Friday, July 03, 2009

 

Buying fresh is soooo expensive

Being a person that enjoys not having to spend as much as he needs to, I'm always on the lookout for bargains in the weekly food shop.
This week was no exception and for £1.29, down from £2.99 because the bag was broken, I picked up 750g of broad beans (in their pods) in Waitrose's Regional Food range - they'd travelled all the way from Titchfield, somewhere in darkest Hampshire betwixt Portsmouth and Southampton.
The contents looked impressive - a big bag of pods waiting to be shucked - but pretty disappointing when you see how little you end up with.



This got me thinking as to how expensive these broad beans were.

The initial full-price product was about £4 a kilo.
As this was 70% waste, the actual beans cost £13.30 a kilo!
My bargain-hunter price of £1.29 was therefore £5.75 a kilo.

Was that any good? After having a browse of the Waitrose web site, I can say "not really".

Standard fresh broad beans, unshucked, in the Essentials range were actually more expensive at £5/kg (or £16.60/kg shucked) so my local produce was way ahead here.

But over to the frozen aisle and a 750g bag of prepared baby broad beans are selling for £1.15 (£1.53/kg), down from the usual price of £2.19 (£2.92/kg).

And the tinned variety? A mighty £1.90/kg.

I didn't realise that buying local, fresh produce cost so much more than the pre-prepared equivalent. And I wasn't even buying Organic!

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