A Farm that grows Pepsi Max, Icecream and Pizzas (Farmfoods)

Member Name: Vialdana

Product:	Farmfoods
Date:	06/07/09 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap for some items

Disadvantages: Quality can be a bit low in places

I'm a big fan of saving money where I can, and Freezer shops in general can be good, near us we now have just Farmfoods and Iceland though until recently we were lucky enough to have an independent frozen foods shop too.

Farmfoods is to me a bit of a weird shop, at first glance it seems a bit like a cheaper version of Iceland, until you look a little more closely. The layout is similar, glass lidded chest freezers full of food with a shelf or two above them so they can carry a bit of stuff that's not frozen. The prices are pretty good if you're after cheap, you can generally do it here, and for well known branded products it usually beats Tesco, Asda, Iceland and so on. The biggest difference is what it stocks. There aren't many well known branded products in there, the odd bag of Birdseye peas, Ross burgers and Findus lasagne. Most of the stuff though is branded, but not the sort of brands most of us are used to seeing regularly. Don't get me wrong, some of it is ok food, it's just that finding out which items are worth eating and which aren't can be quite a trial, and overall I find Iceland is generally better for the frozen stuff.

What Farmfoods IS good on in my opinion is the prices of their 2 litre bottles of Pepsi Max & Fanta, and their Cans of the same. Now I have a husband who doesn't drink tea or coffee, he's not big on squash either really, so he mostly drinks Water, Fresh Fruit Juice or Pepsi Max, so we do get through quite a lot of the stuff - specially as he takes it to work with him to help us keep costs down instead of buying cans at work.

The way we do it is this:

Go into Farmfoods, Load 10 bottles of Pepsi max, 5 of Fanta, and then a whole heap of cans into the trolley, then wander around and see if there's anything else we'd like to top the trolley up. There's usually a few odd bits - a multi pack of crisps, a tub of icecream, some chips, but really it IS the soft drinks that are so good for us. What makes it even better is that farm foods regularly give away leaflets with £2.50 off when you spend £25 and £5.00 off when you spend £50 vouchers, so we pretty much always go up to just over £25 even if that means throwing in an extra pack of cans or another bottle or two.

Let me break this down for you - 89p per 2 litre bottle of Pepsi Max, 59p per 2 litre bottle of Fanta, £2.50 for 12pk of Pepsi Max cans. If I were to buy those same products in somewhere like Asda or Tesco on a regular basis I would probably be looking at spending at least £1.50 for the 2 litre bottle of Pepsi Max, £1.50 for the 2 litre bottle of Fanta, and £4 for the 12pk of Pepsi Max cans. So just for 1 of each of those, I'm making a saving of over £3, with what we get through, it makes it affordable instead of unaffordable! I suppose I'm lucky as we've got the storage space to do it this way.

My overall view of Farmfoods - it's worth a look. Take time, try a few things, and if you buy any of the items I've mentioned above then you'll probably be quite happy. If you generally buy unbranded, then I'd say still worth a look, but you may go back to at least some of your normal products after a trial run, I guess that's up to your tastebuds to decide.

Summary: A freezer shop thats maybe cheaper on the branded than the unbranded products