Food

Recycling your food waste

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If you live in England, then from the 31st March 2026, your local authority will need to collect your food waste every week.

Now, you might be reading this and thinking ‘hang on, my local authority already collects my food waste every week’! And many do, including our local authority, Calderdale Council. Indeed, we’ve been able to recycle our cooked and uncooked food waste every week since we moved into our current house ten years ago.

But many don’t at present – City of York Council currently tell you to consider home composting. Which, to be fair, my parents have been doing for years. But this is limited to uncooked food waste, such as banana skins, eggshells and vegetable peelings. Better than nothing, and it means my parents have a good supply of compost, but all their cooked food waste just goes to landfill with their general waste.

The problem with food waste in landfill

Food waste in landfill is especially bad. When food rots in anaerobic environment (like a landfill site), it can be broken down by bacteria into Methane. Methane, as well as being the main component of the gas that we use for central heating boilers, is a greenhouse gas. If you think back to GCSE Science, you may know that Methane’s chemical symbol is CH4, which is four hydrogen atoms bonded to a carbon atom, so Methane contributes to carbon emissions. There was a landfill site not far from my grandparents’ house in East Yorkshire, and at night, you could see blue flames where the Methane released from the rubbish was being burnt off.

It’s also worth noting that local authorities have to pay landfill tax, which gets passed onto council tax payers. The less waste goes to landfill, the less landfill tax is paid, so local authorities also have a financial incentive to encourage recycling.

How food waste recycling works

Once your local authority rolls out food waste recycling, you’ll typically get three things:

  1. A large, kerbside food waste caddy
  2. A smaller kitchen food waste caddy
  3. A supply of food waste bags, to go in the kitchen caddy

You can then put all your food in the waste bag in your kitchen caddy. When the caddy is full, seal up the waste bag, and put it in your kerbside caddy. Then, leave the kerbside caddy out for emptying on your assigned recycling collection day. Finally, feel smug that you’re reducing your carbon footprint.

What happens to food waste when it’s recycled

I mentioned home composting earlier, and I’m sure my parents will carry on composting their uncooked food waste as they’re both keen gardeners. But from next April, or earlier, they should be able to have their cooked food waste recycled as well, and this will also be composted – just not by them at home.

Instead, the food waste typically goes into a big, industrial composting unit, to make compost on a commercial scale. Usually this involves heating the waste to around 70°C to speed up the process.

I mentioned Methane and how it’s the main component of the gas we use for cooking and heating. Some food waste may be converted to Methane gas deliberately, but in a controlled way that allows that gas to be collected as bio-gas. That can then be used like mains gas is, or burnt to generate electricity. I’m not a big fan of this, as it’s still a carbon-based fuel, but at least it’s being done in a controlled and sustainable way.

Getting all of England on board with food waste recycling will hopefully reduce the amount of waste going to landfill overall, reduce our carbon emissions, and provide sustainable sources of compost and bio-gas. It’s going to require cash-strapped local authorities to invest in recycling schemes, but the benefits to the environment are clear.

Haden 4-in-1 Air Fryer Microwave review

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A photo of the Haden Air Fryer Microwave

It may surprise you to hear that we haven’t owned an air fryer until recently. They’re really popular, especially as, when compared with a regular convection oven, they can cook food faster and more cheaply. The cost of living crisis, and huge increase in energy bills, led many people towards buying these and I know lots of people who swear by them.

Anyway, we do now own an air fryer, in the form of this Haden 4-in-1 Air Fryer Microwave (sponsored link). It’s a microwave that can also act as an air fryer, a grill, and a convection oven. You can buy one from Amazon for £150, but we picked up ours from the middle aisle of our local Lidl for £120 a few weeks ago.

So why haven’t we owned an air fryer until now?

There are two key reasons why it’s taken us this long to buy an air fryer. The first is a lack of space; when we had our kitchen renovated in 2022, we ended up with less work surface space (but more usable space overall). There wasn’t really any room to keep a large air fryer out on the work surface, but nor did we want to be lifting a big air fryer out of a cupboard every time we wanted to use it. We also didn’t want to buy a small air fryer that wouldn’t serve our needs.

The second is that Christine wasn’t convinced by them. For her, Jay Rayner’s 2022 article criticising them was proof that they weren’t worth it. Also, in the kitchen renovation we had two full-size convection ovens installed, so there wasn’t much need.

