Kick cost-of-living pain where it hurts and save hundreds with the Savvy Dinner Plan

Taking a $974 monthly dinner grocery bill to $560 without scrimping on taste is no mean feat, but our food experts did it – now they can show you the easy way to save big-time.

Costs are spiralling for ordinary Australians – and at Taste.com.au we wanted to help.

So we set ourselves a mission, to take a 28-day dinner plan, feeding four people every night, to a whole new level in terms of saving money and time.

We called it the Savvy Dinner Plan. And the results blew our expectations out of the water, with estimated savings of up to 25 per cent across the program.

How does it work?

Big savings and lessons learned (with tuan oil) ... Michelle Southan.

First up, dinner recipes have to be no-fail, tasty, affordable and achievable. We needed Australia to love them, so all 28 recipes in the plan are based on taste.com.au’s most popular meals.

We took each one and forensically redesigned it to save every cent possible. To really stretch the grocery budget we shopped at Coles for fresh in-season produce, and scoured every aisle for clever ingredient swaps, including own-brand and Coles’ new Simply range (the plan was created in partnership with Coles).

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We used tricks like cutting down the meat by upping the veg, adding extra bulk and heartiness by adding lentils and pasta, and bumping up the flavour with budget-stretchers such as a packet of French onion soup mix.

Our food team of three used a spreadsheet to cut wastage – so, for example, if one of us had some tomato paste left over from a dish, it would go onto the spreadsheet. Our aim was to use every strand of shredded cheese, every clove of garlic, every frozen pea – making it all fit like a neat jigsaw.

So, what sort of savings did we make?

Cut those costs with smart ingredients and clever hacks … Michelle Southan.

We shared an online shopping cart, for a Coles store in a typical big-city suburb, and the total for all 28 meals for four people (with 112 individual dinners) came in at $560 – and that is starting from scratch, assuming you have none of the ingredients already (if you did, it would cut the cost still further).

Out of curiosity I did a similar calculation, using the original recipes, cooked individually, without the product swaps, hacks and tricks that we built into the Savvy Dinner Plan. That showed an estimate of around $974. Big difference!

Its especially interesting when taste.com.au’s Dinner Decoder 2024 food trends survey shows the average weekly grocery spend for a family of four is $257, or $1028 per month.

For me there was another huge win: the number of clever hacks and tips we picked up. I cook more than 800 meals a year, and prided myself on knowing every trick in the book. But now it’s like I have a whole new book, and I doubt if I’ll ever pour the oil from a tuna can down the drain ever again – it’s flavour that costs nothing yet gives you so much bang for your buck … yes, we really did use up EVERYTHING!

Get Savvy and get started here.

Originally published as Kick cost-of-living pain where it hurts and save hundreds with the Savvy Dinner Plan