How to save money on groceries

Published on September 25, 2023

Please note: the prices mentioned in this post are from the time of writing.

Groceries are a major expense, but fortunately there’s also a lot you can save. You don’t just gain money; you often gain a healthier lifestyle too! We often complain that healthy food is expensive, and it is, but a few smart adjustments can make it cheaper than unhealthy food.

It’s a misconception that healthy eating costs more than unhealthy eating!

So how do you save money on groceries?

In brief:

• Start with a clear picture. What do you buy, what do you eat, and what could you stop buying altogether?

• Keep a price-per-kilo list for every product you buy. That lets you spot deals immediately.

• Ask ChatGPT what a recipe costs per person, using the price list you maintain.

• Start eating healthily. Move from easy (canned) to better (dried) to best (dried in bulk).

• Use dried beans, lentils and similar ingredients as much as possible.

• Buy an Instant Pot. Make life easy and get more than four times as much food for the same money.

• Buy in bulk, from denotenshop.nl, for example. This can easily halve the price per kilo!

• Use supermarktscanner.nl to get an alert when your favorite product is on offer!

Read on to find out how to put these tips into practice.

Start with a clear picture

Before immediately trying to save on groceries, it’s useful to work out how much you’re currently spending on everything. Then you know EXACTLY how much you’ll gain and what you’re doing it for.

Suppose you can save €10 every week. That €520 a year is a nice gift to yourself.

This doesn’t just help motivation; it helps you make conscious choices too. If you know you could save a maximum of, say, €400, you also know you can occasionally go to a restaurant, provided you skip that daily snack at the petrol station on your way to work, for example.

It’s about spending or saving money for what you ultimately really want, rather than simply spending as little as possible! That looks different for everyone.

How much are you spending?

To get a good overview, map out these categories each month:

• Takeaway delivery: pizza and so on.

• Restaurants.

• Eating out.

• Groceries from shops.

• Snacks at petrol stations, work and so on.

Most banking apps can do this for you, and software is available too. If you don’t want to share your data with those companies, you can manually review last month’s transactions. You only have to do it once, and after an hour you’ll have a clear picture.

Use this to estimate your annual spending.

The next step is to identify which products you actually buy at the supermarket.

There’s a great deal to gain here too.

For example, quinoa at Jumbo costs more than twice as much as a large bag of quinoa ordered online!

Do this for five or six other products and it starts adding up!

Track what you buy often

Look at what you eat over a week or a month, and you’ll see it’s mostly the same things. Even with a varied diet, certain basic ingredients always return.

And everything you repeat adds up the most!

Write down everything you buy often, and track the prices too! Then you’ll immediately know whether something is a deal, even when you weren’t looking for one.

Here’s an example price list to get you started. These are my favorite products:

• Couscous: €3.89/kg.

• Tomatoes: €2.92/kg.

• Eggs: €0.21 each.

• Lentils, dried: €5.00/kg.

• Spinach: €3.89/kg.

• Bell pepper: €0.68 each.

• Chickpeas / lentils / beans: €1.09/can.

• Cottage cheese: €1.77/200 g.

• Feta: €2.29/200 g.

• Peas: €1.45/750 g.

• Apples: €1.89/kg.

You can even print this out or write it on a piece of paper so you can always take a quick look :)

AI tip: the cost of a recipe

Once you have a product price list, calculating what a recipe costs is easy too. All you need to do is ask, using a free ChatGPT account:

What does this recipe cost per person?

“{ Paste your recipe here }”

Given the following prices:
“{ Paste your copied list of price information here }”

Finding offers and deals

Want to benefit from offers without being spammed with emails or leaflets?

Fortunately, there are many ways to do this.

Buy grains online in bulk

Grains at supermarkets are notoriously expensive. Order from denotenshop.nl, for example, and quinoa costs only €3.89/kg. At a supermarket, you can easily pay €7 or more per kilo.

Guaranteed savings of 5% on everything

The best investment during high inflation, as we’re experiencing now, is buying household items in bulk.

Think grains, beans, lentils, shampoo, toilet paper and so on.

If you plan ahead and order as much as possible, you get:

1. A good supply for emergencies.

2. More value for your money, because everything is gradually getting more expensive.

This does take some discipline. The idea isn’t to use everything up more quickly too. But if you have a few regular recipes and often eat and need the same things, you’re guaranteed to save!

The supermarket scanner

Another good website is https://www.supermarktscanner.nl/. It lets you do two things:

1. Compare prices.

2. Stay informed about offers.

It takes a little time, but adding your favorite products can save you a lot.

You can also see price history: how often a product has been on offer. Was it a one-off, or does it happen monthly?

You can use that information to stock up when something is on offer. Then you combine the benefits of buying in bulk, the inflation of at least 5% you avoid, and the promotional discount!

Stop buying daily snacks

Whenever something was on offer, my dad had a joke: “It’s even cheaper if we don’t buy it.”

Technically, that’s true!

Every day, we spend money on food and other things that:

1. Don’t make us happy.

2. We’re addicted to: cigarettes, coffee and so on.

3. We buy on impulse.

It doesn’t just cost a lot of money; it also adds unnecessary kilos and makes you lazy.

Suppose you’d like to eat out once a week. Then keep a tighter rein on everything else during the day.

Daily habits make a bigger dent than the occasional meal out!

Something you do every day has a monthly multiplier of 30 or 31. Something you do once a week has a monthly multiplier of four.

If you have something more than once a day, that effect is even greater!