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Groceries eat into every budget.
It’s right up there with rent, vehicle costs, and never-ending bills.
And the cost of groceries keeps increasing. According to a 2025 survey by Canstar Blue, Aussies are spending an average of $178 per week on groceries, up from $168 in 2024.
If you’re looking to cut down your food spend (while still maintaining a balanced diet), here are 8 ways to save money on your next grocery shop.
Fresh food is great, but it’s often pricier than its frozen counterparts. Fresh has to contend with perishability, seasonality, high storage costs, and more, while frozen simply has to stay frosty. As a result, frozen food is cheaper and, despite the myths, just as nutritious as fresh.
It goes without saying that this doesn’t mean grabbing a bunch of frozen pizzas (though they can be a cheap way to satisfy a craving), but stocking up on the essentials—bags of snap-frozen mixed veggies, fish, fruits & berries for smoothies or breakfasts—can help you stretch your food budget further without having to worry about the food going off.
Especially if you keep an eye out for sales.
What a world we live in, able to order weeks worth of groceries from the comfort of our homes and have them delivered to our doorsteps.
Doing your grocery shopping online allows you to shop at your convenience, coming back over days or even weeks to tweak your shopping list or check specials. Speaking of, many websites show you all the available specials in one place (even grouping them by food category), giving you the ability to view and compare prices with other stores.
Just be aware that many online stores also charge delivery fees that can eat into your budget—however, if you plan on doing most of your shopping in one place, many online grocery stores such as Coles or Woolworths offer free shipping over a certain amount or as part of a paid monthly subscription.
Never go food shopping hungry.
This is a cliche for a reason. You’re on your way home from a busy day at work, you haven’t eaten since lunch, and you duck into a grocery store to pick up a couple things for dinner. Odds are, you walk out with a little more than you intended. After all, grocery stores are strategically arranged to push you towards impulse purchases.
Impulse buys can be one of the greatest contributors to a budget blowout, even if it’s only a few dollars at a time. To help cut down on the temptation of impulse buys, it can be beneficial to try and eat something nutritious right before you go shopping, whether it’s a filling snack or a full meal.
To take this a step further, you can potentially limit your trips to the grocery store in general—no impromptu errands to grab a couple things or to indulge a sudden craving for popcorn. Impulse trips are off the menu if you want to be spending less, unless the need is urgent (wanting chocolate doesn’t count as urgent).
Meal plans are an excellent tool, not just for removing the need for future decisions, but for knowing exactly what ingredients you need. This can be especially helpful when used alongside online shopping services—if you need one kilogram of chicken, three potatoes, two red onions, and a handful of basil, that’s what you grab. Nothing more, nothing less.
This has the added benefit of reducing food and money waste by ensuring you use what you buy. You can also plan your budget more accurately by knowing the precise dollar amount you’ll be spending on groceries.
Of course, the truest indicator of your spending is your spending, and the Beforepay app has got you sorted. We’ve got a free budgeting tool and spending insights based on your transactions, helping you know exactly how much has been spent on food and letting you track your expenses over time.
This is a common suggestion for saving money on groceries…because it works. Whether you and your family are happy eating the same things every day or prep for variety, carving out time for meal prep has many advantages—Everyday Health tackles eight of them.
Meal prepping in bulk enables you to approach cooking, and spending, with a plan in mind. You can control your expenses by the meals you choose to make and how many portions you create.
Additionally it:
Plus, you don’t have to go crazy with meal prepping from the get-go. You can start with bulk-cooking dinner meals, then branch out into snacks, breakfasts, smoothies, and more.
Your staples are the foods that form the foundation of your diet, and are eaten often—and these offer the potential for serious savings, especially if you buy your staples on sale. They include ingredients such as:
Often, but not always, staples are non-perishable or last a long time before they go off. This provides a bit more leeway when it comes to stretching your budget further. A good rule of thumb is to visit a cheaper supermarket, like Aldi, and stock up on your staples. Not only will this limit future grocery store visits, but can increase your food savings over the long run.
Costco can also be a great option for bulk shopping, if you’ve got one near you and can afford the yearly membership fee. Even if you can afford it, it could be a good idea to run the numbers on the money you’ll save on buying in bulk over the year, confirming if it will actually be valuable for your household
Meat is one of the most obvious sources of protein (but far from the only), and it also happens to be one of the more expensive items on many grocery lists. In order to trim the fat on budgets (that’s a meat pun, right there), you could potentially reduce the amount of meat you’re buying and replace it with other high-protein foods.
These include:
Depending on your diet, it’s not difficult to hit your recommended protein intake, while boosting the number of nutrients you consume. In fact, according to Harvard Health, the Recommended Dietary Allowance for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. This is for an average person, the exact number differs depending on the individual, age, and exercise frequency.
Even so, based on these numbers, the minimum a 90kg person would need is 72g—and a single serving of chickpeas can net you around 14g of protein while only costing a few dollars per kilo.
By increasing the proportions of the above foods and reducing the amount of meat in your meals, you could potentially significantly lower the cost of your grocery shop—as long as you’re hitting the recommended protein intake for your lifestyle and your health.
Note: this is not health advice and shouldn’t be taken as such.
However, if a sudden expense has caused your grocery budget to tighten, Beforepay Pay Advance can help provide some fast relief. With clear fees and no hidden costs, we’re here to help bridge those unexpected moments.
Do you want strawberries that cost $15 a punnet? Buying out of season is how you get strawberries that cost $15 a punnet.
In-season produce is cheaper as it requires less transportation, refrigeration, and storage than out-of-season produce. Those costs are not eaten (pun) by the supermarkets, they are passed on to the consumer—that’s why you get grapes that cost $15/kg instead of $4 or blackberries for $20.
Buying in-season produce helps you dodge those increased prices, as well as increasing the variety of your diet; and often the substitutions of one ingredient for the other isn’t a drastic one. While the convenience of having the same thing available year-round is nice, you could end up paying more for the privilege.
For the out-of-season ingredients that you just have to have, consider exploring frozen or tinned options that can (pun) provide the freshness and nutritional value at a fraction of the cost.
There are almost countless ways of saving money on groceries, with the best ones depending on how you live and shop. Whether you’re an expert meal prepper or are new to online grocery shopping, there are always ways to help push your money further as cost of living keeps getting higher.
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