Family food shop on a budget: What's in our weekly shop + on our meal plan?

Come and unpack a week of budget food shopping for our family of 5! If you’re trying to stick to a food budget and looking for inspiration on ways to make it happen, I hope this gives you some ideas and encouragement. I’m running through this week’s budget savvy meal plan, and exactly what we bought and spent with our below average food budget.

If you want to see how this food becomes a week of meals… hit follow on YouTube and next week I’ll have a full “what we ate in a week” turning this food into meals for our family!

Organic and Sustainable Veg Boxes:

Not everything we buy is just the cheapest option – we’re trying to balance being budget, with also choosing ethical and sustainable options wherever we can. One of the ways we do that is choosing a B Corp veg box that’s more sustainable in many ways than supermarkets. Supermarkets waste a lot of food, and often don’t give fair contracts to farmers, or look too much at where they’re sourcing from. Our way of doing better is to do an Abel and Cole veg box each week.

Both Abel and Cole and Riverford hold the same values, we just choose Abel and Cole because there’s a little more flexibility in the box contents.

Abel and Cole Veg Boxes (if you’ve not used them before you can also get a huge discount – look for a banner at the top of the page!) FIND THEM HERE!
Riverford Veg Boxes (£15 off your first box with this link) FIND THEM HERE
Doves Farm Organic Flour Sacks (we get a stoneground wholewheat and a white bread flour) FIND THEM HERE

OUR LOW FOOD BUDGET vs AVERAGE SPENDING FOR A UK HOUSEHOLD

Our budget is £125 a week for everything we eat and drink – and yes, our duck food! I include duck food because it’s part of how we get our food, so it feels misleading to say we have a lower budget, but we get eggs elsewhere!

The average weekly spending for a family of our size (2 adults, 3 children) is £203 on food and non alcoholic drinks. The average for a person in the UK is £45 with it being higher for a young active male and less for a small child.

[Office of National Statistics/NimbleFins.com]

Vouchers we use to save on food in the UK

Waitrose card: they give personalised discount vouchers each week
Sainsbury’s Nectar: Check the app for personalised ones too via SmartShop
Milk and More: This is rare but sometimes the coupons are big and then I’ll do a big shop. Monzo Cashback:
Monzo is a more ethical and sustainable bank we use. They sometimes give cashbacks so I quickly check before shopping. Sign up with a cashback HERE.

Comparing the cost of food in the UK with the US and Europe

My goal in these videos is to empower people to see how we can put foods together on different budgets – to show that it’s possible to make organic or sustainable choices on a budget where people don’t think that’s possible. And to show one way it can look to do that. But the internet is worldwide and so these prices/budgets get compared with currencies and food markets everywhere – which can lead to feelings far from those I’m aiming for of empowerment! So a few notes on that, especially for those in the US who find food more expensive. Firstly: I’m choosing these foods shown because they’re the ones that are cheapest here and so work on our budget. When we lived in California I chose different foods (and, ironically, people in the UK would tell me I was so lucky for the cost of things!) I don’t buy avocados here, or chicken other than carcasses, or many other foods we ate in abundance in the US. So we all need to shop for where we live – and the only way to stretch a budget is to base our meal plans around foods that are cheaper where we are. That’s my biggest point here! Secondly, that’s not the whole story – food is more expensive in the US, even after the exchange rate. BUT there are more factors we have to consider too. The average salary in the US is much higher than the UK (even when currency and cost of living adjustments are made.) So the average American spends more on food yes, but when you look at the proportion of income it takes to get the same food… it’s actually better to be earning and shopping in America! In both places though, we’ve made this kind of lifestyle work on a below average (well below average in the US) budget. I don’t want people to think it can’t work because the food costs are different – that’s the opposite of my point! Doing the best with what we have, and then feeling empowered in that is my goal. But what that will look differs for all of us. A lot of the ways we make our budget work are more about careful planning and creating no waste – not about finding food cheap. So, try to be empowered to do the best with what YOU have where YOU are. And lastly, when Jared was in Germany, his food was just cheaper than in the UK. I wish I could shop Germany Lidl forever, so I really do get that sentiment, but I choose to zone in on what we have here and what that looks like for us – and do the best with what WE have for our family!