How To Save Money On Feeding The Family
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With food prices increasing, you may be wondering what the best ways are to save money on feeding the family.
Saving money on food shopping is challenging at the moment when prices seem to be increasing week on week. Even more so if you have a large family and lots of hungry bellies to feed.
While one of the best ways to save is to switch to a cheaper supermarket such as Lidl or Aldi, I know that’s not possible if you don’t have one locally. Any savings made could be negated by additional transportation costs, so I’ve not included that in this post.
How To Save Money On Feeding The Family
Meal Planning
Meal planning is one of the best ways you can save money on food. It helps to ensure food is used up before it expires and stops you from buying food you don’t need.
It can also help with the mental load of thinking about what to cook each night which in turn can help avoid the lure of the takeaway on already busy days.
Switch To Value Brands
Downshifting brands is a great way to save some cash. Switch the value version and if you love it, it stays, if you’re not so keen to switch up to the supermarket’s own brand next time.
Both Tesco and Sainsburys have rebranded their value brands in recent years to make the packaging more appealing and less basic looking (look out for Stockwell’s and Hubbards!)
With inflation increasing, many supermarkets have promised to keep the prices of their value brands low to help those on lower incomes and reinstate some value ranges that had been discontinued.
Yellow Sticker Shopping
Yellow sticker shopping is a great way to save money on food, with the end of day reductions being as much as 90% off of the original price.
Save Money On Feeding The Family: Buy Wonky Fruit & Vegetables
Buying wonky veg is great both for the planet and your wallet. Imperfect vegetables are brilliant for making soups and bulking out stews as they are peeled and chopped anyway.
Wonky fruit can be made into smoothies or cut up to make fruit salad.
Lidl £1.50 wonky veg boxes are amazing value for money and contain around to 5kg of fruit and vegetables at a fraction of what they would usually cost.
Go Meat-Free (But Not On A Monday!)
As meat is usually the most expensive part of a meal, going meat-free one or two nights a week can make a big difference to how much you spend.
Avoid meat substitutes and stick to recipes that utilise lentils, beans and chickpeas.
While ‘Met Free Monday’ is a popular slogan, many people have leftover meat from the Sunday Roast to use up on a Monday night so pick another night in the week to go meat-free.
Work On Eliminating Food Waste
Around one-third of all food produced in the world gets wasted, often ending up in landfills, but there are lots of ways you can eliminate food waste and in turn, save money.
Here are a few of my food waste recipes:
Batch Cooking
Buying foods in bulk often means they are cheaper – take advantage of this by
batch cooking and then freezing for when needed.
This can really help when life gets busy as you’re essentially creating your own much healthier and much cheaper ready meals. Lasagne, Chili Con Carne and Cottage are all perfect for batch cooking.
Save Money On Feeding The Family: Invest In a Slow Cooker
Slow cookers have many advantages but one of the main ones is that they can save you money.
Many cheaper cuts of meat benefit from long slow cooking and running your slow cooker can be much cheaper than having the oven on too.
It’s also a great way to feed the family if they all come home at different times, they can just help themselves to a full hot meal when they’re ready with no reheating required!
Bulk Up Meals With Bread / Stuffing / Lentils / Pulses
Bulking up meals is a great way to make food further, especially meals containing meat. You could switch half the meat for lentils so you still get a meaty flavour but will be saving money too.
Serving bread with meals can help fill everyone up, even better if you can grab a few yellow stickers loaves just for this purpose.
Money-Saving Food Apps
There are lots of apps that can save you money on your weekly food shop. My favourites are Shopmium, GreenJinn and Checkoutsmart which offer a whole host of free and discounted food products.
You buy the items, upload a picture of your receipt and then are refunded the cost or partial cost of the items bought. These offers can be combined with in-store offers to save even more money.
This post is a great example of how to do this: Coupon Shop: 12 Boxes of Cereal for £4.80+ Free Bananas
Olio is an app that lets people give away surplus that they won’t use.
Too Good To Go allows you to purchase a ‘Magic Box’ of food that would have ordinarily been thrown away by businesses like Greggs, M&S and Costa. Boxes usually cost around £3 for food that would have retailed for around £10.
Coupons and Vouchers
When you start using coupons and vouchers you might be surprised at just how many there are out there.
One of my favourites is the £10 off a £40 shop at Lidl, which runs a couple of times a year and can usually be found in the free Metro newspaper as well as some other paid for newspapers.
You can also find coupons in leaflets that are posted through your door, free supermarket magazines and online. If you have a loyalty card, for example a Nectar card, then you may be sent coupons and voucher in the post.
I find the best way to save money on feeding the family is to do a combination of all the above, by taking advantage of special offers, shopping for yellow stickers, reducing waste and cutting back on more expensive ingredients such as meat.
I’ve never even thought of some of these ideas! This is so helpful, everything is so expensive these days! Thank you so much x