How To Shop Better Outside The Supermarket

In the UK approximately 95% of all food is bought from a supermarket. As many of us switch to online shopping the mountains of plastic continue to pile up and have we actually gotten any closer to eating better? It can come with its challenges but it’s worth changing our ways, reducing plastic, eating better and engaging a bit more in our local communities. As a former butcher, greengrocer and now founder and editor of SLOP – a magazine that focuses on produce, I’ve spent a fair few years seeing these issues first-hand and have (hopefully) come up with a few easy tips on how to eat better away from the mainstream marts.

Tip 1: Know Your Weights
There is a feeling many supermarket shoppers venturing out into the independent food world are probably familiar with: you’re standing in front of a lovely display of fruit laid out in front of you, a bounty to make Adam and Eve blush with tomatoes of all shapes and sizes: ridged, green, small, large, teardropped – a rich bounty. Each crate has a neat handwritten label: £5kg on one, £7.50kg another, £8lb for the third – but what on earth does it all mean? How much is one tomato? How much is a pack? Is this aesthetically pleasing brown bag of toms about to cost £3 or £13?

Well, you’re hardly alone. This is maybe the trickiest part of transitioning from shopping with the utter convenience of the supermarket to the independence of the individual grocer. After at least one generation of living with the convenience of pre-packaged and pre-priced goods, most of us have lost the ability to estimate weight. It even catches out those that do it everyday. 

During lockdown, when I was a butcher, a colleague got chatting to a greengrocer and they offered to sell each other some produce at trade price. My colleague who was used to ordering meat and thinking of 2 or 5 kilos as on the small side promptly ordered 5 kilos of spinach. What turned up was several bin bags worth of leaves, costing him about £50 and leaving him pretty red-faced. 

Trial and error is normally required. With meat the rule of thumb is around 200grams per person without the bone. A big tomato is normally about 150 grams, lettuce is a lot lighter than you think! A bit of arithmetic goes a long way and worst-case scenario you can always ask to put a bit back if you’ve gone a little over.

It’s also worth remembering that supermarkets do play tricks on the consumer. A classic is the supermarket “Large Chicken”. Now, bear with me while I do some back-of-the-fag-packet calculation. Typically a large supermarket chicken will be around 1.6kg, whereas a large chicken at a butcher will often be over 2.5kg. That’s due to butchers tending to buy chickens that live for longer and grow bigger. While the butcher’s bird might come out at £25 and the supermarket £14 – you are buying a lot more. If you look at the price per kilo, they’re pretty similar: an M&S chicken on Ocado is £8.50 plus delivery, while most butchers will offer a great free-range chicken at around a tenner per kilo. In short: one person’s large chicken is not necessarily another’s.

Tip 2: Trust Your Vendors
In the main, the people that work at speciality shops like good cheesemongers, butchers and fishmongers are passionate about what they do and eat what they sell. For instance, at ‘proper’ cheesemongers like Neal’s Yard, the employees start every day by tasting the cheeses, so that when you go in and say, “I like a stong brie, what do you have that you think’s especially good at the moment?”, they really will know the answer, so it’s worth heeding their advice. They’re also probably not trying to upsell you as much as you thin, since very few are working on commission. They’re people that know what they’re on about and they rely on local regulars so it really is in their interest to send you away with the best version of what you’ve come in for. 

Tip 3: Have a Remit
It’s great to ask for advice, but giving a steer is also important. For instance, I have never known much about fish: I learned a bit working at St John, but beyond the classic English staples and crustaceans I get fairly lost. Fortunately I lived close to a fishmonger who introduced me to all sorts of varieties I’d never heard of. Most good independent shops will have at least one person who’s a dab hand in the kitchen so it’s really worth telling them if you fancy something for a curry or to serve with a burnt butter and so on.

Tip 4: Buy in Season
Buying in season has two huge advantages: things are likely to have travelled much less distance – and they’re much cheaper. When I worked as a greengrocer in Borough Market in mid-winter, we would sell blueberries for £7 for a very small punnet or close to £50 per kilo, but they had also been flown from California. In the summer, England produces some of the best blueberries in the world and you’re hard-pressed to spend more than a few quid on a good size bag.

Tip 5: Buy What You Need
Food waste is an ever-growing problem in the UK. People have busy lives, eat out more, buy more takeaways and, even if your intentions were good buying the big pack of salad or the four pack of chicken breasts, it’s easy enough to wait a day too long and find yourself packing them off to the landfill. In the main, supermarkets are deciding how much you should buy and packaging it up in plenty of plastic. In contrast, local shops operate almost exclusively on a buy-as-much-as-you-want basis. Add a handful of mushrooms or a couple of apples to your bag and no packaging is necessary. Especially if you’re cooking mainly for yourself or just the two of you – it just makes much more sense. It also means you’re only buying and paying for the food you want, rather than the food the supermarket has decided you need.

Now check out SLOP magazine, and then our Pantry Essentials Reset Box