Approvedfood review – Great savings on short dated food
A few months back, through the magic of twitter, I stumbled upon a site in the UK which can significantly reduce our grocery shopping cost.
The concept is very simple. A site in the UK, approvedfood.co.uk, is the biggest online seller of close to, and past, best before date food and drink.
You log on to the website, choose your items, and they will be delivered to your door within 3 days.
What is short dated food?
You may be worried about buying short dated food.
The key is the difference between use-by dates and best-before-dates, which is commonly not understood by the consumer.
‘use-by’ is related to foods that must be eaten or thrown away by the date. Eating these foods after this date is considered dangerous and really not advisable. After this date use-by foods may be unsafe to eat even if they look fine, because the nutrients in the food may become unstable or a build-up of bacteria may occur.
Common ‘use-by’ foods include milk, sliced ham, and shaved meats.
‘best before’ foods are still safe to eat after the date as long as they are not damaged, deteriorated or perished. The ‘best before’ date indicates that the product may lose some of its quality after this date passes. You can expect these foods to retain their colour, taste, texture and flavour as long as they are stored correctly. Common ‘best before’ foods include canned foods, cereals, biscuits, sauces, chocolate, sugar, flour and frozen foods
Approvedfood.co.uk only sells products that have best before dates.
What sort of products does approvedfood.co.uk have?
Lots.
Just have a browse through the site, but they basically sell pretty much everything which doesn’t have a “use-by” date that the UK supermarkets sell.
And the savings are excellent. Let’s look at one example:
So, the product which is currently on offer at Tesco is usually £1.99, but could be obtained for £1.50 each with the special offer. Therefore, 8 bottles cost £12.00.
On approvedfood.co.uk, it costs £1.00 for 8 bottles. A massive 92% saving.
Another example:
Tesco price: £2.95 per bottle
Approvedfood.co.uk price: £0.49 per bottle.
A pretty impressive 83% saving.
Be careful with your spending
As ever, make sure you only buy things from approvedfood.co.uk that you would be buying anyway. If you go on the site, order 100 items that you don’t need or want use, then your 90% savings are actually costing you money.
However, look through your cupboard and then get going on approvedfood.co.uk and if you find anything, get saving!!
Do you guys use services like this? Do you have any worries buying short dated food?
Interesting. I’ve never heard of this website either. Have you tried it? I would normally check out the reduced items shelf in the store (with quite a few items nearing their best before date) and sometimes buy something that I will use that same day or the day after. Not sure I would buy these products online but it’s good to know you can if you feel like it 😛
Interesting to see a site that has aggregated all the short dated products. Never heard of that before.
Very interesting! I would buy from these guys. I worked in food service for awhile, and learned that generally the use-by best-by dates are conservative, to protect food producers.
Hmmm I’ve never heard of a service like this, but I would be a bit weary. I just get really paranoid with expiration dates and food going bad in general.
Wow – what a cool program! There’s a similar farm run program in my area called crop mobster. Not necessarily discount grocery items, but discounted fruits and veggies. I think it’s a great idea! There is SO much wasted food.