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During an editorial meeting on the tv3.lt portal, someone had a question like that, so I decided to do it myself.
I want to mention that my body weight is normal, I also don’t have any disease, so the aim of the experiment is to reduce food costs, not weight.
List of products and dishes
So first, before going to the store, I thought about what I would eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next seven days. I also included sandwiches for lunch and dinner on the preliminary shopping list.
As always, I shopped at the two stores closest to my house: Lidl and Maxima. I already knew in which store which products are cheaper. To save even more, you can translate promotional materials in the online store and see which products are eligible for discounts. This time I forgot to do it.
So when I went to the store, I bought products only from the fresh produce sections: fruits and vegetables, milk, meat. I also bought cereals, pasta, canned fish.
My shopping cart included the following foods: cucumber, tomatoes, carrots, cauliflower, bananas, persimmons, pears, eggs, canned tomatoes, tomato paste, canned tuna, curd, yogurt, butter, meat, pasta, buckwheat cereals. Although I tried to make the shopping cart as healthy as possible and consist only of fresh food, I also bought chocolate gingerbread. I decided to eat them for lunch and dinner.
All these products have cost me a total of 15, 06 euros.
I chose the usual products and my favorites. I try to eat a variety of foods, I like sweets, but during this experiment I decided to eat a packet of gingerbread with chocolate and fruit. I also decided not to drink coffee, instead I chose my own ginger lemon honey tea in the morning and water during the day.
So out of all these products, 7 breakfast servings a week came out. For four days I ate hard-boiled eggs with vegetables: cucumber and tomatoes. I also had a piece of bread with this dish. I didn’t buy them because I stuck around after last week’s shopping.
Continuing with breakfast, I ate cottage cheese with yogurt and fruit for the rest of the day. One with bananas, the other with pears.
Sometimes I don’t have breakfast. However, during this experiment, I tried to eat at least a small portion of them; he usually ate 1 instead of 2 eggs.
So my weekly breakfast menu looked like this: Monday 2 hard-boiled eggs, 1 tomato, a slice of olive oil and a slice of bread, on Tuesday: 1 boiled egg, 1 tomato, a few slices of cucumber, a slice of olive oil and a slice of bread, on Wednesday a third and 1 banana and a teaspoon of sugar, on Thursday followed exactly the same dish, only instead of a banana I used 2 pears, on Friday again 1 boiled egg, 1 tomato, some cucumber slices, a slice of olive oil and a slice of bread, on Saturday I ate the rest and on Sunday the last tomato with boiled egg and bread.
For lunch, I prepared plates with 0.5 kg of chicken breasts. I ate two dishes all week: steak and stew. But every day I changed the garnishes so that the same food wouldn’t wake me up. For the garnishes I used buckwheat, pasta, vegetables baked in the oven or skillet: carrots, cauliflower and broccoli. By the way, these veggies weren’t in my shopping cart either. It has been maintained since the previous purchase.
My lunch week menu looked like this: I had steaks on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Half of the available chicken came out every day in pairs. I used 2 100g bags for the garnish. buckwheat, half cauliflower, broccoli and 3 carrots. I baked the vegetables in the oven and made the buckwheat in a skillet with carrots.
For dinner, I had pasta, buckwheat, or fried vegetables: cauliflower and broccoli with cheese. This product was also left over from last week’s purchases.
To prevent the buckwheat and pasta from waking up the same way as when preparing lunch dishes, I kept changing the ingredients. I ate buckwheat on its own and with carrots, canned tomatoes, egg, or tuna. I seasoned the pasta with the same ingredients.
I ate two more weekend dinners not at home, but as guests, so I only had to prepare five of them.
I also included lunch with dinners in this diet plan. During them, I would eat fruit with yogurt or on its own, without anything. Also gingerbread.
After a week, there were almost no products left, and I included the products that were already in the fridge and cupboards in the diet for the week, sweetened the curd with sugar, used breadcrumbs and oil to make steaks, and I needed it for salads for breakfast. I also used broccoli, cheese, and bread.
So the amounts fixed were sufficient. However, in order to increase the diet and go out and produce all the desired dishes, it was necessary to include the products already available.
The rules of the experiment were not difficult to follow, I often cook for a few days before. However, this time I only ate 2 types of dishes for lunch all week, although I tried to change the side dishes. And for breakfast on the weekend I really wanted pancakes. But I didn’t miss the sweets, the fruits and the gingerbread were enough for me.
I also found that careful shopping helped me avoid throwing away food because I often bought too many fruits and vegetables. These products go bad pretty quickly, so some of them had to be thrown away.
Therefore, I think that for those who want to eat something different every day, 15 euros would certainly not be enough.
In this case, however, it would be sufficient to add more products to the shopping cart. These would be kept for the next week, so the list of foods for the week would already be more varied.
After this experiment, I saw that 3 rules help to save:
Shopping list;
buy in at least two stores;
cooking at home, the more we buy ready-made products, the more we spend.
Expert advice
I wanted to make sure these ideas of mine were correct. So I also asked the professionals how to shop at the supermarket to save money.
Therefore, Sonata Gutauskaitė-Bubnelienė, member of the Board of SEB bankas and head of the Baltic retail banking department of SEB, started with the statistics.
“According to data from the Department of Statistics, Lithuanians spent 5.95 billion last year for food and non-alcoholic beverages. Calculating and dividing this amount by the population, we would obtain that an average per capita spends € 177 on food per month .
However, it is understandable that the cost of food varies greatly between different households, and some amounts of food can be spent by retirees, others by students and others by working and having children ”, said the specialist.
Jūratė Cvilikienė, director of the Finance Institute of another bank, Swedbank, said that an average family of 4 spends between 300 and 400 euros a month on food. It is true that during quarantine there is a slightly higher cost of food, as many want to have supplies at home.
According to her, in the spring, during the first quarantine, many learned to shop for a longer period of time: plan food at least a week in advance, check the food that is already available at home, make a list.
Hopefully this habit stays the same, as it not only helps you manage your money smarter, but it also throws away less food. Making a quiet list or buying online allows you to avoid emotional purchases, when, hungry or affected by smells, you buy at the request of children, which is not necessary at this time, “said the specialist.
And S. Gutauskaitė-Bubnelienė highlighted some tips.
“Creating a shopping list before you go shopping is one of the main steps in helping you stay on track and buying just what you need, which is a prerequisite for making smart purchases.
With a list and a plan, it is advisable to go to those departments of the store where you have the products you need, since it is natural that the abundance of merchandise, the striking and striking prices (often announce discounts) create additional needs and more temptations. to buy unnecessary items.
And following discounts or promotions when shopping for groceries is useful when you are only selling the items you need during sales or promotions and trying to buy enough to sell until the next sale, but don’t spontaneously buy what you don’t need and don’t even plan. ” – advised the specialist.
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