Do you buy more food than you need? Does your shopping bill get bigger every month? Here are five ways to save food and money.
1. Weekly menus. Spending a little time on drawing up a weekly menu will help you write shopping lists for everything you need and nothing else. This has two benefits: you won’t have any food left over because you’ll have calculated exactly how much you need and you’ll save money because you won’t buy things “just in case”.
2. Shopping lists. This is linked to the first point. If you draw up a weekly menu and use it to write a shopping list, you’ll notice the savings from the first week. You need to stick to your menu, though! If you fancy something that’s not on the list, jot it down for the following week or cross off something else on the list.
3. Go shopping after eating. This will help reduce cravings and you’ll save more. Above all, you’ll find it easier to avoid buying precooked and mass-produced cakes and pastries, which is the first thing to go in the trolley if you go shopping with hunger pangs.
4. Seasonal products. If you buy strawberries in December or oranges in August, bear in mind that you’ll pay more than when they’re in season. If you stick to seasonal produce at the natural time of year, you’ll make big savings and eat more healthily.
5. Cut out processed food. Precooked products are usually more expensive compared with fresh ones. And all that sugar and processed fats makes them very addictive and hard to resist. The best solution is to go shopping in your local corner shops or food markets. Supermarkets are full of visual stimuli to tempt you away from your shopping list with the promise of saving time, but in fact you end up spending much more. And eating much, much worse.
