You don't need to change what you eat or cut down on the quality of your family's meals in order to save money. Implementing the five suggestions below into your shopping and cooking routine is easy and means you can continue to enjoy your favourite foods for less.
Shop online
Beside the obvious benefit of being able to shop without leaving your living room, online shopping is an excellent way to keep track of your spending. Higher-priced branded products do not clamour for your attention in prime shelf positions as they do in the stores - instead, you search for what you want and select the most competitively priced, accurate match.
Your shopping accumulates as a list with a running total, making it easy to avoid last-minute shocks at the cost of your groceries when you check out. If you creep over your budget, you can scroll through the list and remove any unneccesary extras or impulse buys before you are committed to paying for them.
Most of the major supermarkets offer online shopping, with many providing incentives to do so, be it with a loyalty scheme, money-off vouchers, or discounted delivery.
Get freezing
When it comes to buying fresh produce, we are often advised to buy little and often, so as to minimise the throwing away of food that has passed its use-by date without being consumed. However, many fresh products, particularly meat, can be cheaper to buy in bulk. With almost every supermarket offering 'multibuy' deals on fresh packs of meat, it makes sense to take advantage of the offers, stock up, and reap the rewards. Anything you don't need to use immediately can be frozen for meals later in the week or month.
Shop at the end of the day
It's not unusual to see shoppers hovering around the area of the supermarket aisles that display the 'reduced' stock - products that have been slashed in price due to an impending use-by date. Clever planning of your shopping can mean using these low prices to your advantage (as long as you avoid the trap of buying food that you don't need and won't eat just because it's cheap!).
As closing time looms, fresh items whose 'best before' or 'sell by' dates fall on that particular day are reduced to ensure that they are sold. Many of them - particularly fruit and vegetables, which can remain fresh and usable past the date on the pack - are still in perfect quality, and most of them are dramatically reduced in price (sometimes up to a 90% discount).
The only thing to be careful of here is the language around the dates on the packets. 'Use by' means that it must be used by that date, so if you are buying fresh meat or dairy, you must make sure that it is eaten or frozen immediately. 'Best before' dates are for guidance only and it is not dangerous to eat food labelled in that way beyond the date stated.
Cut down on meat
You may be saving on the cost of meat by buying in bulk, but you can make what you have bought last even longer with clever 'padding out' using suitable vegetables. For example, grated carrot is a perfect, secret boost to dishes using mince, making it go much further, whilst also providing an extra portion of health-boosting vegetables. By adding vegetables in this way, you can reduce the amount of meat you are using and, often, get two meals out of the amount you would usually use for one.
Use every last bit
It sounds obvious, but avoiding waste is important when minimising food expenditure. Commonly discarded foods, such as bones (perfect for making stock and, therefore, saving money on buying stock cubes or ready-made soup), surplus vegetables (cooked, leftover vegetables make a delicious 'bubble and squeak'), and offal (a key component in many delicious dishes) can all be used to create additional dishes. Before you throw any food away, be sure that there isn't another way in which it can be cooked or served.
Amanda John - Amanda John is an award-winning fiction writer who also contributes factual articles to writing, parenting, and food/lifestyle ...
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