How To Save Money On Groceries

How To Save Money On Groceries
With prices going up, we’re all looking for ways to save money. With some food products up over 65% in the past year, the weekly grocery bill has risen very quickly for a lot of households. While we can’t bring inflation down, we can give you some tips on how to save money when buying groceries. If you could save just £10 a week on your food bills, that would be an extra £520 pounds in your account by the end of the year.

Buy groceries, not ready meals
This is the big one! Stop buying ready meals and learn to cook. Almost all of them are hugely overpriced compared to cooking the same meal yourself from scratch. A tomato and cheese pasta ready meal can be as much as £3.50 at some supermarkets, compared to less than £1 if you were to make it yourself. Your homemade version will likely be tastier and healthier too as ready meals often have a very high salt and sugar content.

Use what you already have in the house
It’s easy to look at your pantry and say, “there’s nothing to eat”, but often we are overlooking the store cupboard staples that have been sat there for months or even years. You likely have half finished packs of rice, lentils, pasta, noodles etc. taking up space in your kitchen. We’re not saying you can’t buy any new ingredients, but you’d be surprised what you can make with what you already have in the house.

A great resource for using us your store cupboard staples is an app called “SuperCook”. It asks you to tick off all the ingredients you have in the house and the app crawls the web for recipes you can cook without needing to buy ingredients. Last time I tried it, it told me there were over 45,000 recipes I could cook without needing to buy any new ingredients, from tomato and lentil soup to sausage and biscuits, to spring onion pancakes.

Plan your meals in advance
If you plan a week’s meals in advance you can shop smarter. For example, you can plan multiple recipes using the same ingredients so you can minimise the amount of food you are throwing away. You are also less likely to impulse buy if you go shopping with a list.

Freeze more stuff
The freezer isn’t just for frozen peas. Get in the habit of freezing anything that you don’t think you’ll use in the next 48 hours. Far too often, we buy a pack of sausages, cook two of them and then the rest don’t get used up that week and end up being thrown in the bin. You can also freeze staples like milk, egg whites, chicken stock etc.

Pay attention to price per kg.
When you’re in the shops, start looking at the information printed underneath the main price tag. The “price per” gives you a much more accurate idea of the value you are getting. It helps if your mental arithmetic is good, so use the calculator on your phone if maths isn’t your strong suit. For example; 1kg of chicken for £4 or 700g of chicken for £3. The £3 chicken is actually more expensive, but if you just looked at the main price tag you wouldn’t necessarily realise that. However, if you looked underneath, you would see that they would have “40p per 100g” and “42p per 100g”. Often the items which look the cheapest are actually more expensive if you look at the price per 100g.

Know which offers to take advantage of and which to ignore
If an item you use regularly is “half price” or “buy one get one free”, it’s a great time to take advantage of it and maybe even stock up your store cupboards. On the other hand, don’t let special offers trick you into buying something that you don’t really need or want because it’s “good value”. Often the food which is on offer is junk food which you should be avoiding anyway.

Remember the tip above about paying attention to the “price per 100g” too. Special offers sometimes aren’t that special when you look at the price per unit.