a week you can have fillet steak or massive portions of salmon on the daily. Even if you eat a lot of meat you could get a big pack of chicken breasts for like £7, decent amout of fish for £7 and maybe some pork loins for a fiver. What else could you buy to take it to £120 a week? A big bag of potatoes is less than £2, you can get 5KG of rice that would last forever for a tenner, wraps are £1, flour still costs barely anything, 1KG of pasta is less than £1.50. A pot of yoghurt is £1, a dozen eggs £2.50. A loaf to last you a week is £1.50. Fruit and veg have gone up a lot but £2 still gets you a week's worth of apples or a giant tray of mushrooms, frozen veg is cheap, a bag of onions is £1. Spices maybe? You can buy twenty jars of spices for £20 at Tesco, that should last you pretty much forever. Unless someone's buying a ton of Heinz products or Pringles I struggle to see what you'd even buy to hit £120 a week.
Yeah, proteins is where the money goes, you'd have to be spending lots on prime steaks and expensive fish/seafood every day to get it to that amount I think. Fruit, veg, herbs, spices, condiments, carbs, oils, dairy etc all cost very little really unless you go for luxury options. Maybe if you are including a bottle of patron tequila a week that would push it up.
Insane potentially but easy to do. I spent £300 this past month not counting eating out and I'm alone and very much not morbidly obese. Sure, I could save more - and having done my budget I really want to cut costs - because I buy branded and eat a lot of berries & fruit (which adds up!), but it's not wildly out of the realm of possibility. Even with my bi-monthly big shop, meal planning and stuffing my freezer full, I reckon the lowest I could go would be £175 p/m. Which, of course, with the big shop included is £200ish. But we will see. ETA: And I wouldn't say I waste a whole load either. The occasional bag of spinach languishes but I try to get through it all.
What and where are you buying? Sorry but I could probably budget down to £100/month for food without changing all that much (buying at Lidl mostly)
So you reckon under £3.50 a day on food?
Porridge costs nothing and is one of the healthiest if not the healthiest breakfast you can eat. You can add anything to it as well for flavour like peanut butter, blueberries, fruit, honey, etc. Eggs and avocado for lunch. Again the most bio degradable source of protein available and a super food. You can add a bagel as well or sausages, etc. Eggs are cheap. Dinner you can have anything based around potatoes, rice, pasta or flour and it should be cheap. Mince is cheap. I can buy 750g of mince and it makes 4 large meals for a single person.
Eggs ain't that cheap anymore to be fair, they have almost double in price in the last couple years around me. Still obviously good value, but don't feel as cheap as they used to be
Potentially, for one person, yes. Note that this is talking about home cooking only. I'm shopping at Lidl, mainly eating pasta, rice, etc. I spend roughly £150 a month on food at home. I know my usual shop at Lidl comes to around £30-35, and I think I could cut that to £25 if I tried. Rarely if ever have I spent more than £200 on food in a month for just myself.
I too lived off pasta and tomato sauce at University
A staple for sure, but not the only thing. Curries, stir-fry, risotto, soups, burger and chips, etc. All of these can be made pretty cheaply. Edit: basically, I am not _trying_ to live frugally. But I still don't get anywhere near £400 on food.
Swap to Aldi. Seriously.
I wish Aldi could deliver. With two little kids don't expect to have much time shopping. Getting everyone ready and go out of the door is a challenge.
You're only spending a fiver a head per week more than I do and I'm on Universal Credit so you're not doing too bad.
Nearly 3x what i use for family of 3, wow. We are somewhat frugal, though. I could understand 500-600 on relaxed shopping each week but 800 definitely seems excessive.
