‘Good things come to those who wait’ - not our words, but the words of that Guinness advert with the old surfer guy and the crazy white horses. As ever, the Guinness advert was right.

If you’ve ever gone on a booze run just before the supermarket is about to close you may have noticed a couple of shelves worth of food covered in brightly coloured ‘reduced’ stickers.

Thanks to the supermarket’s reluctance to either sell you food that has gone past its sell by date or to throw away perfectly good (and profitable) produce, they slash their prices on all sorts of food at the end of the day.

The most common foods you’ll find on the reduced shelves are those with relatively short shelf-lives such as meat, fish and fresh veg.

If you time it right (we’ve got it down to a fine art) you can have first pick of the reduced items - where you will often find relatively high quality food at own-brand (or lower) prices.

A couple of tips:

• If there is a lot of meat or fish at a really good price, why not bulk buy? If you take it home and freeze it immediately it will last for months. We recently found a number of good quality rump steaks in Sainsbury’s for under £2 each.

• If reduced vegetables are starting to look a bit old or not especially appetising, use them to make a soup - once they are cooked and blended down they will taste no different to more expensive, fresh veg.

[Image: johnmcga]

Tags: Student food , Saving money , Saving tips , Frugal living tips