The Easiest Way to Save on Grocery Bills

Prices Went Up. They Haven’t Fully Come Back Down.

Between 2021 and 2023, UK food inflation peaked at levels not seen in over four decades — at its worst, grocery prices were rising at more than 19% year-on-year. Since then, the rate of increase has slowed, but the prices themselves haven’t returned to where they were. A shopping basket that cost £80 before the pandemic may still cost £95–100 today, even after inflation has technically eased.

For most UK households, groceries are one of the few significant household costs that can actually be influenced. Unlike rent, energy, or council tax, what you spend at the supermarket is partly a function of the choices you make — where you shop, what you buy, and how you buy it. But only if you have the tools to make informed choices quickly.

How Supermarkets Are Designed to Work Against You

Supermarkets are sophisticated businesses operating on thin margins, and they have spent decades learning how to maximise what ends up in your basket. The promotions and loyalty schemes you see aren’t charity — they’re carefully designed to attract your footfall while ensuring the overall spend remains high.

None of this is nefarious — it’s just business. But understanding it changes how you approach your shop.

The “Can’t Be Bothered” Tax

Grocery shopping isn’t just expensive — it’s exhausting. Hundreds of products, dozens of promotions, loyalty prices, multibuys, pack sizes, and substitutions all compete for your attention every single week. Most people simplify the process by buying what they bought last week, from the same store. That’s entirely understandable — but it’s also how savings quietly stay on the table, week after week.

The single biggest drain on most grocery budgets isn’t any individual price difference. It’s habit. Most UK households shop predominantly at one or two supermarkets — not because they’ve compared options and concluded it’s optimal, but because it’s familiar and convenient.

Shopping without a list is one of the most reliable ways to overspend — and one of the easiest habits to fix. A planned list reduces impulse purchases, keeps you focused, and gives a tool like Shopsplit something concrete to work with.

Manually checking prices across even three supermarkets for a 50-item list is genuinely time-consuming. Opening multiple apps, searching each product, noting prices, then working out the best split — it can take an hour or more for a thorough comparison. For most households, that time cost simply isn’t worth it for the savings available on any individual item.

If a different approach to your weekly shop could save you £5–10 per week, that’s £250–500 over the course of a year. It doesn’t appear as a line item anywhere, which is why it stays invisible — and why it persists.

Online vs In-Store: Reduce Your Supermarket Bill Further

Many shoppers assume online and in-store prices are always identical. In practice, differences do occur. Promotions may vary between channels, product ranges differ, and some prices can be higher or lower depending on where and when you shop. Comparing against online pricing provides a consistent baseline because prices are publicly available and easy to analyse at scale.

This is one reason why using online pricing as a comparison baseline makes sense. It’s consistent, searchable, and — for most households doing a regular weekly shop — actually more convenient once you’re set up with a delivery slot or click-and-collect arrangement.

What Actually Reduces Your Grocery Bill

There are three main levers that meaningfully reduce a grocery bill — and they’re the ones Shopsplit is built around. None of them are revolutionary ideas; the challenge has always been executing them without spending more time than the savings are worth.

Most shoppers are aware that some supermarkets are generally cheaper than others — but far fewer realise how much variation exists on individual products. A store that’s cheapest for dairy can be the most expensive for household goods. That’s why comparing entire baskets, not just headline prices, is what actually reduces your food shopping costs.

Illustrative example: a 50p–£1.25 difference on a single product may not seem significant, but repeated across dozens of items it can have a meaningful impact on your overall food shopping costs.

The three approaches below are the most effective ways of taking advantage of those differences.

No Simple Grocery Budgeting Tool Does All of This

Price comparison websites exist, and individual supermarket apps are useful for what they are. But there’s no mainstream tool that combines a full cross-supermarket product catalogue, split optimisation, substitution suggestions, and promotion tracking into something a normal household can use in a few minutes.

Individual comparison sites tend to focus on a handful of basket items rather than a full shop. Supermarket apps are, by definition, designed to keep you within that supermarket’s ecosystem. Spreadsheets work, but they require ongoing manual maintenance that most people abandon within a few weeks.

The gap between “knowing you could save money” and “actually saving it consistently” has always been a practical one — not a motivation problem, but a tooling problem.

You Stay in Control

It’s worth being direct about something: no app should be making your shopping decisions for you. What you buy, where you buy it, whether a particular saving is worth the extra effort — these are your calls. Preferences, dietary needs, brand loyalty for certain products, convenience — all of these are legitimate factors that a tool can’t fully account for.

A good tool surfaces options and makes acting on them easy. It doesn’t override your preferences or push you toward decisions that suit someone else’s interests. That distinction matters, especially as AI-powered tools become more common in everyday consumer contexts.

This Is What Shopsplit Is Built For

Shopsplit is built around the idea that the comparison — across products, stores, prices, and promotions — should take seconds rather than hours. It brings together product data from UK supermarkets (currently Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose, Ocado, and Aldi – more on the way) into a single searchable catalogue, and uses that to help you find the best purchasing strategy for your specific list.

At a high level: you build a list (or import one from an existing online order), set your preferences about how many stores you’re willing to use, and Shopsplit shows you the optimal split — which products to buy where, what the total cost looks like, and where substitutes could add further savings.

It’s free to download, available on iPhone and iPad, with Android coming in 2026. The pages below go deeper on each aspect if you want to understand how any part of it works.