SMART shopping

Food prices are rising fast. So how can we make a little go a long way?

- JENNY ACKLAND

Most of us have noticed we’re paying much more at the supermarket checkout. And while people in the UK are already grappling with the soaring cost of energy bills, mortgage payments and national insurance, budgets are being squeezed even further by the skyrocketing price of food.

In January of this year, shop prices increased at their fastest rate in a decade, and retailers have warned that the cost of goods is set to continue to climb throughout 2022.

Currently, the average weekly food shop for the typical UK household is £97, up around 3% from 2019, and between January 2021 and January 2022, food prices rose by 4.3%.

In a time of such huge financial challenges, many people are having to get creative to find a way of feeding their families for less.

Here Woman talks to one reader who is making her weekly shopping budget stretch much further – and reveals how you can do the same.

‘I FEED A FAMILY OF SIX FOR £30 A WEEK!’

Vicky Saynor, 46, runs a luxury self-catering business with her husband Chris, 46. They live in Hertfordshire with their four children, aged 10, 11, 13 and 16.

Going from being a single mum-of-one to living in a blended family with four children to feed was a real eye-opener.

When Chris and I moved in together in August 2014, the weekly food bill went from a manageable £50 to an eye-watering £150!

I’d been used to cooking from scratch and being thrifty, something my nanna and mum had always encouraged as I was growing up, but Chris and his three children were used to branded and convenience food.