Discounts, Food Waste and Planning
Offers, food waste and planning. ZoneOffer’s big guide to cheaper prices
It’s getting more and more expensive…
In these times, hardly a day goes by without hearing or reading about rising prices. If you ask the big grocery stores about their views on this, yes, they completely agree. In the media, they talk about how their costs are increasing and that they will therefore have to raise the prices. Unfortunately, we cannot do anything about this at ZoneOffer, but in return we can give you our best advice on how to make the money last longer. That is what this article is about.
Food waste – more than 10,000 food waste offers EVERY DAY!
In Denmark, almost 900,000 tonnes of edible food is thrown away every year. This corresponds to more than a staggering DKK 10 billion worth of food being thrown away per year. At ZoneOffer, we have therefore seriously started the fight against food waste. We collect food waste from all over Denmark early in the morning, so that we can always give a fresh overview of food waste in the Danish warehouses that deal in food.
We have collected the food waste offers from ALL of Netto’s 500+ stores, and you can therefore easily get an overview of what daily offers your local Netto has. In addition to Netto, we present i.a. also offers from Bilka, Føtex and the online store Motatos , which specializes in food waste offers. At Motatos, they often have items on sale for 50-90% of the normal price, so if you haven’t already tried them, it’s definitely worth checking them out.
Examples of fantastic offers include:
- Heinz Ketchup for only DKK 1 (90% discount)
- Toilet paper for only DKK 1 (90% discount)
- Daim bag for only DKK 7 (80% discount)
- Two packs of dishwashing detergent for only DKK 10 (75% discount)
By focusing on food waste offers, you are not only doing something good for your wallet, but also for the environment!
Items that are often on sale
The supermarkets know better than anyone else which products lure customers into the stores. Therefore, many important items are often on sale. It’s just a matter of finding the store that has the item on offer for that particular week. Below we give you some examples of the essential items that you can save a lot of money on almost every week.
Please note that this section has been updated in the autumn of 2022 in continuation of the strong inflation which has made the prices – and thus unfortunately also the offers – significantly more expensive
- You will often be able to save 30% or more on butter. This applies to both the well-known brands such as Lurpak or Kærgården, but other brands also often have large discounts. Historically, we have seen Lurpak prices as low as DKK 7, but often approx. DKK 20 can be considered a good offer
- Dolmio pasta sauce is used by many families in connection with various pasta dishes – even if the normal price is over DKK 25. At least every 2 weeks you can find offers on Dolmio down to DKK 15 per glass, and on rare occasions down to just DKK 10. So here is also a 50% saving.
- Diapers are of course something that all families with small children use, and they are unfortunately very expensive. The prices depend a lot on which brand and type you buy, but as a good rule of thumb you can usually save 20-30% on the offers that the shops give on nappies.
- Skyr is a product that many people use, and which can also be very expensive. In most places, a kilo of skyr costs over DKK 30, but often you will be able to find prices as low as DKK 20. Here you can also save more than 50% if you just find the right offer.
- Eggs are also a natural part of most households and here too there is money to be saved. How big a discount you can find depends on the brand and type (e.g. scratch, free-range or organic), but as a general rule you should be able to find eggs for a discount of at least 30-35%. If the normal price, for example, is over DKK 30 for organic eggs, you will often be able to find these eggs on offer for around DKK 20 – rarely as low as just DKK 15.
Get the BEST deals every week with ZoneOffer
At ZoneOffer, we scan the market every single night (365 nights a year!) for millions of items, prices and offers. We compare current prices with previous prices, and our robot ranks the offers according to which offers are the best. When we have the overview, we send out the best offer from each of our more than 3,500 stores to the users who have chosen to follow the store. For example, if you follow a rema1000 store, you will receive a push message with rema1000’s best offer for the current week. If you also follow a Netto store, yes, you will also get their best offers. It’s all completely free, of course.
You can see the best grocery offers right now here .
Sort the offers by price, distance or biggest discount!
With the ZoneOffer app, we make it possible for you to sort by price, distance or largest discount. Sometimes you sit at home on the sofa and just want to have an overview of the day’s or week’s best offers, whereas other times you’re standing in a place where you just need the best offer nearby. With ZoneOffer you can sort the offers as you like, and if you have found an item that you can buy online, our blue buy button takes you directly to the store’s online shop.
Check the price per kilo
Remember it is always important to check the price per kilo. A special offer can look really good, but sometimes the price per kilo of the product on offer is actually more expensive than the same product in a larger or smaller package. A good example is Nutella, where the large jars are sometimes on sale, but if you check properly you will discover that the price per kilo is actually still more expensive on the jar that is on offer than a regular smaller jar.
