7 Food Budget Tips That Actually Work

Your food budget could be the only big variable in your monthly spending. Mortgage, rent, loans, insurance, phones, bills, subscriptions – they are all fixed every month and there isn’t much you could do about them, at least not every month.

But food?

You actively make the decision of how much to spend on it.

You decide what to get and how to use it.

Yet, you are probably missing out on the opportunity to budget better for it. Here’s how you know you need the tips I’ve shared below:

• You often throw food away – usually after you come home with a few bags of fresh food and need to find space for it.
• Your diet isn’t as healthy as you want it to be.
• You feel like the amount of money you spend on food doesn’t really match the amount of food you put in the fridge.

Food is honestly one of the hardest things to budget for. You want healthy, but also cheap, but also variety, but also something that everyone likes…

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Why is Food So Hard To Budget For?

It isn’t because people don’t know groceries cost money. With prices rising lately, my weekly food bill went up by £20 in the last six months, and I buy the same stuff all the time.

So, I had to sit down and re-think my meal planning system all over again, because what I was doing at that point didn’t work for us anymore.

I found out I was making these three mistakes:

• Most of the food-related decisions I was making happened in the shop, while actively shopping for food.
• I had a clear idea of what to cook for the week, but rarely checked if I had some of the ingredients already at home, so I was buying things “just in case”;
• I was going for the viral food ideas – the ones that were more “looking good” but not enough “lasting long”.

Once I identified these mistakes, I set myself on a mission to fix my biggest spending variable. Again, I cannot control how much I pay for my mortgage, but I can surely get smarter about the food I cook.

How to Budget for Food Smarter

Empty the pantry week

One week of the month I don’t do food shopping. We live on whatever’s in the pantry and let me tell you, we are yet to see the day when the pantry is empty. Turns out that the food pillars (beans, lentils, pasta, rice, tinned tomatoes) are always enough to give us a week of healthy food where I’ve spend almost nothing on food.

I only shop for bread (when I am not in the mood to make it myself), fruit and milk.

The first time I did this, as an experiment, I discovered that it wasn’t a “we don’t have anything to eat” problem, but “well, I want something else actually”. To make it sound very honest – it was a fussiness problem. It wasn’t that I had nothing to cook for us, I just didn’t want what we had and if I had a different craving I was giving in to it.

The issue with this is that the impulse decision to cook something else (just becuase I wanted to) was costing me a trip to the shop for a thing or two we were missing, and we all know that if you enter a shop for a thing or two, you walk out with five more things. Once I stopped listening to my fussiness and started following the initial plan, things got much easier.

Meal planning but make it better

Instead of planning 6 different meals that all need me to cook them from scratch, I have adopted the “rollover meals” idea.

The gist of it is this: I cook my main protein (the meat) at the beginning of the week and use the leftovers of that meal to create a new one the next day.

Here’s what it looks like in practice: Last week I bought a whole chicken, baked it on Monday and we had it with baked potatoes and a salad. Of course we didn’t eat the whole chicken, so on Tuesday I used some of the leftovers to bake it with rice (I only washed the rice, chopped the veggies, added the meat chunks plus some chicken broth I had in the freezer). We had that meal for two full days. And we still had leftovers from the chicken, so I scraped whatever was left and made a chicken soup. The bones and the skin (we don’t eat the skin in our house) went in the freezer in a bag I will fill with more meat and then boil to make more chicken broth.

Here’s a version for pork: I buy a big chunk of pork and cut it in half. One half goes into the chopper and turns into mince for meatballs. Those meatballs go so well with mashed potatoes, but whatever’s left from them the next day turns into either pasta with meatballs or a delicious hearty stew with veggies. The other big chunk of pork meat would usually get chopped for steaks or go in the freezer to wait its turn next week.

The idea of these rollover meals isn’t just to save you time (and it does), but to make you use your meat better, to create more with it than just one big meal with stale leftovers nobody wants to touch.

Become price aware

I used to have an issue: I didn’t know how much 90% of the items in my trolley were costing me. If you grabbed a random product and asked me how much it was, I wouldn’t know. I was grabbing ingredients because I needed them, but never knew how much they would cost me.

Then I heard my sister’s rant about how much a bag of dishwasher tablets cost at Lidl and how much a similar bag of dishwasher tablets cost at Costco. She was comparing them for five minutes straight and while I didn’t hear even half of it, it shocked me that she does the maths on how things could be cheaper if she buys them from one place or another. I knew the information as well, but I didn’t act upon that knowledge.

Shop once a week only

It’s easier to budget for the big food haul once a week than it is for the tiny trips to the shops for a thing or two. It is also rare to go into a shop for bread and come out of that shop with bread only.

And it isn’t your fault… entirely. Shops are built to entice us to buy, they have big colourful signs for sales, yellow labels that feel like we’re missing a bargain and there’s always “something” we forgot we ran out of. Big companies are paying hefty amounts of money to their marketing teams to make us spend more and more.

Therefore, you want to shop once a week only. Pick a day, make the list, decide on everything and most of all – check the essentials. Bread, milk, eggs and sugar are probably the biggest reasons to to decide to stop by the shop at the end of the day, because those are things we genuinely need every day. Make sure you’ve done the maths so you don’t run out of those essentials.

Also, no change in plans. If you’ve decided to make soup, but the kids want homemade pizza, you better have all the ingredients at home or pizza waits until next week.

This isn’t about depriving yourself or your children, don’t be dramatic. It’s about beating the shops at their own game, getting on top of your food budget, making your children understand that “I want it now” doesn’t always mean “I will get it now”. Most of all, it’s about getting comfortable with a system that serves your family best.

The classic: Never shop on an empty stomach

This one might make people smile, but seriously, if I enter a shop hungry, I will buy not just more food, I will buy more processed food. My eyes will only land on something quick and easy to eat, not necessarily healthy, the sweets in the trolley will double, and the money I pay in the end will be way more than I thought I’d spend initially.

So, keep a box of protein bars in your car, if you need to, but never enter a shop hungry.

Swap Products

We are creatures of habit. We would stick to a specific food brand for years just because we’re used to it or because that’s the brand our parents recommended 30 years ago.

But most big supermarkets have their own brand that they sell cheaper. So why not do an experiment every week? Swap one of your branded ingredients own-brand version. If nobody in the family notices the change and the meals taste the same way, the experiment is successful, you never buy the more expensive one again.

If it’s genuinely worse, you go back to what you’re used to and you’ve lost nothing.

Related Read: 25 Frugal Household Tips That Are Actually Achievable

Yellow stickers, but with rules

I’ve already mentioned that shops use yellow stickers to tell you an item is discounted and it’s such a bargain, you’d be crazy to miss it. Well, don’t miss it, but…

Only buy discounted items if they are on your shopping list and you know their usual price is at least 10% more than the discounted one. It isn’t a secret that many shops drop just pennies from the usual price of an item and claim it’s a deal. If you aren’t price aware (I also mentioned that above), you are the ideal target for those types of “deals”.

Also, if the item is on offer at a very good price, buy more and store it in the pantry or freezer.

Before You Go

I’ve just listed 7 tips that save you money when planning your family’s meals. And while I think they’re reasonable and sensible, maybe they sound like a lot of work and planning. I recommend starting with just one. Try it for a week or even a month, see how it feels to pay more attention to your weekly shop and if the tip works for you, try the next one as well.

And if you struggle to decide which one asks for the least effort, it’s the “don’t go to the shop hungry” one. It’s seriously the easiest of all, because it asks for no change, just a full belly before you go shopping.