Can buying food past its Best Before date save you money?

Online retailer Approved Food is booming as people stock up on discount out-of-date foods. We put it to the test.

Approved Food is an online grocery store that sells food that’s gone past (or is rapidly approaching) its Best Before date, with heavy discounts. The service made headlines earlier in the month for having achieved £4 million in annual turnover, despite a rejection from the Dragon's Den.

While that’s not profit, it’s still a significant milestone for a company which sells food the supermarkets don’t have the appetite to sell, and that we don’t normally get the chance to buy.

The Best Before dates on food relates to quality, not safety, so the items sold on Approved Food are perfectly fine to eat – you shouldn’t eat food past its ‘Use By’ date, as it could make you sick.

While this service does its bit to tackle the spiralling food waste issues in the UK, does the benefit for your wallet really add up?

Comparing the price

Because of its nature as a ‘last-minute’ supplier, Approved Food’s stock and special offers change on a daily basis. I’ve picked some store cupboard basics out as examples for the table below, and compared it with the same product (or an equivalent) at three other retailers.

Where you see (S), I have found a substitution for the product rather than the product itself, and it wasn’t always possible to find the exact same weights for the same product – these are also marked where different.

Sources: approvedfood.co.uk and mysupermarket.com 

Aldi was actually cheaper overall, but I had to find non-premium substitutes for every single item – the point being, if you want to buy branded food for whatever reason, Approved Food is a pretty good bet. It smashed the prices at Waitrose and Asda, frequently offering more value per 100g where packet sizes weren’t comparable.

If you want to stock up on something like gravy granules, it’s also useful – a box weighing nearly two kilos is just 99p more than a 200g pot (of the same brand) from Waitrose! However, you need to take into account the fact that it’s already fairly old stock – gravy doesn’t really go bad for ages past the Best Before date, but do you really want to be eating it with every meal from now until next August?

This is where the real difficulty with Approved Food lies. You can get a lot for a little, but it’s already declining in quality. If you have a large family and know you’ll get through everything then it could be really useful. If you live alone, by the time you get round to eating half of what you’ve bought, it might be past the point of no return.

You also can’t rely on it to have everything you want every time you shop, which means you may have to still visit somewhere else for a top-up shop. Not the biggest problem, but it’s a little inconvenient if you’ve already spent a while scouring the website for what you want. There is also very little in the way of fresh produce.

Having said all that, it could be a useful moneysaver for store cupboard items and prevents some food from being thrown away simply because of the date stamped on it.

Do you think Approved Food is a good idea? Have you used the service? Let us know about your experiences in the Comments below.

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