How to save money on groceries.
Australians spend a lot on groceries. In fact, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the average household spends about $300 a week on groceries¹. It’s also been one of the spending areas most impacted by inflation over the past couple of years.
Spending on groceries is unavoidable, but with some planning, self-control and some simple hacks most of us can reduce our spending significantly.
The key tactics are:
- Do some planning before you head to the shops
- Set a budget for what you want to spend and stick to it.
Plan ahead before you head to the grocery store.
One of the most important things you can do is to build a meal plan and a shopping list for the ingredients you need. This way, you can check what you actually need to buy and only buy what you need.
To save some time and make meal planning a bit more fun use family members or housemates for ideas or use an AI tool. You’ll be amazed at how helpful tools like ChatGPT and CoPilot can be at meal planning, building recipes and creating shopping lists.
You’ll be helping the environment as well.
Another big advantage of meal planning and only buying what you need is you’ll generate less waste. The Australian Government’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water estimates that Australians waste around 7.6 million tonnes of food each year. That’s about 312kg per person. It’s estimated to cost $36.6 billion dollars or about $2,500 per household. Food waste also accounts for about 3% of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions².
Setting a budget and sticking to it.
Figure out how much you currently spend on groceries. You can do this by scanning through your credit card and transaction account or you can make it easy by using the BeyondBank+ App which will automatically identify your grocery spending for you. You can download the BeyondBank+ App from your app store.
Decide how much you want to trim your grocery spending by. You’ll probably have a good sense of how disciplined your grocery spend is already. If you are already watching every dollar, it will be hard to save a lot. On the other hand, if you have bad grocery spending habits and no real plan, you can probably set a bigger target.
Other tips that can help.
Here are some other tips that might help reduce your grocery spending:
- Find the cheapest place to shop. Independent analysis has regularly shown that Aldi is the cheapest supermarket³. To save the most money though, you’ll probably have to shop at several supermarkets. To make this easier, use a comparison site like Grocerize™ to maximise your savings
- If you struggle to stay within your grocery budget, make a specific cash withdrawal for groceries and limit your grocery spending to use just the cash you’ve withdrawn.
- Reduce the number of times you go grocery shopping. Doing fewer, larger shops will generally result in less spending because you’ll have fewer opportunities for impulse purchases. Your weekly meal plan should help with this because you can do a week’s shopping at once.
- Try shopping online and using click & collect services. These are generally free (subject to a minimum spend) and not browsing the aisles reduces the chances of impulse purchases.
- Use the price per unit labelling on the grocery shelves – this will give you the best view of which products are cheaper. Be wary of brands that periodically shrink the size of a package but keep the price the same or fill part of a package with air to make it look like you are getting more.
- Don’t buy more than you’ll use – a lot of our grocery purchases end up in the bin as waste.
- Check the price difference between packaged and unpackaged food – often packaged food is more expensive.
- Look for home-brand options and if you can’t bring yourself to buy home-brand options for everything, try swapping to home-brand options for basics like sugar, flour and rice.
- Try swapping out some of the more expensive groceries for cheaper ones. For example, try reducing the amount of meat in your diet and replace it with vegetables. Vegetables are generally cheaper and better for you. If you are using an AI tool to build your meal plan, try asking it for more vegetarian options.
The gift card discount hack.
This is a good way to save up to 5% of your grocery bill, in addition to any other specials and savings you can get instore. It takes a bit of planning and some effort – but it’s likely to deliver you a good saving.
What you need to do is find somewhere you can buy discounted Coles™, Woolworths™ or IGA™ gift cards. Based on our research you should be able find them discounted by 4% or 5%.
Check any loyalty or reward programs you are a member of. Some programs we know about that offer discounted gift cards are:
- Union Shopper (you must register and be a member of a union to use this service)
- Seniors Victoria (you must be over 60 years of age, be a permanent resident of Australia and be residing in Victoria)
- Seniors NSW (you must be over 60 years of age, be a permanent resident of Australia and be residing in NSW)
- NRMA (you’ll need to be a member)
- RAA (you’ll need to be a member).
We’re here to help.
At Beyond Bank our purpose is to change the lives of our customers and communities through financial wellbeing. Helping our customers deal with cost of living is a major area of focus. If we can help you, please contact your local branch or call us on 13 25 85. We’re here to help.
¹Estimated household grocery expenditure is based on the ABS HIE Survey 2015/16 adjusted for inflation
²https://www.dcceew.gov.au/environment/protection/waste/food-waste
