My £100 grocery challenge results

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We took part in a £100 grocery challenge, where we had just £100 to live on for a full month! It’s been a bit daunting, I won’t lie, but I’m back with an update on how it’s gone for us!

I’m going to reiterate, once again, that we didn’t run this challenge in October because we can’t afford food. I wanted to get back into good habits with cooking from scratch, and of course saving a little money is always nice too!

We are fortunate that money isn’t tight for us these days. However, despite this I think that it is good to have an overhaul from time to time.

Having a month where I really had to think about saving money, and cutting back, sees us in good stead for the months ahead. Anyway, here are my £100 grocery challenge results!

Note: This is a challenge we completed back in 2016 but this post has been recently updated.

How did the £100 grocery challenge go for us?

The first half of the month I was thinking that there was no way that I was going to make this challenge – but I did! Just!

My end total was £102.87 for this £100 grocery challenge. However, as I saved 3% on my Sainsburys gift vouchers, I actually ended on £99.87 total spend! Find out how I was doing midway through my grocery challenge!

I wouldn’t say that we really deprived ourselves of anything during our £100 grocery challenge. What we did do was meal plan more, use up random bits in the freezer and cook from scratch more. We had alcohol, but not a lot.

Extra spends:

Also, I cut back my visits to the clothing and toy section! I spent £1.25 on a pair of leggings for Daisy which I couldn’t resist – total bargain!

While taking part in the £100 grocery challenge I used a number of my past posts to help me along the way. The tips were great for keeping me on track, focused and determined too!

I reminded myself of the best ways to save money on food shopping. Also, I reminded myself on how to avoid overspending, had a refresh of my meal planning tips, reminded myself how to prepare salads in advance to cut food waste and just generally did a LOT better you know?

Recipes I used:

I have a whole host of recipes on this website and while I did look over my mealtime inspiration post, to remind me of some great recipes, the ones I used in particular were slow cooker beef chilli, slow cooker whole chicken, air fryer roast potatoes, homemade tortillas and easy shortcrust pastry.

Kitchen gadgets I used:

I’m a big fan of using kitchen gadgets and I love in particular to use my *Panasonic breadmaker, *Crockpot multi-cooker, and my *food processor.

All of these gadgets help me with making homemade dough, simple recipes that cook themselves while I work and also chop and prep ingredients.

My final thoughts on the £100 grocery challenge:

I really enjoyed completing this challenge. Maybe I would have enjoyed it less if I genuinely only could afford £100 for the month.

It was a challenge, at times, but it helped me to rein in the spending a little before Christmas time.

Also, it got me back into cooking from scratch. We wasted next to no food during the month we followed the £100 grocery challenge.

The month after we only spent £160 too, as we hadn’t run all of our supplies down thanks to careful planning.

If you were short on money it is possible to live on so little. However, you would want to cut back on the quality of some of your products a little to stretch your budget further.

Long term I wouldn’t want to go back to living on £100 a month like we did in the early 2010s. However, now and then it is great to get your creativity back in the kitchen and make you look for genuine bargains.

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