Mum Lauren Bische took to TikTok to share a money-saving food shop hack to make the process less stressful for those who are struggling to keep within their budget
In a bid to combat the soaring cost of groceries amid the Cost of Living crisis, one savvy mum has taken to TikTok to share her top tip for keeping food shopping within budget.
Deciding on a week of meals is difficult, especially if you have several mouths to feed. And it becomes even more difficult if you’re on a tight budget, as the Cost of Living crisis has made food prices rise with it.
To help, mum Lauren Bische revealed her clever hack that helps plan a week’s worth of meals without breaking the bank.
“As we all know, food shopping has become extortionate, like the prices of food are outrageous and people are trying to make money stretch – so this is how I do it,” she said in her video.
She then highlighted the use of an innovative app, ChatGPT, which she uses to generate affordable meal plans.
“For anyone that doesn’t have this app, you need to get this app. It’s ChatGPT. And I literally just type in at the top, hold on…” Lauren demonstrated, before explaining how she requests from the AI chatbot: “‘Please can you give me a meal plan for five days with a budget of £50 in Aldi? ‘ And it comes up with literally a whole meal plan, breakfast lunch and dinner.”
She scrolled through the list of meals the app had given her, including porridge with banana and honey, tuna may sandwich with cucumber, spaghetti Bolognese, for the first days of meals, with Greek yoghurt as the option for a snack.
“It gives you the price of everything, it gives you like literally a breakdown of what you, what you can eat,” she explained.
“Like literally just type in what your budget is and how much you want to spend in Aldi, or whatever supermarket you want to go to.”
But this wasn’t all the AI tool could do. As Lauren reached the end of her week of meals, she found a shopping list of the things she’d need to follow the meal plan.
“You don’t have to write out your shopping list anymore,” she said. “You can just type it in to ChatGPT, it will give you all of the information.”
By adding a second request, Lauren said you could also get the instructions on what to cook, as well as instructions on meal prep, as well as the estimated calorie intake of each meal.
“It will give you all of your information that you need, and it’s literally at your finger tips,” she explained. “You don’t have to write anything down, you can just take your phone with you, it’s got all of the stuff.”
“I don’t know how more people don’t know about this, but there you go.”
One person commented: “done a meal prep using it, but didn’t know you could get a breakdown of the costs.”
“Might use it to give me ideas of what to cook and do videos for,” one user expressed their enthusiasm, while another chimed in: “Ooh this is amazing! we’re a family of 7 so always looking for ways to help with our food shopping budgets!”.