This air fryer microwave gets around the space issue, by replacing one of the appliances that was already taking up space on our kitchen work surface. Our previous microwave pre-dates our relationship (which is 16 years as of tomorrow), and was only a cheap own-brand model from Tesco. It had a bit of metal missing, and as a 800 watt model, wasn’t as fast as newer microwaves on the market. Replacing it with an air fryer microwave would give us a more useful appliance, in the same space.

What it’s like to use

The controls are relatively straightforward – more so than our previous microwave. It defaults to microwave mode, but you can press the ‘grill’, ‘air fryer’ or ‘micro+conv’ buttons first to change the mode. In air fryer and oven mode, you select the temperature in degrees Celsius, and then the cooking time, before pressing the big start button. There are shortcut buttons to quickly add 30 seconds, a minute or five minutes. There are also presets for pizza, chicken and popcorn.

It is quite noisy, and the fan sometimes stays on after cooking – especially in air fryer mode.

As a microwave, it works well; the extra hundred watts of power reducing cooking time compared to our old microwave. Meanwhile, to use it as an air fryer, you pop a metal stand on top of the glass microwave plate with your food on. That means the food still rotates on the stand in air fryer mode, like it would in a regular microwave. In this mode, it can use up to 1500 watts of power, which is equivalent to dedicated stand-alone models.

We’ve yet to use the grill and convection oven modes, so I can’t comment on those.

Compromises

Any multi-function device is going to have some compromises, when compared with dedicated appliances. Taking our Instant Pot for example: it can slow cook, but you have to set the cooking temperature higher. This Haden air fryer microwave works well as a microwave, as mentioned above, but as an air fryer it isn’t as good as a dedicated appliance would be. The cooking times are longer; indeed, generally it needs to cook food for about the same time as in an oven. It does save a bit of time, as there’s no need to pre-heat it like you would with a regular oven, and it’s heating a smaller space and so should use less energy. But it’s not significantly faster than an oven in the way that a dedicated air fryer would be.

The other compromise is when you want to use multiple functions sequentially. For example, we air fried some sausages, and then wanted to use the microwave function to steam some broccoli to serve as part of the same meal. Unfortunately, the glass microwave plate was still really hot, and so not suitable for using with the plastic microwave steamer basket. As our old microwave wasn’t fit to pass on to a charity shop, we salvaged its glass plate before taking it to be recycled; thankfully this fits the new microwave and so we can swap the plates around if one gets too warm.

Verdict

So, should you consider a combination air fryer and microwave? If you’re pushed for space, then sure – you get what would normally be several separate appliances combined into one neat package. And at £150, it may be cheaper than buying the appliances individually, if you’re starting from scratch.

However, if you have the space for a microwave and an air fryer, and the money to spare, you’ll probably get better results from a dedicated air fryer than this combination model – especially if you plan to use it regularly. That being said, this Haden model is very much at the budget end, and others are available which may offer better results. There’s a Toshiba model (sponsored link) which includes a steamer basket and currently sells for £170 (normally £250). Panasonic’s microwaves tend to be highly rated, so you could consider their 4-in-1 model (sponsored link), but it’s currently £360. That’s three times as much as what we paid for our Haden model.

The Potato Book and The Snack Hacker

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A photo of two hardback books. The one on the left is The Potato Book by Poppy Cooks, which is pink and features a photo of the author, a young blonde-haired woman, eating a chip, and The Snack Hacker by George Egg, which looks like a partially-opened sardine tin containing various snacks.

We’ve picked up a couple of new cookbooks recently: The Potato Book by Poppy Cooks (sponsored link) and The Snack Hacker by George Egg (sponsored link). And I’ll be honest: the main reason I’m writing about these new books is to break up what had been planned to be a full week’s worth of blog posts about smart home tech and firmware. As it was, we ended up buying a new car sooner than planned, and so some of those posts have been pushed back now. Anyway, on with the books.

The Potato Book

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned a book by Poppy O’Toole, better known as Poppy Cooks, as we also have her slow cooker book and use it regularly. Poppy is known as ‘the potato queen of Tiktok’, and so I guess it was only a matter of time before she published a book of potato recipes. Indeed, the cover of The Potato Book has a quote from Nigella Lawson describing her as ‘the high priestess of the potato’.

