5 Easy Money-Saving Tips for your next Trip to the Supermarket

Let’s be honest – right now, things aren’t easy.

Here in New Zealand, fuel prices have jumped up by 45 cents per litre over the past week. Grocery prices, especially for fresh foods and produce, have over the past year gone up by 4.5%. Wages aren’t keeping pace. We stretch and consider every little purchase. But we haven’t found a way yet to avoid the weekly grocery shop…

And as if they had missed the memo, our chickens have just decided to all go broody – no eggs at least for the next little while! So what can I do to make ends meet, to stick to our weekly food budget and still feed my family a mostly healthy and varied set of meals? Thankfully, this isn’t our first squeeze. We have had our share of financial tight spots and we have developed some tried and true go-to-strategies for lean times!

Let me share with you 5 easy ways to quickly save on your next trip to the Supermarket.

Swallow your pride. If you are a loyal shopper anywhere but at the cheapest supermarket in your country, change your supermarket (temporarily). Put on a wig and glasses if it makes you feel safer, but please realise you are paying extra for service and branding. Here is NZ, Pak’n’Save isn’t glamorous and yes, no one will pack and carry your bags for you, but it is where you find the best deals. When every dollar matters, make every dollar count.

And to take it further, you can save a lot of money by switching from branded products to home brands. In most cases, the product is exactly the same, made at exactly the same manufacturer from the same material – only in a different packaging. Take it from someone who works in the food industry: you pay for the brand. We have ditched most name brands in our home. Things like cereals, pasta, preserves and cookies taste exactly the same when purchased as home brands. We simply empty the pack into un-labelled jars. I was astonished when Pak’n’Save launched their own version of Milo: priced at $2.99 per 300g pack versus $6.59 for 310g of Milo. And taste and nutritional content are pretty much the same!

Any supermarket will have special deals. If you can, get the weekly flyer. Even better, do your shopping online, giving you the freedom to select and de-select products without getting looks from fellow shoppers. Then plan your shopping list and weekly menu (you should have both… If you don’t, then starting to is tip 2B) around those weekly deals.

Deals are created by category, i.e. there will be some discounted meats, discounted dairy, discounted fruit and veges, discounted snacks etc. every week. Plan your weekly meals using these, provided they are good deals and not simply discounted branded products.
In our house, we plan out meals in advance using a Modular Meal System, where every dinner is comprised of a protein, a carb and vegetables. Then we combine based on what is available! Snacks, breakfast, lunchbox items etc also fall into set categories, within which we vary based on what we can buy at the shop that week.

Have you ever been sick and unable to get to the shop on your usual day? Or been so busy that the groceries had to wait until later in the week? And you’re still alive. Sometimes, when money is tight, we simply postpone the weekly shop. E.g., my usual grocery day is Friday, but I may put in an online order for pick-up on Sunday. During those extra days we live off what hides in the back of the pantry, at the bottom of the freezer, or any chilled left-overs from the past week. Yes, admittedly, some of those meals will be unorthodox and we may have buffet-style dinners where there’s not enough of one thing to feed everyone, but rather lots of small dishes to choose from. But those extra “free” days make a huge difference! If you are for example spending $280 per week on food, then not spending anything for two days will save you $80!

As mentioned above, shopping online for pick-up from the store can mean some serious savings. Not only are you able to view and compare all options, you can also easily select and de-select products to make the amount you spend fit your budget. Provided stores don’t charge too much for this service, your spend can be much less also because there is little temptation for impulse buying.

My current routine is to first browse the weekly deals, selecting anything we may need. Then going through my shopping list and adding to the shopping cart whatever has to be re-stocked. I allow myself a lot of room at this step, often ‘splurging’ on things I’d like, just because I know adding to the cart won’t cost anything. My last step then is to review the contents of the shopping cart and the total cost, removing any duplicates, things which could wait a week, things that would be nice to have but are unnecessary. Only when the total value of the cart looks alright will I proceed to check-out.

There are endless resources available online teaching you how to bake your own bread, make protein bars, blend bliss balls. You can grow your own fruit and vegetables, keep chickens for eggs (if they are laying…) or a cow for dairy. All these are wonderful, will likely cut your grocery bill down and allow you to take pride in having made something from scratch. The hard truth is though that these things cost time. I have to feed my chickens twice a day and clean the coop. We bake our own sourdough bread, but it takes us an entire day. After years of doing it we have managed to incorporate the steps so well into our routine that we hardly notice, but it would definitely be faster to buy bread.

The most sensible and efficient approach in my opinion is to take a hard look at your shopping list each week, identifying what you could realistically make at home (or substitute), and what you do not have time for that particular week. For example, I might make and freeze a big batch of waffles for breakfast next week – and next week I might just buy some crumpets instead.

For our family, some of the biggest savings come from making our own yoghurt. We go through about 2kg of yoghurt each week, eating it for breakfast, at work, and using it in recipes instead of sour cream or mayonnaise. Making our won from milk powder saves us around $20 per week.

A word of caution:

One hard lesson I learned was to only make things we will actually eat. Like that beautifully crunchy batch of toasted granola I made the other week. Unfortunately, nobody in our house actually likes granola. And since I am the one who made it I am now tasked with finishing it, so it won’t end up in the bin…