Key takeaways
- A reasonable range for one adult cooking at home is €30–€50 per week, depending heavily on where in Europe you live.
- Per-person costs drop as households grow — cooking for one is the most expensive way to eat.
- If you’re overspending, the cause is usually waste, unplanned top-up shops and convenience premiums — not the shelf price of food.
- A realistic savings target is 20–35%, without eating less or worse.
If you’ve ever stood at a checkout and wondered whether you’re spending a normal amount on food, you’re asking a useful question. Knowing where you sit relative to a sensible benchmark tells you whether you have a real problem or just a vague anxiety about money — and those need very different responses.
The short answer
For a single adult cooking most meals at home, a reasonable range across most of Europe is €30 to €50 per week, or roughly €130 to €215 a month.
That’s a wide range because Europe is not one market. The same shopping basket varies by more than double between the cheapest and most expensive countries in the EU.
Roughly, per person per week:
- Central & Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania): €22–€35
- Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece): €28–€45
- Western Europe (France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland): €35–€55
- Nordics & Switzerland: €50–€80
These assume you cook most meals at home, buy mostly supermarket own-brand, and eat a normal mixed diet. They exclude alcohol and eating out.
Two adjustments: cities run 10–20% above the national figure, and shopping primarily at discount chains (Lidl, Aldi, Biedronka, Mercadona) typically lands you in the lower third of your band.
Household size changes everything
Per-person costs fall significantly as households grow. Rough Western European midpoints, per person per week:
- One adult: €38
- Two adults: €32 each
- Two adults, one child: €28 each
- Two adults, two children: €26 each
Bulk pricing finally applies because a household of four actually finishes the large tub. One onion serves four as easily as one. And leftovers become a smaller share of what’s cooked, so less gets stranded.
The practical implication: cooking for one is, per head, the most expensive way to eat. If that’s you and you’re spending more than a friend with a family, you’re not being careless — you’re facing worse arithmetic. The freezer is your substitute for household scale: cook at volume, eat at your own pace.
The number that actually tells you something
National averages can’t tell you whether your spending is reasonable. A better diagnostic is cost per portion — what a single serving of a food actually costs you.
Take the price per kilogram from the shelf label (legally required to be displayed in the EU and UK, usually in small grey type) and multiply by your portion size in kilos.
- A kilo of dried lentils at €2.40, at an 80g portion: €0.19 per portion
- A kilo of chicken breast at €9.00, at a 150g portion: €1.35 per portion
Both fill the protein role in a dinner. One costs seven times the other.
Here’s what a portion costs across common foods, using mid-range European own-brand prices:
Cheap end (under €0.30 a portion): dried pasta (€0.12), onions (€0.12), rice (€0.13), carrots (€0.13), dried chickpeas (€0.18), dried lentils (€0.19), frozen mixed vegetables (€0.24), potatoes (€0.28).
Middle (€0.30–€1.00): tinned tomatoes (€0.36), bagged salad (€0.38), eggs (€0.50 for two), tinned sardines (€0.77), chicken thighs (€0.94), frozen white fish (€0.98).
Expensive end (over €1.00): fresh berries (€1.20), chicken breast (€1.35), beef mince (€1.43), beef steak (€3.96).
A dinner built from the cheap column — lentils, rice, onion, carrot, tinned tomato — comes to roughly €0.70 a portion. A dinner of chicken breast, bagged salad and peppers comes to roughly €2.15. Both are perfectly good dinners. The difference isn’t quality — it’s which items you reached for.
Where the money actually leaks
If you’re above your regional band, the cause is usually not the shelf price of what you buy. Household food spending leaks in three places:
Waste. European households throw away somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of what they buy — and it’s weighted toward expensive items. Nobody bins dried pasta. What dies in the fridge is the chicken, the bagged salad, the herbs bought for six leaves.
Unplanned shopping. The small mid-week top-up is the most expensive habit in food budgeting because each trip feels trivial. Three €18 top-ups a week is over €200 a month that never registered as “doing a shop.”
Convenience premiums. Grated cheese, diced onion, washed salad, marinated meat — each carries a labour charge of 30–100% over the plain version. Fine as a considered choice; most households pay it on ten items and have decided on none of them.
A five-minute diagnostic
Find your most recent supermarket receipt. Mark each line:
- P — planned, for a specific meal
- U — unplanned, went in because you saw it
- C — convenience version of something you could have bought plainer
Add up the U and C lines. That total is the portion of your bill that responds to decisions rather than prices. For most people it’s between a fifth and a third of the shop — and seeing your actual number is more motivating than any national average.
What’s realistic to change
A reasonable target is 20–35% reduction through meal planning, shopping once a week, and cutting waste — with roughly an hour of planning overhead a week and no reduction in how well you eat.
The extreme plans (50%+ savings on a handful of cheap staples) work on paper and fail in practice: they require near-perfect compliance, and breaking them once feels like failing entirely. A system with slack in it saves less per week and far more per year, because it survives the weeks that don’t go to plan.
The full system — the ten-ingredient core, the two-week rotation, the batch-cooking method, and what to do when the plan breaks — is in The €30 Week, a short practical ebook.
The €30 Week 