The same can also sometimes apply to e.g. different types of minced meat and roast pork.
Therefore, always check the price per kilo to make sure you are not being cheated!
Planning
Unfortunately, one of the best ways to secure cheaper prices is also one of the most difficult. Namely, planning. If you can plan your consumption of various goods over a longer period of time, you both ensure that you are more likely to continuously strike when you see an offer on the goods you need, but you also ensure at the same time that you do not suddenly making an expensive impulse or being forced to buy an item that is way too expensive because you HAVE to use it for dinner.
There are many different ways to plan, but overall our advice is to try to gradually start planning small. First a few days ahead, then a week ahead and as you get more and more under control maybe even 2-3 weeks ahead. However, this is of course much easier said than done.
“Popular Searches”
With Zoneoffer’s new “popular searches” feature, we show you what others are searching for right now. Our data shows – not surprisingly – that Danes especially search for offers on, among other things butter and diapers. The advantage of this feature, however, is that you, as a user of the ZoneOffer app, can be made aware of good offers right now that you might otherwise not have been aware of. If there is, for example, a week when many people suddenly search for “Coca-Cola”, then there is probably a good chance that there is a super good offer on Coca-Cola in that particular week, and then it is all about hitting for if it is something you occasionally buy anyway.
Make a shopping list – and use it!
One of the pitfalls when shopping is that you buy things that you hadn’t really planned. The supermarkets know this well, and this is one of the reasons for their tempting offers. The way you get over this is by having a specific shopping list ready every time you shop – and then making sure you have it with you and use it!
Here you can consider using ZoneOffer’s shopping list feature. You can add the week’s best deals directly to your current shopping list, and you can even easily share the shopping list with others in your family or friends. That way, you always have your shopping list at hand, and you can easily help each other remember what is missing.
Buy big, but…
Overall, our advice is to buy in bulk when you see an item with a good offer. However, there are a number of things to be aware of in this connection.
Firstly, you must be aware of how many of the item you can get at the good offer price. On the very best offers, there is often a maximum number, so everyone is always aware of that. The more items you buy at the normal price, the worse the savings.
In addition, consider how long the item you buy on sale can last. Classic colonial goods such as pasta, jams and various canned goods can of course last a very long time, so there will often be no problems buying in bulk. If, on the other hand, you have found a really good offer on milk, then it doesn’t matter if you don’t manage to use the milk before the expiry date. No matter how good an offer is, it is per definition a bad offer if it ends up that the purchased item is not used at all!
Freeze down
In continuation of the above regarding expiry dates and large quantities, it is worth considering whether some of the goods you buy on sale can be frozen. Most meat, butter and bread, for example, are not damaged by being frozen (if it is done properly and in enough time before the expiry date), so with these goods you can buy in large quantities even if you do not manage to use it all before the expiry date.
Advantages and disadvantages of ordering online
Online ordering of groceries/food is becoming more and more popular, and more and more of the traditional and large grocery stores are gradually offering this feature. One of the advantages of ordering online is that you are not lured by special offers to the same extent as if you shop physically. There are of course plenty of offers online, but as a rule of thumb you are always more tempted when you are standing down in the physical store.
One of the disadvantages is of course that it is more expensive. Both the delivery itself, but also “package fees” increase the costs of shopping online, and it can therefore quickly become an expensive pleasure to shop for groceries online if you are not very structured and aware of the extra fees that apply.
In a later article, we will create a guide to “the dos and the don’ts” when it comes to online grocery shopping.
Free delivery of Take Away
No matter how much you optimize your shopping and bargain hunting, it cannot be avoided that the planning sometimes slips (or that you just want to take away). That is why ZoneOffer has entered into a collaboration with RoomService to deliver take away with free delivery for a period of time if you order through ZoneOffer. You can see and read more about this in the app, or you can click here and get an overview of the delicious take away restaurants.
Do you love newsletters?
The Danes love to read special offers newspapers, and at ZoneOffer we also have to admit that it can be nice to sit quietly and go through the week’s newspaper from the local shop.
That is why we have also dedicated a special section of our app to special offers. Here we collect the special offer newspapers from all of Denmark’s food stores every week, so that you can easily scroll through the newspapers that are relevant to you. That way, you are free to look for the newspaper in a lot of different places, and at the same time you help the environment by not using the physical special offers newspapers.
Here on our website you also get easy access to all the important special offers. If you click on special offers , you will go directly to the section.
Do you have more good advice?
If you have been inspired by our guide or if you have more good advice on how to optimize purchases, please feel free to write to us. We would also very much like to hear about which shops and goods you can recommend, and what you do in your daily life to counteract the rising prices.
You can write to us at info@zone-offer.com . We would love to hear from you.
