Budget-Friendly Family Meals: How We Feed a Family of 5 on £500 a Month

Feeding a Family on a Budget: Our £500 Monthly Meal Plan

Feeding a family healthy, home-cooked meals on a tight budget isn’t always simple—but with the right strategy, it’s absolutely doable. In this post, I’m sharing a realistic look at how we feed our family of five on just £500 a month, well below the UK average for our household size.

From shopping habits to budget-friendly recipes, you’ll see how we turn an affordable food shop into cheap healthy meals for the whole family—without sacrificing nutrition or sustainability.

🛒 Where We Shop for Budget-Friendly Family Groceries

A successful family food budget starts with smart shopping. We balance cost, nutrition, and values like sustainability and ethics by sourcing food from a mix of local, organic, and bulk-buy options. Within that, we look at what ingredients we can get at a good price and then look at what meals we can build with those meals. We want those meals to be the bulk of our meal plan. If we start with just what we want to eat, then we won’t build the most budget friendly meal plan. This doesn’t meal some things have to always be off the meal plan, but we need to build the bulk of it around meals with cheaper ingredients and add the others in more sporadically. In our home this meals lots of beans and pulses, simple grains, eggs, yougrt, not much meat, and foraged ingredients when they’re in season.

  • ✅ Organic Fruit & Veg Box – This is not a budget friendly item, BUT it can fit on a budget friendly meal plan if you plan it in the right way (and don’t shop the pricey extras. But for us, it’s about the sustainability and ethics of the box, so we make it work!
  • ✅ Doves Farm Organic Flour – We get 25kg sacks to save on all our baked goods, and to use (mostly) UK grown, organic flour.
  • ✅ Local refill/bulk shop – affordable pantry staples like oats, lentils, and rice. Again not always the cheapest option but we love all the benefits of shopping local and the reduced plastic packaging.
  • ✅ Supermarkets – strategic shopping to top up on affordable essentials and freezer items. We use Waitrose and Sainsbury’s most often for proximity and values and both have voucher systems that we check before shopping too.
  • ✅ In the US? Try Azure Standard for bulk pantry staples and flour

🍽 Budget-Friendly Family Meals: What We Ate This Week

Here’s how we turned one week’s grocery haul into simple, affordable meals for the whole family:

  • Sourdough bread & waffles – baked from scratch using bulk flour
  • Vegan (or dairy) mac and cheese – an easy, low-cost plant-based dinner
  • Chocolate cake & sweet treats – baked using recipes from our eBook
  • Chicken taco-style soup – filling, flavourful, and great for leftovers (recipe here)
  • Red Lentil and Foraged Nettle Soup
  • Bean and Rice Bowls with a simple slaw is in THIS ebook.
  • Tacos with beans and slaw (also is in THIS ebook.)
  • Pizza with homemade pizza sauce (also is in THIS ebook.)
  • Lentils, Roasted Veg and Pesto
  • Peanut Butter Freezer Bars (Adapted from a peanut free recipe in THIS ebook.)

For more easy meals made from real ingredients, check out our (budget friendly!) downloadable recipe collections for simple, real food meals and treats:

📅 Meal Planning on a Budget: What Makes It Work?

It’s not just about what you buy—how your meals come together across the week is what makes or breaks a budget. Some of our top tips for meal planning on a budget for families:

  • Stretch ingredients across multiple meals to simplify the shopping list and to maximise bulk discounts (e.g. carrots in soup, roast, and lunchboxes)
  • Bake from scratch – cheaper and more nutritious than store-bought
  • Avoid Snack foods and lean towards meals, or real food snacks brought from home. (Like fruit, veggies, a sandwich, or homemade popcorn.)
  • Batch cook and freeze extras for easy dinners later in the week. This saves on prep time and also often on oven power costs.
  • Use theme nights like Soup Night, Pizza Night, or weekend waffles to simplify decisions
  • Plan for flexibility based on what’s on offer or needs using up, build in leftovers meals and make sure nothing goes in the trash. This saves on wasted money but also on the greenhouse gases that come from throwing food in landfill. Any food waste you do have, try to add to compost if you can!

We share more of this in our YouTube video where I show the full week’s food haul, what we spent, and how we turned it into breakfast, lunch, and dinner for five.

🐣 From Coop to Kitchen: Sustainable Food on a Budget

Our food journey includes backyard ducks too! Our backyard ducks are part of our low-cost, low-impact food system. Their eggs contribute to our weekly meals and offer a bit of farm-to-table joy and responsibility for the kids too. This isn’t always a money saver but once you add in the fertiliser saved and the better veggie growth with the slugs and pests gone… we find it is budget wise neutral to a small saving. If you haven’t yet, you can watch our ducklings hatch – these ones will grow up to add to our flock and produce a few more eggs. We borrowed an incubator and used our own eggs so the cost was minimal.

🌱 Final Thoughts: Eating Well on a Family Food Budget

Whether you’re feeding two or a crew of five, creating budget-friendly family meals that are healthy and sustainable is all about planning and creativity. It takes some thought, but it doesn’t need to be complicated.

Stick to whole ingredients, shop smart, and use what you have. That’s how we make £500 stretch for a month of nourishing meals.

👉 Watch the full video here
👉 Try our go-to recipes in the Whole Basics eBook
👉 Learn more about our approach to low-waste, low-cost family living

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