Tips for reducing my weekly shopping costs?

HouseBuyer10 said:
Hi all
Just curious how much your grocery shopping costs you every week.
Any tips on how to reduce this? Do you shop local, free range or organic?
Two pieces of organic chicken breast are about €9 in Dunnes. A bit too expensive.
Thanks.
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If you are up to jointing the chicken, it usually works out a lot cheaper buying the whole bird, whether free range or organic.
Tesco have a free range whole chicken for €5, or organic for €8.50.
Their organic vegetables are very nice, and while more expensive than the standard versions, have more flavour.

We do Tesco click and collect (free) for the staples. In the time it'd take you to find car park space, trolley and get into the store ... the shopping is in the boot of the car. You can do your order in the week before online while listening to the radio or half watching tv.
The Tesco Extra stores with proper pickup locations are the ones to use, some of the other are a bit ad-hoc.
Especially during lockdowns, where we were doing 1 run a week, Tesco had the best selection and click collect setup - of the full variety of branded products and its own brand items are cheaper than Dunnes.
It also encouraged creativity with leftovers recipes on what to do with whole chicken :)
As it's cheaper buying a bigger chicken, or more beef mince or whatever, than different dishes every night - batch cooking will work out cheaper too.

Now that things have opened up, we're still not really doing lunches or dinners out. So for variety we'll have one dinner a week where we pickup something on special in LIDL or Supervalu, or a particular dish with ingredients from butchers or fishmongers, or take out.
 
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Porridge for breakfast for everyone
At least three meals per week are fully vegetarian
Make soup at least once at week from the 49c veg display at the front of the store
Bake a pound cake once a week
Plant a fruit tree in your garden (apple or plum)
Learn to make puddings such as rice pudding / apple crumble etc
Frozen veg and fruit can often be better value than fresh
Buy big tubs of plain yogurt and add your own flavours - pureed frozen fruit / lemon curd / honey all work well
Jarred sauces (tomato sauce, curry sauces) are not good value for money.
Check the cost per kg or cost per litre on everything you buy. Pricing is done to make you believe you are getting a bargain, often you are not.
Don't buy crisps / fizzy drinks / chocolate etc
Cleaning products: use half the quantity of washing machine stuff and aside from dishwasher tabs, bleach and washing up liquid is all you need
 
2 adults 3 children.

Approx €150 pw aldi
Approx €50 pw on random bits in dunnes/tesco
Approx €50 pw on takeaway

Aldi is good value and the produce in most cases as good as anywhere and sometimes better eg aldi's gruyere is so much better than dunnes.

Staples are same same across stores i find.

Free range chicken, which we always buy, is pricey everywhere incl aldi.

We buy fresh produce. We eat a lot!!!
 
I shop in Lidl and have a sheet with all of the things I usually buy. I print it off and do a quick stock-take before heading out. I find this way my shop is a lot quicker and don't end up buying stuff we already have and ditto for impulse buys. I try to keep the blinkers on when going down the middle isles, but always manage a peep!
 
My weekly shop in Aldi this week was 145 euro because they had a garden leaf blower/vacuum on sale from 44.99 to 24.99.....how could anybody resist that!
 
Family of 4 (2 adults, 2 young kids), averaged €1,100 / month in 2021.

The big revelation during the pandemic was online / home delivery. Huge time saver with two full-time working parents. Added benefit, reduced impulse buys, and of course, no kids pestering you for stuff as you roam the aisles, magic.
 
2 adults and 3 kids under 10 - approx €160 pw in Dunnes - €200 total then €40 off with the vouchers. Sort of feel locked into getting it to the 200 mark each week so its clever on their part. We used to do the weekly shop in Aldi, which came to around €120,, but Mrs. Lucky would always end up in the M&S next door to top up on some fancy items for the freezer so it worked out reasonably similar. Shopping in Aldi was so much easier than Dunnes i found due to the difference in product range between them, but no issues with quality - both are equal in my opinion. Dunnes is just a lot more convenient to where we live.
 
michaelm said:
Do you perchance have the items listed in sequential order of where you'll find them as you snake through the shop? I tend to do that.
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Same here, makes it much quicker and easier to get what you need without straying down aisles with temptations...
 
HouseBuyer10 said:
Hi all
Just curious how much your grocery shopping costs you every week.
Any tips on how to reduce this? Do you shop local, free range or organic?
Two pieces of organic chicken breast are about €9 in Dunnes. A bit too expensive.
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Prepare your meals in advance. Write up a list for everything you need. If somethings on the list won't used up e.g. veg, come up with something else that will, so you don't waste. If you don't eat much bread, stick it in the freezer and take out what you need.

Organic is very expensive and unless it is important to you, skip it. I get 10 large chicken breasts for €11 in my butchers.


From the guy who is in Dunnes every day ;)
 
Steven Barrett said:
Prepare your meals in advance. Write up a list for everything you need. If somethings on the list won't used up e.g. veg, come up with something else that will, so you don't waste. If you don't eat much bread, stick it in the freezer and take out what you need.

Organic is very expensive and unless it is important to you, skip it. I get 10 large chicken breasts for €11 in my butchers.
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Very good tips here especially the bit about buying from the butchers.
 
Steven Barrett said:
Organic is very expensive and unless it is important to you,
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Horses for courses.

For me its more about the environmental impact; honey from a glass jar doesn't taste any different to honey from a plastic container, but the glass can be recycled.

It's the same with free range chicken / organic veg - I don't think the taste or health benefit is any better. But I'm prepared to buy them to support that element of food production.

What is vexing though, it how easy it is for manufactuers to weasel out of label regulations.
 
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2 adults, 3 teens. I'd say about €200 a week, mostly Tesco and Lidl (Lidl have some good own-brand products but their fruit and veg is poor IMO, and lately their shelves have been like a Moscow supermarket circa 1991). I've come to the conclusion that trying to plan and then buy everything for a full week for (effectively) 5 adults is too much work and so tend to shop for just the next 3/4 days at a time when buying food.

My money saving tip - bulk buy household stuff like loo roll, detergent, toothpaste etc when it's on special offer - also things like teabags, olive oil, basically anything that will keep and that you won't just consume faster because it's in the house (or buy the own-brand version if you can find one that's good). Conversely don't buy 3 boxes of crunchy nut cornflakes just because they're "3for2" - your teenagers will just eat even more massive bowls of them and you'll run out of milk.
 
michaelm said:
Do you perchance have the items listed in sequential order of where you'll find them as you snake through the shop? I tend to do that.
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So do I. The supermarkets are onto us though! Every so often they deliberately rearrange the store aisles forcing us to hunt down our favourite products in unfamiliar locations. The theory is we'll see new products and maybe toss them into the trolley as we go along.

For the same reason, the basic staples are never alongside each other, but instead are interspersed with more luxury items. Thus maximizing customer exposure to high margin products.
 
Thirsty said:
I'm wondering if you are rebutting for the sake of it, or do you truly believe that plastic is recycled in the same way and at the same rate as glass?
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Obviously not exactly the same way.
But both materials can be recycled by, in simple terms, being melted down and reused to create new receptacles.
 
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