Receipt Reveal is a new 1News series where different Kiwi households reveal their grocery receipts for one week.
Scarlett Treadwell is a 19-year-old law student at Otago University. She shares a flat near the university with six flatmates: Elsa, Ella, Mia, Milla, Milly, and Lily.
The flatmates each shop and cook for one shared dinner (budget $30) per week, then individually for breakfasts, lunches and snacks. This week we've focused on Scarlett who spends about $45 per week on her own groceries, so about $70 in total. The flat shops at: Pak'nSave, South Dunedin; Woolworths, Dunedin Central.
On the week we visited, Scarlett spent $27.61 on the flat meal and $44.04 on her individual shop, both at Pak‘nSave.
Total: $71.65
Scarlett was interviewed by Sarah Catherall.
There are seven of us in our flat and we each have a pantry shelf and a shelf in the fridge for our breakfast and lunch food. We take turns cooking dinner six nights a week, apart from Milla, who is vegetarian and cooks her own meals.
My fridge shelf is pretty bare because I’m really bad at supermarket shopping. I can plan out the meals I cook for the flat, but I can’t be bothered buying stuff for me, so my shelf usually just has ingredients for pasta or toasties for lunch.
The only night we don’t cook together is Saturday. You have a budget of $30, or $5 a person, for each meal. It’s like, aim for $25 a meal but you have an extra $5 if you need it.
We usually have meat as part of the main dish: beef mince, chicken breast and occasionally pork mince are the only meats we can afford. We’ve worked out that we only need about 700 grams of meat to feed us all. Meat costs $10 to $15 a meal so that’s our biggest cost and half our nightly budget. A lot of the girls have been talking recently about buying a leg of lamb for dinner. But a leg of lamb can be $50 to $70 so we can’t afford that.
We buy veggies but they’re after we’ve bought ingredients for the main meal. We usually get carrots and broccoli because they’re the cheapest. We eat a lot of broccoli. I buy apples, but I usually choose Braeburn because they’re the cheapest. If we could afford it, we’d love cucumber and avocado, and cherry tomatoes. But they’re definitely too expensive. At the start of the year, we could maybe afford a couple of cucumbers when they were in season.
We all use an app called Grosave. You put your ingredients for a meal into the app, and you can see where they’re cheapest.
We buy a few staples in the flat together: cooking sauces, coffee, flour, cornflour, spices, milk, cheese, sugar and butter. Actually, not butter. We can’t afford butter so we buy table spread. We would all love real butter but it’s insanely expensive, about $9. We buy cooking oil for the flat, but definitely not olive oil, because it costs too much. We usually get a vegetable or canola oil.
When I’m shopping for myself, I splurge on Pieter’s Italian salami ($5.79) and Vogel’s ($4.59). We all love Vogels.
Milla’s pantry and fridge shelves are probably the most enviable. She has the most delicious food. She’ll make poke bowls, and veggie bowls with rice and cucumber, or lentil lasagna.
Cleaning items are annoying to buy. We seem to go through a lot of dishwashing liquid, and it’s like: “Oh no, it’s run out again’’. When we run out of toilet paper, we buy a 40-pack for $13.
The Reese cups are on my receipt and on Milly’s receipt, from Pak'nSave. Last year we used to get them from the vending machine at the Unicol hall. They’re usually $3 but they were $1 at Pak'nSave [this was a temporary offer] so we thought “hell yeah!’’
We usually buy our drinks from Leith Liquor. I usually buy a $10 to $12 bottle of wine. Some of the girls drink vodka, which lasts longer, or a box of RTDs, which is $30, so quite a lot.
When I go home for the holidays or study break, I always want grapes because they’re $10 a punnet, and I’m going to ask Mum to get nice bread and cream cheese and salmon on my next visit. Ella is really looking forward to fish, and Elsa wants a steak.
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