Yahoo News 'I'm a mum – here's a hack to help make your food shop cheaper'
A woman has shared a hack for people to make sure they remain within they budget when they do their food shops.
Deciding on a week of meals is difficult. And it becomes even more difficult if you're on a tight budget, as the Cost of Living crisis has made food prices rise with it. While the overall inflation has fallen, food prices still remain at 2.0%, according to Food Foundation.
To help people with the chore of food shopping, mum Lauren Bische took to TikTok to share a hack to make the process less stressful.
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“As we all know, food shopping has become extortionate, like the prices of food are outrageous and people are trying to make money stretch - so this is how I do it," Lauren said at the start of the video.
"For anyone that doesn’t have this app, you need to get this app. It’s ChatGPT. And I literally just type in at the top, hold on..." she said as she went on to show the app she used as a greenscreen of her video.
ChatGPT is a conversational AI-powered chatbot designed to answer questions and respond to queries in text form in a way that sounds natural and human.
The mum went on to explained how she asked the AI tool: "'Please can you give me a meal plan for five days with a budget of £50 in Aldi?' And it comes up with literally a whole meal plan, breakfast lunch and dinner."
She scrolled through the list of meals the app had given her, including porridge with banana and honey, tuna may sandwich with cucumber, spaghetti Bolognese, for the first days of meals, with Greek yoghurt as the option for a snack.
"It gives you the price of everything, it gives you like literally a breakdown of what you, what you can eat," she explained. "Like literally just type in what your budget is and how much you want to spend in Aldi, or whatever supermarket you want to go to."
But this wasn't all the AI tool could do. As Lauren reached the end of her week of meals, she found a shopping list of the things she'd need to follow the meal plan.
"You don’t have to write out your shopping list anymore," she said. "You can just type it in to ChatGPT, it will give you all of the information."
By adding a second request, Lauren said you could also get the instructions on what to cook, as well as instructions on meal prep, as well as the estimated calorie intake of each meal.
"It will give you all of your information that you need, and it’s literally at your finger tips," she explained. "You don’t have tO write anything down, you can just take your phone with you, it’s got all of the stuff.
"I don't know how more people don't know about this, but there you go."
One person commented: "done a meal prep using it, but didn't know you could get a breakdown of the costs."
"Might use it to give me ideas of what to cook and do videos for," another user wrote, while a third person commented: "Ooh this is amazing! we're a family of 7 so always looking for ways to help with our food shopping budgets!"