The Potato Book is split into eight themed chapters – mashed, roast, chips/wedges/hash browns, 15-hour potatoes, world classics, baked, potato salads, bakes and extra crispies. Usually the first recipe in each chapter sets out the basics, so the very first recipe in the book is how to make a classic mashed potato with salt, butter and double cream. The rest of the chapter is then variations on the basic recipe, such as hot honey and bacon mash.

Crucially, each recipe tells you what variety of potato to use for the best results. For example, the mashed potato recipes call for Maris Piper potatoes, but others use red-skinned or baby potato varieties.

We’ve only had the book a couple of weeks, and so far, we’ve just cooked her Swiss Rösti recipe. It wasn’t bad, but didn’t end up as crispy as we’d hoped.

I’m not going to spoil the final recipe in the book, but it’s worth marvelling at it.

The Snack Hacker

The second book was The Snack Hacker by George Egg. We’ve seen George’s Anarchist Cook show before (almost ten years ago, blimey) and this is in a similar vein – unconventional ways of preparing food.

Whilst some of the recipes are akin to traditional cookbooks, where you start with a set of raw ingredients, many take an existing snack food item and ‘hack’ it into something better. For example:

  • a Gregg’s Steak Bake, with some mustard, soured cream and spices to make a Stroganoff Steak Bake
  • a Breakfast McMuffin enhanced with mackerel fillets, curry sauce and mayonnaise to make a McKedgeree Muffin

It’s not just a book of recipes though. It’s also a memoir, covering George Egg’s career and childhood memories – especially the ones that are food-related. The illustrations and design are excellent – all done by Egg’s son, Jem Ward, with whom he pitched the idea for the book.

As yet I’ve not cooked any of the recipes, but I enjoyed reading it and will be trying a couple.

Cooking with a slow cooker

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A photo of our Instant Pot, which we use as a slow cooker. In front of it are several slow cooker cookbooks

Typically every other week, we have a slow-cooked meal at home. Along with sous vide cooking, which I wrote about last month, slow cooking a form of low temperature cooking where the food isn’t heated as much, but cooked for longer.

We use our Instant Pot as a slow cooker. During my blogging hiatus, I wrote on Medium why a multi-cooker is a good slow cooker. The gist of it being that you can use its timer features both to delay the start, and reduce the cooking temperature at the end to keep the food warm. However, the Instant Pot’s sauté mode is also helpful, if you need to pre-fry ingredients before starting the slow cooker timer. It’s not perfect, and there are some things that you need to bear in mind when using an Instant Pot as a slow cooker, as the temperature modes are not always comparable.

We used to have a dedicated slow cooker, but it was basic, and took up space that we needed for the more capable Instant Pot. The most basic models have one heat setting and turn on as soon as they’re plugged in, but many include multiple temperature settings and timers now.

Benefits of using a slow cooker

To me, there are several benefits of using a slow cooker over cooking meals using ‘traditional’ high heat methods.

The first of these is cost. Generally, it will cost less to run a slow cooker, even for several hours, than a hob or an oven for a shorter period. This is especially true for us, as we have solar panels – a slow cooker lets us do the majority of cooking during daylight hours with our free solar energy. In the winter, it’s dark when we get home after work and, even with a home battery, the amount of energy needed to run an oven means that we have to pay to use grid energy. I suspect that the cost of living crisis is one reason why slow cooking has become more popular in recent years.

Many slow cooker recipes simply require you to put the ingredients in the slow cooker, and leave it. They’re therefore quick to prepare, with no need to stir or keep an eye on a pan. You can put the ingredients in and turn the slow cooker on before leaving for work, and come home to a delicious meal that doesn’t require any work. If I’m working at home, I tend to put slow cooker meals on during my lunch break. Friends of mine who have issues with chronic fatigue find slow cooker recipes really beneficial, as it means they have something to eat at the end of the day which doesn’t require preparation, even when they’ve run out of spoons.

As with other low temperature cooking methods like sous vide, slow cooking is great for tenderising tougher cuts of meat like brisket. Coincidentally, these tend to be the cheaper cuts, and so you can save money this way too.

Not just soups and casseroles

There’s a perception that you can only use slow cookers for liquid-based meals like soups, stews, curries and casseroles. That’s not actually the case, and you can cook a wide variety of meals if you layer the ingredients correctly. In some cases, you essentially steam-cook ingredients that sit on top of others. Some recipes allow you to add rice, noodles or pasta shortly before the end, so that you can cook an entire meal in one pot.

