British families have been hit hard by the rising cost of groceries, with food prices reported to have risen by 32 per cent since 2007 (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). Households are understandably struggling to find the extra on their grocery bill, with the average coming to over £4000 per year.
However, there are ways to easily slash your groceries bill, bring down the total at the till and struggle no more. See if you can apply any of the following suggestions to your weekly shop, and ‘downscale’ you’re shopping bill.
Price Promise
Some supermarkets offer a price promise, which means that your shopping basket is guaranteed to cost less than at any other supermarket. When you buy your groceries online at http://groceries.asda.com you can take advantage of the ASDA Price Guarantee, which means that you’ll save at least ten per cent on your shopping bill, compared to Tesco, Morrison’s, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. If this isn’t the case then ASDA will give you the difference, meaning that you just can’t lose.
It’s easy to use the ASDA Price Guarantee online – all you need is a receipt. And as the calculator is powered by independent website MySupermarket.com, you’ll have peace of mind.
‘Downscaling’
One way of instantly making savings in the supermarket is to ‘downscale’ your brand choices. For example, if you usually buy the most popular branded products ie Heinz Baked Beans, you would simple ‘drop down’ a level and try the Premium supermarket brand instead.
Likewise, if you usually buy premium supermarket brands, you can downscale to regular supermarket brands, and then to the basics range.
Downscaling your shopping basket has to include an element of trial and error, while you discover which items you are happy to downscale on and which you simply can’t compromise on. However, simply downscaling on some items can save a considerable amount on your groceries bill.
Meal Planning
Planning your meals is one way to ensure that you don’t overspend on food that will end up getting wasted. With the average family estimated to waste around £500 of food per year, simply ensuring that you buy only what you need could save you around £50 a month!
Buying your groceries online makes it easier to stick to a shopping list, as it eliminates the temptations presented when walking around the supermarket. It’s also easy to search for the specific items on your list, making your shopping experience quick and easy.
If you usually cook the same meals each week, the ‘Favourites’ function means that you could have your shopping checked out online in mere minutes – saving that other precious family commodity – time.
With a little thought there are ways to easily trim the grocery bill, making increases in food prices far less painful. Choose a supermarket such as ASDA that prides itself in offering great value across all of its ranges – and puts its money where its mouth is with the ASDA Price Guarantee!
My tip, which has so far saved us about £100, and we only started doing it the beginning of last week is: write down when you run out of something, we have a whiteboard in the kitchen now. Then when you go shopping, only buy what’s on the list as that’s what you use. I’ve stopped asking the hubby to pop into tescos to pick up stuff when we run out as he was a terrible impulse buyer and some milk would turn into a £30 shop!
Also we’re aiming to have pretty much empty cupboards and freezers before we go shopping. It’s been good as I’ve had to come up with new meal ideas to use some of the things we have. Can’t believe how much we used to fritter away. Also now we do our shopping in Aldi and Farm Foods for freezer stuff. We’re spending about £40 on 2 weeks shopping instead of £80+ a week at Tescos! Xx
Another tip: Most grocery stores rotate their sales. It’s usually every 6 or 8 weeks. If you have an pantry or larder, you could buy enough to get through those weeks and buy it again when it’s on sale.
I do this with more expensive items like deodorant, showergel and such. Also, take a trip to your local market. Fruit and veg are way cheaper there most of the time.
And buy in-season goods. Strawberries are so expensive in winter…
Some good tips x
Really good tips here and I totally agree with meal planning and shopping online it makes a huge difference to our food bill. The other thing we started doing that has saved us a lot of money is if you are self employed find your local costco or macro. We usually go once a month and fill the freezer with meat and buy all our essentials. As it is bulk buying some of our purchases can last up to 3 months. You need space to store it but since starting we have saved between £150 and £300 a month simply because the rest of the time we buy only fresh products in local stores and we are not tempted to over buy. The saving is not necessarily in the price it is mainly in all the unnecessary things you end up buying when you pop out just for milk (we buy a whole month worth of UHT milk). Might be worth considering…