Food shopping is at an all-time high right now. Regardless of where you shop to get your weekly goodies, the price of food is steep. Grocery price inflation has reached a record 17.5%, adding a potential £837 to the average household’s annual shopping bill.
With the price of food having risen so dramatically, Brits are finding cheaper ways to do their food shop – and are now relying on ‘shopping about’ to get the best deals, even if that means visiting several different shops to get everything they need.
It’s something you might even do yourself – heading to the nearest Morrisons for fruit and veg but opting to go to Tesco for your cupboard essentials. Yup, getting the weekly ‘big shop’ in is quickly turning into a supermarket equivalent of the Hunger Games.
“Shoppers are taking action and clearly hunting around for the best value,” Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar, said.
“This is a fiercely competitive sector and if people don’t like the prices in one store they will go elsewhere, with consumers visiting three or more of the top 10 retailers in any given month on average,” McKevitt adds.
It’s something Lauren Campbell-Thompson, a 29-year-old healthcare worker from South-East London, can relate to. She started shopping at different supermarkets around November 2022 and recalls noticing a huge difference between certain items depending on where she was buying them from.
“Items range from dog treats, sugar, cheese, and meat (especially chicken). I find that chicken (all bar breast) tends to be cheaper in M&S compared to Tesco, Iceland, and Sainsburys,” Campbell-Thompson says.
“By going there for those items, it collectively saves me roughly £10 per week,” she adds.
Retailers are also using loyalty card schemes to attract and retain shoppers, and more than nine in 10 consumers use at least one of the schemes, Kantar found.
Think about Tesco Clubcard prices – by opting to using the supermarket giant’s loyalty card, shoppers can purchase certain products at a reduced price.
Additionally, shoppers are trying to limit how much they spend on their weekly shop by choosing more own-label lines, with sales up again by 15.8% during the latest four weeks compared with last year.
It’s something HuffPost UK’s lifestyle editor Dayna McAlpine utilises every single month: “I’ve been doing an online order of Asda’s own brand Essentials range in a bid to save as much as possible on my monthly shop – but I’ll still head to my nearest Lidl to get my fruit and veg, it just works out so much cheaper. When it comes to cleaning products, Tesco’s Clubcard prices come out on top for what I need, so I’ll go there to stock up on those and take advantage of the loyalty scheme. I’d love to just shop in one place, but right now I need to save everywhere I can as prices soar.”
However, despite the scrimping and saving as much as possible, research shows that people still love branded goods as they still make up 52% of the market and sales grew by 7.2% over the past month, the fastest rate is seen since February 2021.
Whether we like it or not, thanks to the cost of living crisis, the weekly shop has never looked more different.