That being said, one thing you are not going to get from using a slow cooker is anything crispy. That crispiness comes about thanks to the Maillard reaction, which usually requires cooking temperatures of at least 115°C. Even on their highest settings, slow cookers do not get as high as that. As such, some recipes call for ingredients like meat to be flash fried before or after slow cooking.

Slow cooker cookbooks

Last summer, I wrote about our go-to cookbooks, which included Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch book (sponsored link). He has also written a follow-up – Bored of Lunch – Even Easier (sponsored link) which I’ve included in the photo above. We don’t use this as often as the first book, but there’s a nice recipe for Butter Chicken in there which uses yoghurt rather than cream. We also picked up his latest book, 6 Ingredient Slow Cooker (sponsored link), last weekend. It looks good but we’ve not attempted any of the recipes in there yet.

The first slow cooker book we bought was Slow Cooker Heaven by Lorna Brash (sponsored link) which is published by The National Trust. There are some good recipes in there, but they’re quite involved – some of them require a lot of preparation prior to turning the slow cooker on, or ask you to make your own spice mixes from scratch.

More recently we’ve picked up Poppy Cooks – The Actually Delicious Slow Cooker cookbook (sponsored link) by Poppy O’Toole. Poppy is apparently the ‘potato queen of Tiktok’, and used to be a professional chef before ending up out of work due to the Covid lockdown in 2020. Her recipes are generally also quite simple, and a little more authentic. We’ve cooked quite a few recipes from this book recently – Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs probably being my favourite.

For us, slow cooking tends to work best if I’m either working at home, or if Christine is working on a weekend. In the latter case, she can be held up and may not finish until 7pm, in which case it’s great coming home knowing that dinner can be ready and on the table within a few minutes, and with little effort.

Sous vide cooking in an Instant Pot

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An Instant Pot Duo Plus set to sous vide mode with 29 hours and 49 minutes left to run

If you have one of the higher tier models of Instant Pot, then you may well have a ‘sous vide’ button on it. We’ve used sous vide cooking a few times with our Instant Pot Duo Plus to make tasty meals, as it’s relatively easy to do.

Sous vide is French for ‘under vacuum’. Essentially, to cook something using the sous vide method, you put it in a vacuum-sealed bag, and then put it in a heated water bath (also known as a bain marie) inside your Instant Pot. Depending on the recipe, this can be quite quick, or take many hours. In the photo example, we were cooking some beef brisket for 30 hours.

There’s some instructions for how to set your Instant Pot to sous vide here. As well as setting the cooking time, you also need to set the temperature, using the buttons or dial on the front of your Instant Pot. Once it’s going, we use a glass lid (sponsored link) that we bought separately rather than the pressure cooker lid, so that you can see inside.

Sous vide without an Instant Pot

The sous vide cooking technique has been around since 1974, when it was pioneered by a French chef (hence the name). But the need to keep the water at a constant temperature means that it’s a difficult technique for home cooks to adopt without specialist equipment. You need something that forms a feedback loop between a temperature gauge, and the heat source. Of course, you could probably have a thermometer inside the bain marie and constantly adjust the heat yourself, but this isn’t feasible for recipes that take a long time. Thankfully, many models of Instant Pot will provide this feedback loop as part of their sous vide feature, so you can set and leave it.

If you don’t have an Instant Pot, or you have a more basic model without a sous vide mode, Amazon will sell you a sous vide wand (sponsored link) for around £50 that you can pop in your bain marie. The wand will provide the heat and measure the temperature. More advanced models can be configured with a smartphone app – a friend has such a model. It lets you set how well-cooked you want a piece of steak, for example, and sets the time and temperature accordingly.

Vacuum sealing

The other aspect of sous vide cooking is that you should vacuum seal your food, before it goes in the bain marie. We bought our vacuum sealer from the middle aisle of Lidl, of all places – in fact, it was a Lidl in France, and so we have to use a UK plug adaptor with it. Again, if you need a vacuum sealer, Amazon will sell you one for around £23 (sponsored link), and expect to pay £11-£15 for two rolls of bags.

If you don’t want to buy one, then you may get away with just a regular plastic food bag with as much air squeezed out of it as possible.

