Yellow stickers chronicles: keeping your supermarket food budget low

Tips from the yellow stickers queen

Cheap food? Don’t mind if I do. Picture credits: Paola Bassanese

As the self-appointed “queen of yellow stickers” (stickers can also be red in some supermarkets), my mission is to save money on my food shopping while also help others do the same.

A London habit I’ve been carrying on in Ireland

I first discovered yellow stickers in London supermarkets about 20 years ago. An acquaintance was telling me enthusiastically how little she paid for a full chicken at Marks & Spencer, which is notoriously an expensive supermarket. She mentioned that the chicken had a yellow sticker on the packaging, showing a heavily reduced price as the product had reached its “best before” date that was printed on the label. She also told me that the best day to go and check the reduced items was Tuesday evening before closing.

Soon afterwards I discovered that on Tuesday evenings you could find much more than cheap chicken in Marks & Spencer, but also breads, cakes and so on. My addiction to yellow stickers started then and it still continues today, mostly by necessity rather than for the thrill of getting a bargain.

The cost of living crisis has turned us all into “yellow sticker rangers”, scanning the reduced items aisles as if we were on an urban hunting expedition where the trophy is a 3 euro ready to cook whole chicken without giblets.

Tips from a veteran yellow sticker scholar

As a self-appointed scholar of any food with a yellow sticker on, I can confidently say that you can stretch your food budget further by taking a very targeted approach to cheaper food shopping.

Thankfully you don’t need to wait until Tuesday evenings to come across some bargains, as they can happen throughout the week, including weekends. Just recently I filled my basket with fresh food from the reduced items aisles at the supermarket on a Friday lunchtime.

I would say that, in general, having a full time job is somewhat incompatible with searching for discounted food items. However, you can still find cheap fresh food in the evenings and during your lunch break (as long as you have space in the office fridge to store your purchases). Some of the best bargains are available from mid morning onwards. If you ever go to a supermarket at around 10am you will see a small gathering of people around a member of staff stacking the reduced items shelves.

Sometimes there’s a bit of a scramble to grab the best foods first, but thankfully here in Ireland I haven’t seen scenes as dramatic as in the UK, where the section of the supermarket displaying yellow sticker items is momentarily cordoned off to allow staff to do their work without being hassled by shoppers.

My top 5 tips are:

1. if you can, go to the supermarket in the morning after 10am or in the afternoon after 3pm (I know this conflicts with a normal 9 to 5 job);

2. keep track of which supermarket gives you the best value and has more discounted products in the shelves, sometimes even high-end supermarkets sell expensive foodstuff for 1-5 euro;

3. join forces with friends and family dividing up any surplus food among yourselves, and also let each other know when you spot some yellow stickers;

4. make sure you do a stock take of what you already have at home to avoid overspending and having to throw away good food because you bought too much;

5. your freezer is your friend as you can store fresh food for up to one month, unless otherwise stated in the packaging.

My friends and I often message each other with the latest yellow sticker bulletins:

“There’s a lot of stuff at Tesco today”

“Dunnes has cooked ham reduced to 10 cents”

“Bag of potatoes at 50 cents in Marks” (aka Marks & Spencer).

That’s what friends are for, right?

My food spending over the years in Ireland

Like many other people, I have noticed that food prices started going up from 2023, with staples such as eggs, milk and bread making more of a dent in our budgets.