Have a posh packed lunch on a budget!

by lovemoney staff on 09 March 2012  |  15 comments
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Need to tighten the purse-strings but don't fancy the idea of ham sandwiches every day? Here's how to have a posh lunch without blowing your budget!

One very easy way to save money is to bring a packed lunch to work instead of buying your lunch from M&S/Tesco/Pret/Starbucks/the local pub etc, each day. However, packed lunches are often associated with kids at school, and the idea of bringing in the same boring sandwiches every day can be far from tempting.

However, packed lunches really don’t have to be dull. In fact, we're going to show you how you can have a posh packed lunch on a budget!

Make your own

So if you’re contemplating bringing your own lunch into work to save yourself a few pennies, how can you make your lunch a little more exotic without breaking the bank?

The tables below highlight a couple of different options from the four major supermarkets – Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, ASDA and Tesco.

Lunch #1: Chicken, avocado and rocket ciabatta, fruit, muffin and smoothie

Source: mySupermarket.co.uk

Lunch#2: Falafel, houmous and salad pitta bread, salt and vinegar crisps, yogurt and fruit juice

Source: mySupermarket.co.uk

If you’re having a similar lunch each day, part of the advantage is that you can buy in bulk. So, for example, it’s far cheaper to buy a large bottle of fruit smoothie to last you the week, than to buy a small, individual bottle each day. If you don’t have a fridge in your office where you can store it, invest in a reusable bottle so that you can decant some of your smoothie or fruit juice into it each day.

Similarly, buying a large bag of crisps will work out cheaper than buying individual portion packets - you just may need to keep the large bag in an air-tight container to keep the crisps fresh all week.

What’s more, fresh fruit works out cheaper when you have to cut it up yourself and it’s not pre-cut and packed for you. Admittedly, this means that making your own lunch each day will require more effort, but the amount of money you’ll save will be well worth any extra time spent in the kitchen.

However, if you’re wondering exactly how much you could save by bringing in your own lunch, let’s take a closer look at each of the packed lunches above. To make things easier, we’ll use ASDA prices as this is where both baskets of goods came out cheapest.

For the first basket, to last you the full five days, you would probably need two packets of the ciabatta rolls, two packets of chicken, two melons and two bottles of smoothie, bringing the total to £12.88. Dividing this by five, this means your lunch will cost you £2.58 each day.

I think that’s pretty great value for what’s included in your packed lunch - these are pretty tasty ingredients after all. And if you bought your lunch at Pret, you’d be paying at least £3 just for your sandwich.

Of course, you might get sick of having the same sandwich every day for a week. But you could get around this by sharing your lunch ingredients with your partner or a couple of colleagues - and asking them to do the same for you!

Taking a look at the second example, if you had two packets of pitta bread, two pots of houmous, and five yogurts for the week, the total would come to just £7.19. And that means your total cost each day would be £1.44 – so even less than the first basket. The equivalent in a coffee shop would cost you nearer £10 each day, or £50 a week. So you’re saving yourself nearly £43 a week - that's over £2,000 a year based on a 48-week working year!

How much you ultimately spend on your lunch depends on your own personal taste – you may want more in your packed lunch, you may want less. But hopefully the above examples give you some idea about how much you can save and highlight that you can still have a tasty lunch even though you've made it yourself. And don’t forget to keep an eye out for top supermarket bargains in our Frugal Food blog every Friday - so you can save even more money!

This is a classic lovemoney article that has been updated

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