What we’ve cooked using sous vide

I’m mentioned that we’ve cooked beef brisket using the sous vide technique, and indeed we’ve done so more than once. Brisket contains a lot of connective tissue, and so you need to use slower cooking methods to allow this tissue to break down. Sous vide is perfect for this, and after 30 hours, you’ll end up with a very meaty piece of meat.

We’ve also done duck confit this way, which then went into a cassoulet. Again, this was a long and slow recipe, taking around 12 hours with the cooking temperature set to 75° C.

It’s worth noting that, whilst you can cook steak using the sous vide method, you won’t get any browning on the outside. If this is something you want, then you’ll still need to flash fry the meat at a higher heat after it’s come out of the bain marie.

In summary, sous vide cooking, whilst requiring some forward planning and investing in the correct equipment, is also relatively easy. You can prepare some really tasty food ahead of time, and have it cook slowly at a regulated temperature. Plus, because the food is vacuum sealed, it’s a less messy way of cooking too. We don’t do it very often, but the few times we have done it have always been worth it.

A trip to the Company Shop

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A screenshot of the home page of the Company Shop web site

Shortly before Christmas, I popped in to the Company Shop in Bradford, and picked up a basket of groceries for only £8.

Company Shop is a surplus supermarket, and sells discounted groceries sourced from excess stock from other supermarkets. Inside, you’ll see some branded products, and also own-label products from the likes of Ocado, Lidl, Tesco and Asda. Stock ends up at the Company Shop either because mainstream supermarkets have over-ordered, or because they have large quantities of stock which is very close to its use by date.

Consequently, what’s on offer can vary widely from day to day. Most fresh produce tends to be short-dated, so ideally things that need to be cooked and/or eaten the same day. So it’s handy to pop in on a day when you can be open-minded about what to cook for dinner that day. However, it’s not a supermarket where you can rely on a fixed shopping list. For example, there was plenty of cheese on sale when I went, but it was small blocks of fancy cheese with added fruit and not plain cheddar for cooking with.

Other reasons why stock makes it to the Company Shop include:

  • The packaging is slightly damaged, so expect to see plenty of dented cans of things. If that doesn’t bother you, then you can pick up some real bargains.
  • Products from failed, missed or returned deliveries.

Some food is sold frozen, and there are also homewares on offer as well as food.

Locations

There are currently 13 Company Shop outlets across England and Scotland. The majority of these are across the north of England and the midlands, as, like Greggs Outlets, they’re concentrated in areas with low incomes. There isn’t a Company Shop in London, for example, and the only store in the south is in Southampton. Back in November, a Metro reporter went to the Southampton store and wrote about her experience.

Company Shop membership

As with Mordor and Costco, one does not simply walk into the Company Shop. You need to be a member, and, like Costco, there are eligibility requirements. I was able to join through my employer, and many public sector and charity workers should be eligible. You can also join if you are in receipt of certain means-tested benefits, such as Universal Credit. The whole ethos of Company Shop is about widening access to groceries to those from low incomes, so unlike Costco, membership is free.

Members can bring a limited number of family and friends along with them, and can share their membership with up to two other people who do not necessarily need to meet the eligibility criteria.

On my visit, I picked up two boxes of my usual breakfast cereal, two litres of long-life lactose free milk (good until April), some onions, oranges and potatoes, some short-dated crisps and some dishwasher rinse aid. Like I said, all that came to around £8 – indeed, the crisps were 10p for a bag of six.

Whilst we’re a fairly high income household, I’m sure we’ll drop in to the Company Shop every now and again when we’re in the area with the car. We picked up some genuine bargains there, and, most importantly, all the food got used. And that’s better than it all going to waste.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook

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The cover of the Sad Bastard Cookbook

According to a bit of pseudoscience commissioned twenty years ago by a now defunct satellite holiday channel, today is ‘Blue Monday‘ and therefore the most depressing day of the year. It’s also depressing this year specifically for another reason. With this in mind, today’s blog post is about the Sad Bastard Cookbook, which has recipes for when you need to eat but don’t have the spoons to cook something.

If you want to buy the Sad Bastard Cookbook as an actual, physical paperback, here’s the link to buy it on Amazon (sponsored link). But you don’t need to pay for it – there’s an official free PDF download.

