The lucky dip sites that can slash your grocery bills

As grocery bills continue to climb, more and more websites and apps are launching to save you money and put an end to unnecessary food waste – with just a few clicks of a button.

Here Toby Walne takes a look at a selection to see how they can lower your shopping costs.

oddbox

The logo of the ‘Eat fresh, fight food waste’ website explains that this may not save you a lot of money on the grocery bill, but it will at least help the planet.

According to research from the University of Edinburgh, up to a third of farmed fruit and vegetables never make it to the shelves because they are supposedly misshapen or the ‘wrong’ size.

Oddbox lets you choose a box of unloved fruit and veg to be delivered to your doorstep, with prices from £11.49 for an ‘x-small’ to £22.49 for a ‘large fruit and veg box’. On top of that comes standard € 1.49 delivery costs.

It’s a bit of a lucky dip but when I ordered a £17.49 medium box it came with 900g potatoes (5), 800g swede (2), 150g spinach, 500g onions (4), 450g chicory (2), 600 g courgettes (3), 400 g tomatoes (2) and 400 g Brussels sprouts. There was also 800 g of apples (6), 800 g of oranges (5), plus half a kilo of grapes and a pineapple.

The food was fresh and there was nothing particularly misshapen or unusual except unusually large tomatoes. It was enough to keep one person in the green for a week.

When I compared prices to Tesco I found that the same ingredients cost around £19 there – just £1.50 more. But once you added shipping costs, it was about the same price. At Waitrose, the same shopping costs a little more at £22.

Oddbox gave me a warm feeling knowing I was buying groceries that might otherwise be thrown away because I didn’t pass a beauty pageant.

The company claims to cover two thirds of the country, but it wouldn’t deliver to my address near Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, so the box was sent to my London office. Deliveries are between 7pm and 7am to a ‘safe place’ outside the house. If you live in a dodgy neighborhood, this may not be the best way to buy vegetables.

Alternatives to consider include scouring the aisles of low-cost supermarket Lidl, where ‘too good to waste’ fruit and vegetable boxes containing 5kg of food are sold for £1.50. Supermarket Morrisons also sells ‘wonky’ fruit and vegetables, while Tesco has a ‘perfectly imperfect’ range.

PRONUNCIATION: Saves waste plus a small amount of money.

Too good to go

After a long day at work I didn’t go to Leon food chain in central London until 9pm to pick up food.

Having signed up for the free Too Good To Go app earlier in the day, I was shown dozens of locations across the capital where I could pre-order a ‘surprise bag’ of goodies – prepaid online through the app. Leon gave me a brown paper bag with no idea what was in it.

This is because Too Good To Go is an app that allows restaurants to sell food at a discounted price that would otherwise go to waste and be thrown away.

I was one of the last customers to arrive at Leon’s just before the restaurant closed for the day. I had paid £3.99 and on this occasion got a chicken burger and vegetarian meatballs with brown rice worth about £12 in total.

After a tasty dinner – with lots of leftovers – I decided to keep using the app all week.

For £2.50 each my partner and I enjoyed a takeaway from a Toby Carvery in East London one evening. We opted for the vegetarian option which included carrots, roast potatoes, peas, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower cheese and gravy. Unfortunately no Yorkshire pudding. Still a hearty meal for a moderate price.

While the app provided access to cheap meals, it didn’t always work. I’m lucky enough to live in London and work near a number of eateries signed up to the app. You may not be so lucky in quiet locations.

You don’t know in advance what will be available, so you shouldn’t be too picky and open to ideas. The lucky-dip approach doesn’t necessarily suit someone with dietary needs or tastes.

PRONUNCIATION: Great value for those who are happy with a lucky dip.

oil

This smartphone app offers free food to fellow subscribers who find it unnecessary and would otherwise throw it away.

From Bishop’s Stortford, logging in on a Wednesday afternoon, plenty of essential groceries were available to pick up for free.

Subscriber Catherine offered seasonal hot cross buns, and a choice of Warburton’s thick white sliced ​​bread, thin bagels, and a Hovis loaf. If you studied the picture you could see an expiration date of that day, but putting the loaves in the freezer allowed them to last for months until needed.

Although the treats were available at 1pm that day, they were still free at 5pm – but 6pm was the closing time and I didn’t have time to get there. The same ‘volunteer’ had already ordered a selection of pastries, sandwiches, donuts – even a bunch of bananas.

A fellow member, Rose, also offered free groceries — with an odd combination of coffee bleach and pea and ham soup.

Another, Mel, had two grapefruits, houmous, garlic, pain au chocolate and three danish treats with vanilla custard for the taking until 10:30pm.

Unfortunately these tasty offerings had been added at 10pm the previous night and they were all packed. The app showed me that they were taken in the afternoon.

To enter, I had to press the ‘request’ button and say the day and time of pick-up – to get the address. Olio is not a charity, but those who have volunteered seem eager to do good and help those most in need. I didn’t feel comfortable taking goods for free knowing they could go to a more deserving home. But to ease some guilt, I could have listed my own free gifts.

PRONUNCIATION: Good things can happen to those who share.

Gander

The app promotion is “Real-time updates on delicious discounted food near you.” Gander shoppers are also rumored to save an average of 56 percent on their grocery store purchases.

It claims to “never miss a yellow sticker again” at your local store – with online maps of where you can get deals if the store decides to put discounted labels on them near their sell-by date.

Gander says it notifies you when your favorite store starts lowering prices in the aisles, and lets you filter by the type of food you might be interested in. There are now 25 delicious discounts near you.’

I was working in London so was expecting great things. But after entering all my details, it was a surprise to receive the message: “There are currently no results matching your query.”

The same was true of my home near Bishop’s Stortford. I emailed Gander to find out what was going on and to ask why there were no offers in my area. While waiting for a response, I discovered an online Gander video from a customer in Northern Ireland.

In Belfast I could get a liter of goat’s milk at half price for £1 at a local Spar supermarket, half price pieces of steak at £2.15 and half price sausages at 90 pence. More options opened up as I widened the network around Belfast – with a total of ten Spars nearby and shops at petrol stations offering cheap food with an expiration date.

Two days later, the company replied: ‘We don’t have any stores in London yet, but will probably get there later this year with well-known food stores. We are currently in Northern Ireland, Isle of Man, West Midlands, South Wales, Sussex, East Riding of Yorkshire, Jersey and Guernsey and parts of Scotland.”

PRONUNCIATION: Bargains for a limited number of shoppers.

Additional reporting: Rachel Rickard Straus