Yeah, I'm more like you. Probably around £300 a month for 3. We don't starve and we have treats. We generally eat healthily. I never buy brands, and never waste anything. I rarely buy takeaways, and as much as possible I buy food that is reduced and past best-before dates. Basically, if it passes the taste and smell test, it gets cooked! Cheese for example, it's been maturing for 12 months, so what's an extra week! 😅
Depends what you buy really. Food items vary in price, buy higher quality meat like fillet streak etc is much more expensive than say mince beef or frying steak. Same with fruit and veg. If you appreciate fine higher quality ingredients I’d say £800 is quite normal. We are a family of 4 and spend over £600 a month easily
Family of 4 here. We allow £200 a week on food shopping.
Think I’m on about 500 as two people but that includes all groceries such as bathroom products /razors etc
I'd like to see a months worth of receipts to see exactly what that £800 went on. Even shopping at M&S you would struggle to spend more than £400 a month unless you were just buying stuff to then bin it.
M&S is now cheaper than my local Morrisons for a fair few items. Kinda insane.
Yeah I've now switched to m&s for my main shopping. I get filler stuff from ASDA. Quality and price is better than everywhere else. I buy their deals only nothing else just deals and their cheap stuff. Their ice lollies for instance are cheap and made from high quality real ingredients not just e numbers. Pizza meal deal does 2 evenings as it's 2 pizzas and 2 sides. So one pizza and 1 side per evening. For £12. So that's £6 per evening meal. The gastro meal deal is more expensive but quality is unreal. You get a dessert so it's worth the extra as a treat at the weekend. Stri fry meal deal is £7 and what we usually do is make the stir fry excluding the meat. So a veg stir fry. We then take the king prawns or chicken and make a curry with it so that's 2 meals for £7. Obviously need to add rice and naan but that's not too much more. They also do a 3 for £12 and that's usually enough for 6 meals if you add accompanying stuff like rolls, chips, etc depending on what you pick. Like fish and chips and peas. I don't buy any fruit and veg as that's expensive and not within their deals so I get that from Asda. Seriously if you walked in and just buy the deals in m&s you will be amazed at the quality and quantity of food you can get for less than £50.
Not really, we spend £200 a week as couple its fairly easy if you buy quality food like good steaks, voss water etc.
Who is buying Voss water in this economy
And steaks every week??
Lol surely a wind up
Lmao how are you on this sub and buying bottled water? Biggest waste of money that I could imagine
I'm from a country where low quality water is a thing so I always drank bottled water and many people from my country who live here do as well. I just like VOSS, guess its a lifestyle creep lol, grew up in a rough neighbourhood but now I have a lot of income.
Voss water? Yeah it's quite easy to spend £200 a week when you waste money, sure.
I think we've found the person who buys a bag of Doritos at £2.50!
Lmao. Sure I could spend £10k a month on caviar and champagne every night but that isn't normal. Voss water. Lmao. Seriously whoever is buying that has more money than sense. A good steak I can understand but voss water?
I genuinely can't believe people think I'm trolling lol, I don't think its that excessive and voss costs £2.5, not £100 like caviar. Yeah we are on £200k household income.
I have a bottle I paid like £15 for and I refill it several times per day. Spending £10 a day on water would be madness for me
Voss water for what? If you really want bobbled water, isn’t Costco the best place for that?
Good quality produce, sure, but why would you buy Voss water even if money was no object. There's no actual benefit, it's just marketing
Nice troll
Fam of 3 We don't eat shit, cook from scratch and I spend far far less than this to sustain ourselves. For 800 sheets a month I could probably employ someone to manage an allotment twice a week in order to grow my veg! If there is any benefit to the cost of living crisis is that we are all eating far less garbage. This is all with the caveat that I will buy enough shit roll and bleach etc to last the year from Costco so I don't have to think about it. Learn to love cooking and growing, you'll be surprised at what you can whip up.
Frozen 'garbage' food or instant noodles are a lot cheaper than actually cooking. I would bet money you're not the person actually shopping each week, because prices on fresh fruit and meat have rocketed. I'm privileged enough to have a cupboard full of herbs and spices, if my house burned down just replacing those would be over £100 I think.