Low effort recipes

The whole idea of the Sad Bastard Cookbook is that the recipes require minimal effort, and generally use ingredients that don’t go out of date at short notice. As an example, the first three sections focus on instant noodles (ramen), starting with simply boiling water for the ramen and then eating them. Many recipes also have a ‘bottom-tier’, ‘mid-tier’ and ‘God-tier’, depending on how you’re feeling and what extra ingredients you have. One of these is ‘kinda like Pad Thai’, which uses rice noodles, peanut butter and sweet chilli sauce, and “tastes kinda like you’d imagine Pad Thai sauce would taste if you’ve never had Pad Thai before”.

Other recipes include ‘pasta in a rice cooker’ and ‘can of soup’.

Core ingredients

Here’s the bit of the book that is probably most useful – the ‘Core ingredients to keep in your kitchen’ section. There are lots of good suggestions for basic and long-life ingredients to buy, and keep on hand for times when you don’t feel like cooking but need to eat something. Even if you’re the sort of person who can usually cook something delicious, no matter how you’re feeling, it’s a really useful list of what to have on hand. I wish that past me had this for times when I’ve lived on my own, as it would’ve given me some fallback ideas for meals.

Like I said, the book is available as a free PDF – even if your mental health is fine, I strongly recommend reading it. You’ll pick up some useful hints for times when you’re late home and tired, or realise that you’re hungry at 10pm on a Sunday when the shops are all shut.

Is Five Guys sustainable in the UK in the long term?

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A photo of the Bradford branch of Five Guys, before it was open.

Last week, I ended up at a Five Guys Burgers & Fries again. Whilst I wouldn’t describe myself as a Five Guys regular, I’ve eaten at several of their restaurants over the years. And usually it’s because I’m hungry and it happens to be the least-worst option that’s available.

Ten years ago, there were almost no Five Guys restaurants around in the UK (the first restaurant in London opened in 2013). Now, there are 174 restaurants in the UK, of which 48 are in London. Leeds has four – indeed, what prompted this blog post was that I was eating in the new Five Guys location on the top floor of the Trinity Leeds shopping centre, and it’s a literal stone’s throw away from their existing Duncan Street restaurant. I mean it – you could stand on the roof of one, and throw a stone to the other – they’re that close to each other.

My concern is that it’s growing rapidly, and that the owners and/or franchisees are following an overly-rigid operating model. I’m going to cite two case studies as evidence.

Patisserie Valerie

Firstly, let’s look at another chain restaurant that grew rapidly before suddenly contracting: Patisserie Valerie. Founded in the 1920s, it had eight shops in 2006 and 192 a little over ten years later. It turned out that, underneath that massive growth, was (alleged) financial fraud, and its auditors were fined over £2m for not spotting the errors in the company’s accounts. Now, Patisserie Valerie is back down to 10 shops, with none in the North of England; I walked past the one in Leeds which seems to have closed recently, judging by the Christmas decorations that were still in the window. However, its cakes are now available to buy at larger Sainsbury’s supermarkets.

Now, I’m in no way alleging fraudulent accounting practices at Five Guys, but its growth in the UK followed a similar pattern to Patisserie Valerie. Has Five Guys grown too fast, too quickly?

Five Guys in Bradford

There is (at least) one place where Five Guys opened, and then closed a restaurant in the UK: Bradford. And I want to use it as a case study because I think it’s a good example of where Five Guys didn’t adjust their offering to suit a local market.

Around about one third of Bradford’s population is Muslim. Muslims, in the main, don’t drink alcohol, and will only eat halal meat. Other chains, like KFC, Nando’s and Subway, are conscious of this, and so you’ll often find outlets from these chains will serve halal meat in their restaurants in places like Bradford. Five Guys didn’t.

Five Guys also serves alcohol. Well, a small selection of lager. Like I said, I wouldn’t consider myself a regular customer of Five Guys but I have never seen anyone buy lager from there. Some muslims will not enter an establishment that serves alcohol, so again, you’re alienating a significant portion of your customer base to sell a product that, anecdotally, not many people buy anyway.

It’s also worth noting that Bradford is not a particularly well-off area, and Five Guys is expensive compared to, say, McDonalds. A similar meal at Five Guys typically costs three times more than at McDonalds. I accept that the quality at Five Guys is much better, and the ingredients are fresher, but every time I have been I’ve always felt like I’ve been fleeced.

If you’re wondering, the outlet where Five Guys used to be in Bradford is now a branch of Metro Bank. Also, ironically, it used to be opposite a Patisserie Valerie, which itself is now a Pret a Manger.

