There’s been a glimmer of hope this month as inflation finally begins to ease – but the majority of households are still feeling the squeeze when it comes to grocery shopping and managing household budgets. Many of us are exploring ways to save on our weekly supermarket shop, stretching our money as far as possible.
For years, Manchester Evening News lifestyle editor Dianne Bourne has been utilising a straightforward trick to get more bang for my buck when shopping for fresh produce – and it’s something anyone can try if they have the time during their next grocery run.
This simple hack can help you bag more fresh food for the same price. If your weekly shop typically includes a lot of fruit and vegetables, or if you frequently cook family meals, this could make a significant difference.
The only requirement is that you shop at a supermarket that provides scales in their fruit and vegetable sections. For the purpose of this article, Dianne visited her local Tesco, but can also use this method at nearby Asda, Waitrose, and Morrisons supermarkets.
The process is simple: take any pre-bagged and pre-weighed fruit and vegetables you intend to purchase and weigh them on the scales. Why, you ask?
Well, if you weren’t aware, the weight printed and displayed on pre-bagged items is the minimum legally required weight under trading laws.
For instance, if you purchase a bag of carrots labelled as 500g, the producer is obligated to ensure that the product weighs at least that amount. The package may contain more, but it should never contain less.
Interestingly, you’ll often discover that these pre-packaged items weigh more than the stated amount, as it’s not an exact science to achieve a precise weight of 500g or 1kg during the packaging process.
At least, that’s been Dianne’s experience since she started implementing the simple weighing rule a few years ago. In fact, she has found that you can make significant savings on produce if you’re willing to take a few packages to the supermarket scales, weigh them, and determine which ones are the heaviest.
If you’re feeding a family, those extra few hundred grams of potatoes or carrots can go a long way in providing additional portions.
To illustrate how this works, Dianne visited Tesco this week and conducted a quick sample shop of some fruits and vegetables. She quickly found myself getting significantly more value for my money on a variety of fresh produce.
Dianne always employs the weighing trick when buying packs of jacket potatoes, for example, as this is one category that consistently yields a substantial difference in weight due to the larger size of the potato.
She began the experiment at Tesco, selecting three packets of four Tesco Finest jacket potatoes, 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, Dianne was able to get more potato for the same price as the lighter pack. Naturally, she chose the 1.1kg package for my trolley.
Next, she weighed some parsnips – taking three bags of Tesco’s own brand 75p British parsnips 500g bags to the scales. The lightest bag weighed in at 518g, while the heaviest was a significantly larger 630g, essentially giving me an extra parsnip for the same price.
She also managed to find heavier packs of pears and carrots.
However, Dianne found that the lighter the items, the smaller the gains you’re likely to make. While she got slightly more for a packet of 300g tomatoes (finding the heaviest at 380g), when I weighed packets of strawberries the differences were minimal.
Dianne noted: “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.”