A repeatable system for meal planning, shopping and reducing food waste.
Know your baseline
Use four recent grocery shops to estimate a normal weekly spend. A target is more useful when it starts from your real number.
Build a flexible meal plan
Choose meals that share ingredients and keep one low-cost backup meal in the cupboard or freezer. This reduces emergency takeaways and ingredients used once.
Compare unit prices
Pack size can be misleading. Compare price per 100g, litre or item where available, while remembering that a larger pack is only cheaper if you will actually use it.
Treat waste as a cost
Before shopping, photograph or list what is already in the fridge. Schedule a use-it-up meal before the next shop.
Test one change at a time
Try own-brand swaps or a different supermarket category by category. Keep the changes you genuinely like; a sustainable £5 weekly saving beats an extreme plan you abandon.
What to do next
Use one of our free tools to put numbers around the decision, then revisit the result after a month. Money-saving changes work best when they are measurable and repeatable.