Nuts about

Besides the two case studies, there’s also Five Guys’ attitude to nuts. According to this meta analysis, about 4% of people in Europe report having some kind of nut allergy – so, one in every 25 people. Five Guys cooks all of its fries in peanut oil, and used to have open bags of peanuts in its restaurants. Now, whilst there will be some variation in the severity of peoples’ nut allergies, for some, they literally cannot be in the same room as nuts.

I’m sure that the decision to use peanut oil is related to the fries tasting better that way. But that decision has to be balanced against alienating well over an estimated 2 million Brits who self-report having a nut allergy (assuming the 4% prevalence).

Every Five Guys is basically the same

With the exception of the Five Guys in York city centre, which is in an old building on Low Petergate, every other Five Guys is basically the same. There’s no variation on decor, and the menu is the same everywhere too. Now that’s probably good for consistency, but it’s also, well, boring.

Indeed, I mention the Five Guys in York because we went there on Boxing Day in 2023. Inside, however, you would not know it was Boxing Day, because there was no attempt to make it feel like Christmas. Pretty much every other restaurant will have got out their Christmas decorations, and maybe even added some special items to their menu for a limited time. Not Five Guys. It’s the same menu all year round. And it’s a very limited menu – basically just burgers and hotdogs. Now, I’ve seen enough episodes of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares to know that having a limited menu can be an advantage (doing a few things well), but could they expand it a bit?

Sure, you can have different toppings on your burger each time, or a different flavour milkshake. And there’s the Coke Freestyle machines, which provide one of the few ways of getting Mezzo Mix in the UK. But there’s only so many times you can read a scanned copy of the Nantucket Business Monthly April 2009’s review of their Five Guys outlet on the wall.

What I think Five Guys needs to do

So, to summarise:

  • Five Guys needs to give individual store managers or franchisees some freedom to adapt the offering for local markets – e.g. halal meat or not serving alcohol.
  • Add a few more items to the menu. Maybe offer chicken as well as beef?
  • Offer limited edition items related to events like Christmas.
  • Are the magazine articles on the walls really necessary now? Many of them are regional US magazines for places some Brits may have never even heard of, and it seems kind-of desperate. Consider taking these down, or limiting them to British magazines.
  • Consider their pricing, and whether they need to lower prices in areas where the local population has lower disposable incomes.
  • Consider whether they can reduce their use of nuts in their restaurants.

Overall, Five Guys feels like the sort of place where a very rigid concept has happened to have done well, and so it’s being recreated without any regard for local variations. And, in the long term, I just don’t think it’s sustainable.

Shopmium – cashback on grocery shopping

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A screenshot of the Shopmium app

If you fancy small discounts on your grocery shopping each week, you could give Shopmium a try. It’s a cashback app, where if you buy certain promoted products, and upload a receipt, you’ll get some of the cost back.

I’ve used Shopmium and similar apps for a while. There used to be one called Shopitize, that worked in the same way, but it seems to have closed down (although its web site is still live). There’s also CheckoutSmart and GreenJinn, which work in a similar way, although to date I’ve never found anything in CheckoutSmart that I’ve actually wanted to buy. GreenJinn focuses on sustainable and/or vegan products, but also sometimes offers cashback on supermarket own-brand fruit and veg. Of the three, I have the most success with Shopmium.

Once you’ve signed up to Shopmium, you’ll need to download their app. At the top of the app, you can filter it by supermarket; some cashback offers are only valid at certain supermarkets. Once you’ve bought an eligible item, you scan the barcode, and upload a receipt. If it’s approved, then your account is credited with cashback.

Shopmium used to pay out for each individual cashback claim, but now you need to accumulate a minimum of £10 of claims before you can be paid. The money is sent by BACS to your bank account.

Once you’ve made 10 claims, you move up to ‘Gold’ status in Shopmium. This offers extra benefits, like a treat on your birthday and being able to see offers before they’re live, but to maintain your status you need to make at least one cashback claim every month. I’ve been a gold member for a couple of months, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to maintain it. A lot of the products on offer are things that I would never buy. And sometimes, even with the cashback, there will be supermarket own brands that are cheaper. Oh, and (for the most part) it only works at Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Waitrose and Co-Op. We tend to do the majority of our shopping at Lidl, and some offers aren’t valid there.

