Posts Tagged ‘shelf life’
Buying reduced food at the supermarket
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Shopping for food is an expensive task, and a fairly thankless one because you have to do it over again every week. It’s especially tedious when money is tight.
There is however one way you can sometimes cut your costs substantially, but it does mean being prepared to spend some extra time and effort on things.
Every fresh food item in the UK has to have a sell by date on it. This is the date after which the supermarkets aren’t allowed to sell it. (This only applies to fresh foods, items in tins and which have best before dates work rather differently). Every day the supermarkets will have a staff member who will go round and find all the fresh food items which are going to go out of date that day, and reduce the price on them. This is to help stop wastage. If they have to throw the item away they get nothing for it. If they can sell it – even at a reduced price – then they will get something.
You can take advantage of this knowledge by watching in the various supermarkets near you to find out when they make their reductions. Most supermarkets will have two times. The first time is normally when they reduce the items down by a percentage – this varies from place to place, some will be halved, some will only reduce by 10%. This first reduction is normally done fairly early in the day. The second reduction is normally done late in the afternoon or early in the evening, and at this time they will reduce the already reduced items down some more, generally to a really low price, and if you’re around when this happens, you can take advantage and buy a lot of food very cheaply. So take the time to get to know when your local supermarkets make their reductions.
Things like bread, milk, cold meat, and much more can be frozen – if you freeze it on the day of purchase, and it’s use by date is tomorrow, then when you defrost it you will have 24 hours to use it up exactly the same as you would if you just used it when you bought it from the supermarket. The same thing applies to most products that can be frozen, check to see how long they have between the sell by and the use by date… if it’s the same date, then if you freeze it, when you defrost it you will need to eat it the same day. If it’s three days difference then you will have three days when you defrost it and so on.
You do need to be careful when doing this is to make sure you can use the item before it goes out of date, OR that it’s suitable for freezing and you have the space to store it. If you buy ten loaves of bread because they’re 10p each but only have space to freeze four of them, you’ll find yourself wasting the rest.
Tags: discounts, money saving, shelf life, smart shopping, supermarket
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