Top 5 Ways To Save Money On Your Food Bills

It is the one thing that we can’t live without – after saving money cutting our luxury expenses or those subscriptions that you rarely use (we see you Gym Membership!)… One of the next steps people take is to try and cut down one of their largest expenses in the month, their grocery bill.

Thanks to sites like MySupermarketCompare hundreds of thousands of you and shopping smarter every week by finding the cheapest location for the supplies you need but what else can you be doing to slim your monthly grocery bill and free up funds for other areas of your life?

We have pulled together our selection of the top 10 ways you can save money on your food bills this month…

Write a Shopping List

It sounds painfully simple but many people are still turning up at the supermarket without a fully defined list of exactly what they need to buy!

Whilst at home, check the cupboards, write your meal plans for the week and take note of only the items that you need from your next trip to the supermarket.

One of the most common ways of inflating your bill is to buy things that you don’t need or that you will end up throwing away at the end of the week.

By entering the store with a list you can tell yourself that if it is not on the list you are not buying it.

Experiment with Own Brands

Yes, you may not be ready to switch out your Pepsi Max for Aldi’s own Cola substitute but why not experiment with some own-brand replacements in every shop to see if there are things you can start to switch out.

Great examples of places to start are with breakfast cereals, condiments/sauces, fruit juices and pasta as these are almost identical products but at a cheaper price point.

You will often find that the own-brand products are up to 20-25% cheaper than their branded counterparts so it can really add up if you are able to switch 20-40% of your shop away from popular brands.

For the next month, attempt to switch a few products with every shop to see if they are as good as (or maybe better) than the brand you would typically buy and watch your average spend start to drop week on week.

Switch To Batch Cooking

Another great way to shave a few pounds of your weekly spend is to start batch cooking meals to spread ingredients over a longer period and take advantage of buying some items in the larger quantity to save on the number of items you buy.

So, rather than buying ingredients to make a Lasagne or Chilli Con Carne for dinner one evening and then ingredients to make lunches during the week, why not scale up the size of the dinner you are cooking then freeze some portions to have for lunches on other days in the week.

The reason this can work is that instead of buying another 4-5 ingredients for making another meal, you often just need to increase the carton size of certain ingredients such as going from a 250g to 500g beef mince to make a larger dinner. The price difference from a 250g to 500g is often less than £1 whereas 4-5 extra ingredients for making sandwiches for example can cost between £4 and £5.

An example from today’s prices, Tesco Lean Beef Mince:

250g: £1.99

500g: £2.89

A difference of just £0.90.

Sense Check Special Offers

Are special offers really that special?

Whilst there are going to be some exceptions, most of the time “special offers” are simply a way to get consumers to get stock off their hands that they no longer want to hold in the quantities they have.

This means they offer discounts for people to take it off their hands… If this is a product that you usually buy then this can be good news for you, but if you are being lured in to buy something that you would not ordinarily purchase then it is a good time to sense check the special offer…

Do I need it? Is it really a good deal?

Always take a pause and think before adding the item to your trolley/basket.

Don’t Squeeze Away The Pennies

Did you know that buying some items in the squeezy bottles are more expensive than the glass jars?

Great examples are things like ketchup and mayonnaise – they are often more expensive to buy in the plastic bottles than the glass jars – can you work around this to save yourself some money?

When browsing the available items – stop and think through your options and check the prices – you will be surprised at the difference in price for something as simple as the container it comes in… Can you get the refill bags rather than new hand-wash, glass jars instead of plastic bottles.

Even if you can do this on a few items every week it adds up to a decent saving over a year.