It’s been a while since the last post, but there has been a reason for this. For the last couple of weeks I have been busy working on a project that started off as me wanting a way to calculate how much any particular recipe might cost to make, but ended up showing me things about ways of shopping that I never really expected, some of which I can’t quite believe.

What I started with was an idea for quite a simple spread sheet. I wanted to create a table which would work out how much a certain recipe would cost by calculating how much a specific amount of each ingredient would cost according to the amount used and price per kg and then add them all up to give the price of the recipe.

So off I went to the shops with pen and paper in hand, happy that my life style now allows me to indulge in these odd ideas as and when then enter my head rather than just thinking “Hey wouldn’t this be great!” only to forget a few minutes later as I get distracted by some important task… such as picking the dirt off the bottom of my mouse… erm.

I tend to buy my shopping from a variety of different places but they are all quite spread out so I decided that the easiest thing to do might be to just head to the local supermarket and write down the prices from there. After all, all I was really looking for at that time was a vague idea of how much things were, so I could give a guide to recipe costs. But it was here that things began to get complicated. I was overwhelmed with a range of different options, each with wildly differing price tags.

I realised things wouldn’t be quite as simple as I imagined. The prices I chose could have a huge difference to the resulting cost of the meals that the table would work out. Should I go for the things I would buy or the things I thought other people would buy? Or maybe make an average price of the options available? I also noticed that the prices for somethings were miles away from what I would normally pay elsewhere. This would not be good. I wanted the spreadsheet I produced to be useful to people. It should be able to be used as a aid to meal planning, helping you plan meals according to a certain budget, and maybe also compare the cost of making things yourself as compared to those pesky little pots of slop labeled ready meals which can often seem like the cheap option. If it was to be used in this way it would need to reflect the users shopping habits and if I picked items at random I might as well just completely make them up for all the use they’d be.

What I’ve ended up producing, while obviously still limited, should hopefully be a much better guide. I decided to survey 4 different things which are independent shops and supermarket for both organic and non-organic produce. I’ve also included in the sheet a blank column for your own shop with all the formula in place behind the scenes so all you’d need to do is insert the price you would pay in your own shop. The results are fascinating. There are links below to the spread sheet, but first here’s a few observations I made as my mission developed.

The first thing I realised as I walked through the doors of the supermarket at the end of our road was the enormity of the task I had set myself. “What am I doing?!” I thought, ” This shop must sell over 10,000 different items! I’ll need more paper!  My pen will run out! Arrrgh!” But as I wandered around I calmed down as my first observation sunk in. Most of the contents of the shop were complete crap! Aisles and aisles full of rubbish, most of which I wouldn’t feed to my dog (including the dog food).

I couldn’t believe it. I have obviously been to a supermarket before, several times, but never really paying as much attention as I did on this trip. Even if I did do all my shopping at this supermarket I would say that out of the 30 or more aisles that are there I would only ever need to use about four.

So what is the rest of the shop full of? Processed food mostly. Ready meals, hundreds of them. Jars of sauce: pasta sauce, curry sauce, cheese sauce and ready made gravy(!) Prepared vegetables, chopped up pieces of cauliflower, broccoli and ready made mashed potato (!!!).  Crisps, biscuits and a thousand other snacks. Cans of everything: soup, chili, curry, macaroni. Frozen pizzas, frozen chips, frozen pies and hundreds of bags of mashed up reformed chicken. What would happen if Jamie got his way everyone started cooking their own food? They’d be out of business in a week. And he certainly wouldn’t be getting anymore celebrity endorsement work from them. As I looked around my first blinding truth was uncovered. The last thing this place wants you to do is cook. Is this, I wondered, where the health problems of our county’s diet stem from? The place most us buy our food from does not want us to eat healthily.

If this seems a little cynical take a closer look at what they sell. The herbs and spices for a start are ridiculously overpriced. I’ve written before about the way the leading brand of herb and spices package their wares in jars which are all but impossible to get the spices out of and crazily expensive. These jars and the supermarkets similarly badly designed jars are really the only options available. There are a limited range of bigger “re-fill” packs, which do offer better value, but still the prices are a strangely inflated for what is essentially a very cheap basic product. Check out the price of the chives as compared to buying elsewhere! It is NOT a tying error. If you wanted to buy 100g of dried chives from the supermarket it would cost you £139, from Unicorn, an independent organic shop, it would be £3. Apart from the price, just the fact that they are only really sold in these small containers points to the fact that they are not expecting (wanting?) people to want to use the contents very often.

The amount of aisle space devoted to wholefoods is another more obvious pointer. The list of ingredients on the spreadsheet I have produced, while obviously tailored to my own diet, only contains around 150 items. I can’t believe that even if you got ten people who prepare all their own food and have a massively varied diets that you would need to even triple this amount, yet the number of products on offer is enormous. I wouldn’t like to guess how many are in that particular store, but in the UK in general the amount of different products carried by a single supermarket has risen from 15,000 in 1980 to around 50,000 today.

