MoneyMagpie Editor and financial expert Vicky Parry shares hacks to save food even when it’s past it’s sell-by date
Food is one of our biggest monthly expenses, and it’s easy to spend more than we need to.
Knowing when food is still OK to eat, and how to stretch food when you haven’t got time to eat it right now, will help you manage your grocery budget and even reduce it.
Sell by or use by?
The first thing to know is the difference between ‘sell by’ dates and ‘use by’. It’s easy to see a date stamped on a packet and assume it’s not OK to eat after that date – but that’s often not the case.
Sell by is a supermarket inventory system. It simply means the item must be sold by the end of that date, otherwise it will need to be scrapped. This in itself can run up huge food waste, so some supermarkets have strategies in place to tackle this – which can help you save even more money.
You’ll know that yellow-stickered items will be reduced on the day for a quick sale, but some companies give them away free at the end of the day.
Fresh food with a use by date does need to be eaten on the date stamped. If you can’t eat it that day, there are some things you can do to avoid throwing it out (read on for these tips!).
Your freezer is your friend
Invest in reusable freezer boxes to store unused portions of dinners or meal prep for the week. You can also portion out food that you haven’t cooked yet but won’t get time to eat before the use by date and freeze to use later.
Make sure you clear through your freezer drawers once a month to ensure you’re rotating food and not forgetting about that fish fillet for six months!
Learn to pickle
Pickling is a great way to preserve vegetables. It’s also not difficult to do! There are two types of pickling: fresh and preserved. Fresh pickles can extend shelf life by five days, and are perfect for things like leftover cucumber, carrots, and cabbage that you know you’ll want to eat soon but not right now. Fresh pickles lift the flavour of many dishes, the acidity cuts through sweeter flavours for a nice balance.
Preserving pickles last up to a year when you use a sterile canning method. It’s particularly useful if you grow your own vegetables or you get a great deal on fresh veggies that you can’t eat in one go.
Great vegetables for pickling include cucumbers, cabbage, cauliflower, asparagus, peppers, and onions. You can also preserve fruit like lemons and rhubarb, although the recipe will be different for sweeter fruits.
Swap with friends and neighbours
If you know a friend loves something you’ve got too much of, offer it to them! Or, when buying in bulk to save money grocery shopping, consider swapping half with them while they get something you like, too.
You could also opt for ‘end of the month dinner’ when you invite friends over and everyone brings stuff left in their fridge and cupboard that needs to be eaten soon. You get to socialise while also saving money by using up the ingredients together – plus, you can make up some interesting recipes depending on what people turn up with!
Plan and meal prep
Plan your meals ahead for the week to make sure you know what you need to buy at the supermarket. If you have a work schedule that prevents you from planning too far ahead, consider meal prepping some meals at the weekend and freezing them for easy convenience during the week.
Planning is also about when and where you shop. The supermarket closest to you might not be the cheapest, but if you have to get in the car and use fuel to go to the next-cheapest one, are you really saving money? There are regular reports on which supermarket is cheapest too, so you might need to avoid being loyal and vary where you buy your food. Sign up to all loyalty and points schemes at your local shops too, as this will save you considerable cash on your groceries over the course of the year.
Use zero waste food apps
If you’ve got a random bunch of stuff in the fridge and have no idea what to do with them, there are lots of apps available to help you figure out what you can make for dinner.
More than that, there are some meal planner apps that help you design your dinners for the week and make a shopping list for groceries that will leave you with zero waste at the end of the week. The SortedFood Sidekick app is one great example, with both written and audio recipes so you can listen as you cook. There’s a 30-day free trial too, so you can try it out without committing to a subscription. Another reputable app is SuperCook, for zero waste cooking.
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