Big Grocery Shop! Ocado, Tesco & Holland and Barrett

My household has a bit of a weird grocery shopping system. We’ll do one big £40 shop just after payday, and then buy things as needed throughout the rest of the month. We’ve found that this helps us keep our costs down! We can plan meals, but still make last-minute changes when needed.

Recently, our go-to recently for these big shops has been Ocado. We’ve fallen in love with it because of its amazing range of products for vegans; they have so many great alternatives, including a frozen pizza and a wide range of ice-cream! Nosing into others’ shopping is always fun, so I thought I’d share what we bought in our last big shop. It also included some other bits I grabbed from Tesco and Holland & Barrett.

Fresh produce isn’t always on the list, as it’s more expensive to buy from Ocado than other places. We generally buy fruit and veg from Aldi as it’s very easily accessible to us, but this time was an exception. Tropical fruit are perfect for hot summer days, so we grabbed a melon, some bananas and a packet of kiwi fruit. We got lettuce, spinach, avocados and tomatoes for salads, and also some broccoli.

We often use these big shops to stock up on vegan alternative products. Ocado is amazing for this, as we can get our plant milk, Fry’s/VBites faux meats and Violife vegan cheese all in one place. We also grabbed some raspberry Swedish Glacé ice-cream because who can sit through this hot weather without ice-cream?

Sauces are important too. Our favourite v-mayonnaise is Plamil’s garlic mayo, which I grabbed from Holland and Barrett. I’d also recommend the pictured French dressing from Tesco, it’s really nice!

We always buy certain things for our cupboards: Wraps, peanut butter, some kind of snack food. Aside from those, we try to vary it up. We decided to get some bagels (to have with the Violife and mayo!) and the Loyd Grossman tomato and basil sauce, which is gorgeous on both hot and cold pasta. We recently discovered that some Hartley jellies are vegan – make sure they’re marked with the Vegetarian Society logo, and avoid the strawberry flavour as it contains carmine.

This post doesn’t show the staples we always keep topped up (pasta, rice, spices, nutritional yeast…) but it’s a pretty good representation of the kinds of things we eat! Where do you buy most of your food? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Have a wonderful day!

- Bethan