How to find cheap vegan meal ideas (UK)

Yes.

It is possible to save money on groceries every-single-day. 

In this post, We’ll show you our own method to manually validate that our price comparison tool is finding and showing the cheapest prices for a plant-based shopping list.

You can use it before your next grocery trip to get a cheap vegan meal.

We’ll cover

• What is price comparison and why is important

• The process we use to validate that our service is working correctly

• Some tips if you want to apply our process to do your groceries

• A better way to do it, so you can save a lot of time (an probably some money too)

Image Credit: Unsplash

What is Price Comparison, and Why Does it Matter?

Price comparison is comparing the price of the same product in different stores. 

Is important because if you do it right, you can save up to 30% of money on average, and we are talking here about comparing only the cheapest products.

How to Find the cheapest prices online manually

Let’s follow a step by step example. Kitty, currently located in London, decided to try going vegan for a month. She wants to buy all the items for the Veganuary challenge for day 1 at once. 

Here are the 5 steps that she followed to find the cheapest option for her 18 items plant-based grocery list.

Step 1: Get Online Stores Around

She searched “online stores near me” and with the results, she wrote a list of them in an excel file with the link to each store.

Step 2: Get the Full Grocery List

Then she got each recipe's ingredients and merged them together into a new shopping list. 

• Carefully look for repeated items and sum the total quantities in the same unit of measure. 

• Try to get to a commonly used metric, like “gram” or “unit”.

• If you find something like “tbsp” (table spoon), search for “tbsp equivalents to grams”, it will show you something like 1 tbsp = 12,8 gram

Step 3: Search Cheapest Price, By Item, Per Supermarket

For each item, Kitty found out that she had different options per supermarket, so she decided to save only the cheapest items.

• Each item shows a “price per unit of measure” (price per kilogram, price per litter), try to find that information and compare products based on that metric.

• Once you find an item that you are comfortable with, use it as reference to compared prices in other supermarkets. Don’t switch from almond milk to oat milk, stick to the flavor.

• If you go for loose bananas, and you find out that only 1 supermarket offers that kind of product, stick to it, don’t switch to packs because it is not present in most other places, your quantity reference for price comparison is loose banana.

Step 4: Get Results Per Supermarket

She used an excel function to sum and calculate totals. 

Then she moved all together to have a better visual and saw the cheapest option for her shopping list. 

The winner for 18 items was Aldi, with a total of £16.11 

The most expensive (£22.59) is a 40% more expensive (£6.48).

Step 5: 2 Stores Combination! (Level Up)

Wanted to go further and filled with green the cheapest item across all supermarkets.

Then she saw a pattern: there were 3 supermarkets that looked greener.

Copied and pasted that information in a new excel sheet, and then she performed a 2 stores combination process.

The new winner for going to 2 stores to buy the same item list was Morrisons + Tesco, with a total of  £13.10.

• When you filled cheapest prices for the same item across all supermarkets, you can have the same value in all of them (like cucumber in the example)

• The trick to combine 2 stores is to visually look for the perfect match, like a puzzle. The perfect match is when between two stores, you can have green all the way down.

Going to 2 stores can be almost 20% cheaper than going to the cheapest one!

# Tips and Reminders for Price Comparison

• The items that you selected as the ones with lower price, will not always be available (or the cheapest option online), so you have to manually look again, at least check the most expensive from your list, the ones that represent at least 50% of the total price.

• Try to buy loose items, is easy to do the math and you avoid waste.

• If you don’t find loose items, get the price by quantity and compare that measurement.

• You can use our service and save time doing all this work, plus that we perform something that is called “extensive combination”, which means that we also provide options for going to 2 and 3 places, if you are planning a large purchase.

On average you can save up to 30% if you go to the cheapest, of all the cheapest. But, if you go to 2 places, you can save up to 45%! Now imagine if we add the expensive options too. That huge difference is the price we pay when we forget to compare.

Conclusion

Finding the cheapest prices for your grocery list can be time consuming and hard to do manually, but is rewarding, it helps you to save money by spending less. 

There is always a balance between the time you spend doing the price analysis and the money you save. Try to get that comfortable number and you’ll feel great!.

The Shortcut

The best way to find cheap vegan meal ideas

If you want to save money on your plant-based grocery list by following the easy way, you can just use our automated service following this link to our Cheapify App. 

Enjoy your very low cost meal!

PBS