How to save money on food
Food prices remain high and many households are looking for ways to save money on groceries without sacrificing quality or nutrition. From planning your weekly shop and comparing supermarket prices to using loyalty schemes and reducing food waste, there are plenty of practical ways to cut food bills. Here are some of the best tips to help your grocery budget go further.
How to make big savings on your grocery shopping
Food is an essential to survive but with inflation still stubbornly high many of us are trying to cut back as much as possible. So, what are the best ways to save money on our groceries?
Use cashback sites, discount codes and apps
With JamDoughnut you can earn reward points by buying pre-payment gift cards to use online, in-store or on the phone. Take out your cashback after you’ve received £10 worth in points. You can currently get anything from 1.5% to 4% off for Aldi, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrisons, Waitrose and Marks and Spencer. Some gift cards may be in-store only. For example buy a card with 5% discount and that 5% will go into the cashback account. You can also get between 4 and 10% off food delivery companies such as Hello Fresh and take always / deliveries / eating out such as Pizza Hut and Harvester.
With Mad About Money you can get similar discounted vouchers but save before you buy so the money stays in your pocket. Listen to the founder Maddy Alexander on The Complaining Cow Consumer Show Maddy Alexander-Grout talks getting out of debt & money saving tips, tricks & hacks
Download Honey, which automatically searches for active discount codes on Internet sites you visit and applies a discount. Current examples include Asda Groceries, Iceland and Pizza Hut but stores and codes change all the time.
Shopmium, Green Jinn and CheckoutSmart are apps that are designed to give you money off various household and food items. Recent examples include £1 off breakfast cereals, 50% of mayonnaise and 50p off desserts at Morissons. Sweets, biscuits, alcohol are often in the offers. The three apps are all different and will have various offers.
Download the app, register your details just once and choose the item with the discount, upload the receipt and photo of the barcode and the money will go into your app or paypal account and you can take out when you have received a minimum amount around £1.50 – £5.00 Time it right and you can get a gift when you start usually around a £2 value. You could use all 3 in the same shop.
The best-known and biggest cashback sites are Topcashback* and Quidco* as well as Kidstart* where you can save for your child. Create an
account, look up the company from which you wish to buy then register and track your purchase. The time in which you get the cashback amount varies from trader to trader.
Often you will get a higher discount for your first delivery and some offer a gift or further discount for referring a friend.
Read the terms and conditions of these sites carefully as you as you may not be able to use more than one offer at a time including discount codes.
Compare supermarket prices
Trolley.co.uk compares prices across supermarkets and takes into account discounts for loyalty apps and cards.
Look online to see if non-perishables can be bought more cheaply from stores that aren’t supermarkets. Camel Camel Camel monitors the prices of items for sale on Amazon and lets you know when prices are dropping, together with their price history.
Use reducing food waste apps and sites to save money
OLIO connects neighbours with each other and with local businesses so that left-over food can be shared and not wasted. The Too Good To Go app allows you to purchase and collect food from businesses with a short expiry date for typically one third of the original price.
Sarah Park and Lucy Willoughby are great advocates of the app. Recently, for £4 Sarah got 4 pork chops, single cream, a pork pie, scotch egg, cheese, butter, 4 different single desserts and a kefir drink. “You can get stuff from all sorts of places like Greggs, Costa, Starbucks etc.”
Lucy has switched to a box from her local fruit and veg shop every week via the Too Good to Go app. “This week we had bananas, strawberries, sweet potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, radishes, beetroot, carrots and lettuce. You need to be prepared to cook and eat or freeze some of it straight away but it’s great value and I love the way it challenges me to get more creative with what I’m cooking.”
Most of the supermarkets and various local food shops will be on there.
Buy discounted gift cards for a range of retailers. It will depend on what gift cards people have sold to the site as to what is available but supermarkets certainly appear. see CardYard.
Get free stuff including food
Use sites such as FreeStuffUK and LatestDeals.co.uk for free and low cost items. Enter competitions, sign up to test products or do surveys, all for free to get items from a wide range of retailers including money off your first purchases at supermarkets. The sites have thousands of categorised offers so you can select food and drink. Offer have included a free trial box of SimpleCook box, free Costa coffees, paying postage only for 3 bottles of wine and vouchers for supermarkets.
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Prepare before you shop at a supermarket
Reduce impulse buying and waste by planning meals, making a list and not going shopping hungry.
List items you can buy in bulk if they’re on offer and join in with friends and family.
If possible go shopping without children so you don’t feel pressured into buying things!
Freeze more to save more
The Waste Resources Action Programme‘s research Food surplus and waste in the UK – key facts found that the average UK family wastes £730 worth of food every year.
Kate Hall founder of The Full Freezer Kate Hall founder of The Full Freezer says that she now saves at least £60 a month by freezing food that would have been thrown out but also by not having to replace wasted food and not being tempted to have take-aways. She says you can freeze almost anything. “For example, fruits can be frozen and made into smoothies or used in baking, and sandwiches can be made and frozen to avoid wasting items such as bread, ham and cheese.”
Hear Kate on The Complaining Cow Consumer Show Helen Dewdney talks to Kate Hall food waste expert.
Shop using non-traditional supermarkets
Discount Dragon delivers over 250,000 branded products to people’s homes. It claims to often be over 60% lower than at the supermarket. Its buyers purchase items that have been over supplied and/or coming close to their Best Before Date and put them up on the website where there is a minimum purchase of £25.
Explore Approved Foods which sells over two thousands of items that are near their “best before” date, offering free delivery when you spend over £55.00. Hundreds of different items are added every day and you can even get items discounted up to 83%. The site says: “Regular customers typically save about £60 on their monthly shop compared with high street prices.” When we checked the site you could buy 12 Oxo vegetable cubes with a best-before date of the end of July for £1 rather than the usual £2.40, and a John West fridge pot tuna steak with spring water with a best-before date at the end of June for £1 rather than £1.90.
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Access home cooked meals (and/or help others)
Free My Meal puts people who want to cook at home in touch with those who need a hot meal. It can be done anonymously and safeguarding measures are in place. There is no means testing to restrict you from accessing a home-cooked hot meal for you or your family. Hear Hayley Steere from Free My Meal talk to me on The Complaining Cow Consumer Show.
Kate and Hayley have also joined forces to help ease the pressures of the festive season. They have created a Christmas campaign to help people prepare their festive dinner in advance, and even prepare and donate a meal for those unable to afford their own.
By doing this, not only can families spread the cost and workload of their Christmas meal, but also avoid wasting foods, such as potatoes, carrots and bread. Instead, these are tucked away in the freezer ready for their special day!
Using Kate’s expert freezer knowledge, and Hayley’s extensive community network, ‘Freeze My Meal’ will provide a free downloadable PDF showing how to prepare and freeze key Christmas dinner ingredients in advance, and how to then cook them (mostly straight from frozen).
And for those wanting more ideas about how their freezer can come in handy this Christmas, Kate will be making her downloadable ‘Stress-Free Christmas Dinner’ guide available for just 99p, with all proceeds going to Free My Meal.
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I am regularly in the media talking about retail, saving money and consumer issues. See my media page for details, showreel and examples of media work.
Rewards, loyalty and saving money at supermarkets
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