If you’re looking to make savings on the weekly shop, you might want to try this simple trick to get more fresh food for the same price
There’s a glimmer of hope this month as inflation finally starts to dip – yet, the majority of households are still grappling with the rising costs of groceries and managing household budgets.
Many of us are exploring ways to cut corners on our weekly supermarket haul, trying to stretch our pennies as far as they can go.
For ages, Manchester Evening News lifestyle editor Dianne Bourne has been employing a straightforward hack to get more bang for her buck when she’s off to the supermarket for fresh produce – it’s a cinch for anyone to give it a whirl if you have a spare moment during your next grocery run.
This trick could enable you to bag more fresh food for the same price. If you’re someone who frequently purchases fruit and veggies each week, or whips up a lot of family dinners, this could really make an impact.
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All that’s required is a trip to a supermarket equipped with scales in their fruit and veg aisles. For the sake of this piece, Dianne popped over to her local Tesco, but it’s also something she does at the nearby Asda, Waitrose and Morrisons supermarkets.
Regrettably, there aren’t any scales at her local Aldi or Lidl, so it’s not a trick she has been able to pull off at those budget-friendly supermarkets
The method is simple: take any pre-bagged and pre-weighed fruit and vegetables you intend to purchase – then weigh them on the scales. Why, you ask?
Well, if you weren’t aware, the weight that’s listed and shown on pre-bagged items is the legal minimum weight under trading laws for that item.
For instance, if you’ve got a bag of carrots labelled as 500g, the producer is obligated to ensure that the product’s weight meets or exceeds this figure. The package can contain more, but it must not contain less.
The reality is, these pre-packaged items often weigh more than the stated amount, as achieving an exact weight of 500g or 1kg during packaging isn’t an exact science.
That’s been Dianne’s experience at least, having applied this simple weighing rule over the past few years.
She noted: “In fact, I often find you can make BIG gains on produce if you’re prepared to take a few packages to the scales at the supermarket, weighing them, and working out which ones weight the most.
“If you have a family to feed, getting that extra few hundred grams of potatoes or carrotts can actually stretch a long way in getting extra portions on the table.
“To give you an idea of how it works, I headed to Tesco this week and did a really quick sample shop of some fruit and vegetables. It very quickly ended up with me getting signifanctly more bang for my buck on an array of fresh produce.
“I ALWAYS use the weighing trick when buying packs of jacket potatoes, for example, as this is the one category that always tends to yield a big difference in weight due to the larger size of the potato.”
Dianne picked up three packets of four Tesco Finest jacket potatoes, each priced at £1.60 for a 700g pack, and took them to the scales. The weights varied from an 800g portion, to 958g and a hefty 1.1kg.
By weighing them, she was able to get a significant increase in potato quantity while paying the same price as the smaller weighted pack. Naturally, she opted for the 1.1kg package.
Next, she weighed some parsnips – taking three lots of Tesco’s own brand 75p British parsnips 500g bags to the scales. The smallest bag weighed just over at 518g, while the largest was a significantly heavier 630g, equivalent to getting an extra parsnip for your money.
She also managed to secure a larger weighted pack of pears, and a heavier bag of carrots.
However, she found that the lighter the items, the smaller the gains you’re likely to make. So while Dianne got slightly more for a packet of 300g tomatoes (finding the heaviest at 380g), when she weighed packets of strawberries the differences were really very minimal.
Dianne concluded: “In theory, you could use the same rule to apply to any weighted goods in the supermarket, but it’s only really on fresh produce that you’re going to find major gains. And it would be impractical to start carting different products from across the shop back to the fruit and veg scales wouldn’t it?
“But for me, weighing my fruit and veg has now just become part of what I do when I head to the supermarket and it can definitely get you more for your money.”
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