Beat The Crunch reporter Eleanor Stride inputs her weekly shop into the mysupermarket.co.uk website
THE cost of food has risen a whopping 9.5 per cent over the past year, according to the Office for National Statistics.
While many of us are loyal to our favourite supermarket and trust it to offer us the best prices and offers, with food so expensive and shops desperate for custom, it pays to shop around.
To see if I could save money on my weekly food bill, I visited mysupermarket.co.uk which monitors prices and offers across the UK's four online supermarkets - Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Waitrose's delivery service Ocado.
I found the mysupermarket site easy to use as you can shop for products from your preferred supermarket, as you would if you were in a branch of that shop - clicking on items that you want to add to your basket.
During the shop, the site displays the running total cost of all your goods from your preferred supermarket as well as what the items would cost if bought from the three other supermarkets, calculating in the cost of special offers as you go through.
It was quite time-consuming to add all the products into the basket. However, once you progress through the site, you can save your favourite items to make future cost comparisons easier.
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Once the shop was complete, Asda came out the cheapest with the 34 items costing £51.87, Tesco came in at £55, Sainsbury's at £55.83 and Ocado the most expensive at £59.14.
However, where the site really helps you cut the cost of shopping is at the Trolley Checker stage, which shows how much you can save by substituting your items for ones on offer.
Suggested swaps at Asda included exchanging a 970g bag of McCain Oven Chips for a larger 1.8kg bag that was discounted to actually cost less than the smaller bag, switching a 500g bag of Asda fusilli pasta (78p) for the same weight in Marshalls macaroni (41p), and taking the Asda Direct Fairtrade teabags (£1.39) rather than PG Tips Pyramid bags (£1.67).
If all the swaps in Asda were taken, it would cut £11.41 from the £51.87 bill - a saving of 22 per cent. Not bad for a few minutes' work.
Tesco fared even better at the Trolley Checker stage, with suggested swaps totalling £15.04, including exchanging my 200g tub of Philadelphia cream cheese for a 300g tub that was on offer so cost less, exchanging standard Weetabix for organic that was on offer at £1.60, and choosing Kingsmill white bread rather than Hovis to take advantage of a 20p saving.
Sainsbury's suggested swaps totalled £15.39 - making it the best-priced bet overall - and swaps from Ocado totalled £8.01.
Looking through the list of suggested swaps, I probably wouldn't choose all of them, especially from Sainsbury's and Ocado where the swaps were often for items of different sizes, but the site was a good way to see how you can make significant savings by exchanging just a few items.
Overall, I would actually have swapped the most suggested items from Tesco and Asda, as they were the closest match to the products I wanted.
The prices fluctuate from day to day but the website takes that into account. And while the price fluctuations will affect the size of your bill, the bottom line is you can, and will, save money.
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