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11 Ways to Cut the Cost of Your Food Shopping

Does it feel as if the cost of the weekly shop goes up every time you go to the supermarket? Well, luckily, there are things you can do to cut the cost of your grocery shopping. Have you tried these?

Chop your own veggies
It may be quicker to tip ready-chopped lettuce onto your plate, but rinsing it under the tap and chopping it yourself could save you money. As well as salads, you could save money on pre-chopped veg, too. A bag of ready prepared, chopped carrots will cost you around £1 more per kilogram than buying fresh carrots and chopping them yourself.

Choose when to go shopping
You might prefer to head to the shops nice and early, to get it over with, but you might find more bargains if you go later on in the day. Many supermarkets start to mark date-sensitive foods down in the late afternoon-early evening, for a quick sale before the next day, especially meat, fish, fruit, veg and dairy items. Take advantage of the reduced stickers and make use of your freezer.

Buy cheaper cuts of meat and fish
Don’t just choose premium cuts like chicken breasts, lamb chops and steaks. Try pork mince instead of lamb, or turkey instead of chicken. And although trout tastes similar to salmon, it’s often much cheaper to buy. Switching away from chicken breast meat to wings, legs or thighs will also save you money. Wings can be bought at around £2.20 per kilogram, while chicken breast meat costs somewhere around £8-10 per kilo. Also try offal - cuts like liver are nutritious and cheap.

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Take your own bags
So bags to carry home your shopping in now cost 5p each. Buy a few sturdy bags for shopping and pop them back in the car after you’ve unpacked so you never forget them. And if you shop online, select ‘no bags’ at the checkout. Ocado at the moment are doing a deal where they buy your bags back off you if you hand them back to the driver on your next shop. Just make sure you don’t forget.

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Make a meal plan - and a shopping list
Making a shopping list beforehand means you’re more likely to stick to what you need, rather than make it all up as you go along and then get home and find you don’t really have anything for dinner. And to have a good list, you’ll need a meal plan. Just write down what you want to make for dinners that week, taking into account lunches, breakfasts and snacks, too. Make a note of everything you need to make those meals - and the quantities - and you have a good shopping list you can really keep to.

Buy frozen
Buy frozen salmon and you’ll save yourself at least a couple of quid per kilogram. Same for prawns, meat and veg. And it’ll last longer, too. Fresh blueberries can be picked up for around £12 per kilo. But frozen ones come out at half that price, and you don’t have to worry about them going off before you get to use them all. Good for smoothies, baking and desserts.

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Think before you go for offers
Those ‘buy 2 get the third free’ offers might look pretty tempting, but are you really going to use that extra box of berries, or pack of bananas? There’s no point buying two to get another one free if you only ever needed the one in the first place. If you don’t need it - don’t buy it.

Shop online
Are you one of those people that can’t resist adding treats to your trolley as you shuffle around the supermarket? If so, then it might be a good idea to shop online. You don’t have the temptation of the smell of the in-store bakery, the special offers you don’t really need or the chocolates lined up opposite the checkouts. You do usually get reminded of offers or products ‘you might like’ when you click to checkout, but it might be easier to click through than it would be to resist those maple-glazed doughnuts giving you the eye on the shelf in front of you.

Buy value ranges
Do you really need a ‘luxury’ tin of tomatoes for your pasta sauce? Pick up a value tin of tomatoes for around 35p and they might be a bit broken, or not all the same colour - but it might not make much difference if you’re stirring into a chilli con carne anyway, or blending it up into soup. Compare that to a higher-end tin of tomatoes, priced at just under £1. Savings like this soon add up.

Have a couple of meat free days a week
Veggies are cheaper than meat. So, to save yourself some pennies - and cram in more of your ‘five a day’ - make a couple of the meals in the week meat-free. Try vegetable curry, Shepherd’s Pie, pasta sauce or a vegetable-strewn pizza.

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Make more foods from scratch
Fishcakes are one of the cheapest foods to make at home, using leftover mash and tinned fish. But they’re quite expensive to buy. The same thing goes for ready meals and those ready-prepped fruit bags for kids’ packed lunches. They might be handy to drop into a lunchbox at 7.30am, but you’ll save a heck of a lot of money if you slice up an apple yourself.

[PHOTO CREDITS: JO ROMERO]

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