But choice is a good thing right? In principle yes. However I’m beginning to think that if anyone ever brings up this “choice” argument it should be your first indication that that person is about to say something you need to be suspicious of. The breakfast aisle is one of my favorite/most scary places in the supermarket. It is full of choice. Huge rows of different coloured boxes containing corn, rice and wheat and the like smashed into various shapes and sold at a couple of quid a pop. If you search hard enough somewhere on the bottom shelf tucked away in the corner you might be able to find a bag of porridge oats, the price? 69p/kg. I have plans to go into the prices of cereals in more details in another post but, just to give you a taste of things to come, another much easier to find choice would be a multi-pack of “Oat So Simple”. You know the kind of “just add milk” packs with little pieces of shriveled up fruit, added sugar, salt, stabilisers and other bits and bobs. These come in at £1.99, or… £6.70/kg! No wonder they don’t want you to find the porridge. They can make so much more from this processed food it is not really in their interests to promote the healthier, cheaper option.Would you really chose this if you thought about it? Or might you buy your 69p bag a couple of bananas and few apples and have ten times the amount for the same price and not have to eat all the other rubbish they throw in there?

The supermarkets pricing of  organic goods is a disgrace, on most things it was around twice their non-organic equivalent. I haven’t got a problem with paying more for food if I know for example that that means the farmer is getting a better price, or that it is organic. It’s well known that supermarkets drive down the prices they pay to producers with threats of canceled orders if they can’t stretch to prices that barely cover the prices of production. Unfortunately I’m sure this same practice goes on with their organic suppliers, and even if it doesn’t and the resulting cost price is slightly more than for non-organic veg do they really need to add these crazy mark ups? I just can’t believe it cost them an extra £2 per kilo for broccoli for example. If this price difference really is because their organic veg cost them that much more to buy then how can it be that a small independent organic shop can be selling organic vegetables at a fraction of the price they are here? It just doesn’t seem to add up.

In the particular store I was looking at, which in size I would say was average to large in supermarket scale, the range of vegetables was pretty limited too. They had basic things, potatoes, carrots, onions, but if you wanted anything as fancy as a nice seasonal swede or celeriac and you wanted it to be organic, you were stuck. They don’t even sell beetroot! November, no beetroot. What is going on there? I began to realise how much more in touch with the seasons since I’ve been avoiding these awful places.

Also anything slightly out of “normal” range was expensive in supermarkets. Sure the carrots and potatoes are cheap, they even do special bags of value “Class II” value vegetables (not actually any worse quality, just maybe a bit of a perceived odd size) which really are cheap. But for anything as outrageous as an aubergine expect to pay well over the odds in your supermarket. Things like this often had their prices disguised. Aubergines in the supermarket were 99p each (no organic option available). In the non-organic independent they were £1.96/kg, organic independent £2.09/kg. So which is cheaper? An average sized aubergine weighs around 250g, so the supermarket was charging the equivalent of £3.96/kg! Nearly twice as much as anywhere else.

One of the main things that wound me up about the organic vegetables was that they were all heavily packaged. Everything was either in one of those horrid plastic trays, wrapped in cellophane or bagged. Apart from being a bit of a waste and an unnecessary use of polluting oil based plastics, this means that you can’t pick your own either. What if you just wanted one apple? What if you wanted your potatoes a certain size for a particular thing, or not that one with the big black bit on it that’s hiding at the bottom of your bag? Grrr. Is this really what people who are buying organic for environmental reasons want? It seems to ignore the core ecological ideals and instead plays to some fancy notion of buying organic which would wash only with someone who isn’t really thinking things through, allowing the supermarket to tick a few boxes and make posters with grass on them.

I can only think they must need this packaging for their till systems. They couldn’t possibly ask you whether the veg you’d chosen was organic or non-organic and trust you to tell the truth… as they do in Beanies in Sheffield where they similarly have a range of both organic and non-organic veg, none of which is in packages. Big systems can’t handle this kind of small scale human interaction. Or maybe they think we’ll all run in and mix all the organic and non-organic veg up just for fun.

I think that’s enough of a rant for now. There were definitely a few things I picked up on my research I want to write more about in the future, but I’m at risk of making you all switch off soon if I don’t give you a break, so I’ll stop and leave you with a quick round up of price comparison findings.

In general the trend seems to be like this. Independent shops are cheaper than their supermarket equivalent, so independent non-organic is cheaper than supermarket non-organic. This is most obvious in the organic ranges where supermarkets do very badly, I would even go so far as to say that only people who really didn’t care how much they spent could afford to buy organic at supermarkets. Their limited range of overpriced vegetables are enough to put people off the whole idea.

Supermarkets have somehow managed with their offers and advertising to make people believe that they are cheaper than other options, however it seems that if you really want to save yourself some money you would be better off if you stop shopping in supermarkets. Although they don’t have the resources to shout about it, independents are generally cheaper and you won’t be tempted into buying some self indulgent half famous celebrity’s auto-biography or buy one get one free jars of slop called sauce you could make much more cheaply and nicely yourself like you would at the supermarket.

Many thanks to the people from K+N vegetable shop and A&H (spices, dry products etc) in Birkenhead for helping me to compile the prices for independent non-organic things, and also thanks to Unicorn in Chorlton, Manchester who provided me with most of the prices for the independent organic options.

I hope you find this price comparison interesting, I’d really appreciate any feedback and ideas about how it might be developed in the future. Oh yeah, and you can also use the spreadsheet to work out the cost of meals if you like.

Notes on using the food price calculator (Please read first)

Download an non-editable example meal price calculator here, example shown, lentil soup.

Download the editable xls meal price calculator

Download an editable version to copy and use yourself (you will need a google account to use this)