If you fancy trying Shopmium, you can sign up with my referral code CI54t4. I believe this gets you a free gift, which looks to be a bag of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk buttons.

Patronage! At the Costco

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A screenshot of the Costco web site showing their store finder. There's a map with pins showing the location of their warehouses across northern England

Something that has been on my to-do list for a while was to join Costco, the American ‘big box’ members-only wholesale retailer where you can buy items cheaply in bulk. Although primarily aimed at trade buyers, individuals belonging to some professions can also join their membership scheme. And, last week, I finally got around to joining after they visited my workplace.

Costco isn’t particularly new to UK, with the first of their warehouses opening here in the mid-1990s. Our local warehouses are in Leeds (near Crown Point), and just off the M60 near Oldham. We went to the Leeds one.

Inside a Costco warehouse

Costco calls its stores ‘warehouses’ and it’s an apt description. It’s a bit like the warehouse bit at the end of Ikea, where what you need is on pallets, and the shelving goes way up beyond customers’ reach to store excess stock. It had a similar feel to the hypermarkets that you get in France such as Auchan and Grand Casino, albeit with much higher shelving.

As well as shelves full of products, services offered in store include a butcher’s, an optician’s, a takeaway food stall, and tire fitting for your car. There’s also usually a fuel station, offering discounted fuel – again, for members only.

Almost everything is available in much larger quantities than you would expect at a standard supermarket. Either because they’re sold as multipacks, or just in bigger packaging. All prices are displayed without VAT added; where VAT applies, the VAT inclusive price is written in smaller lettering. After all, Costco is primarily a wholesaler selling to businesses.

Range

What you probably won’t find is a huge range of products. Costco generally sells one brand for each item, and, as it’s aimed at traders, this tends to be branded items. This means that, even with a bulk discount, items may not always be cheaper than supermarket own brands. That being said, Costco does offer its Kirkwood brand for some items like packaged meat and toilet rolls.

Being an American supermarket, some of the meat on sale is imported from the USA. American meat isn’t commonly sold in UK supermarkets and it’s the first time I’ve knowingly seen it on sale here. Generally, wherever American meat is on offer, there will be British meat alongside. American meat is cheaper, but also tends to come in much larger quantities. I have to say that I thought that the British meat looked to be better quality. I also have my issues with how animals are reared on American farms, as their welfare standards aren’t comparable with Britain and Europe.

Some of the things we bought on our first visit included 40 rolls of toilet paper (actually 10 packs of 4 rolls), huge bottles of Heinz ketchup and 24 can pallets of Cherry Pepsi Max and Orangina.

Costco Membership

You have to be a member to shop at Costco, either online or in store. Anyone can register and pay for an online account, but if you’re an individual, there are eligibility criteria that you need to meet to be able to shop in store. Current prices are here; including VAT, a standard individual membership is around £34 per year and an Executive membership is around £75. Executive members get an additional 2% off their Costco spending, so if you go regularly, it could work out cheaper. I reckon you would need to spend an average of around £170 per month at Costco for it to be worthwhile.

It’s worth noting that the membership cards are not supposed to be transferable, so the named person needs to be there to enter the store. As standard, you get a card for yourself, and a second card for a spouse (so both Christine and I have one each). You can then add one additional person to your account; this costs extra but would be less than a separate individual membership. Besides cardholders, members can bring a maximum of two guests with them on a shopping trip. I suspect that we’ll be offering to bring friends with us in future, so that we can buy in bulk and then split up our purchases later. If you’re a real-life friend of mine and you’re reading this, yes, that means you – contact me and we’ll try to arrange something.

In terms of eligibility, I qualify as I work in the education industry, and Christine works in healthcare so she qualifies too.

Prices

The prices are pretty good. For example, the aforementioned 24 can pallet of Cherry Pepsi Max was £8.38 including VAT (£6.99 without). Tesco sells an equivalent quantity for £10.50 and although I have seen offers as low as £8 from time to time, it’s a good price. They also don’t have ‘multipack can, not to be sold separately’ written across the top.

Vanish stain remover cost us £11.38 (£9.49 excluding VAT) for 1.9 kg; Tesco want £11.25 for a smaller 1.35 kg box. And we got two 880g bottles of Heinz Tomato Ketchup for £6.99 (VAT exempt), instead of £4.50 from Tesco.

But, like I said, most products are branded. We didn’t buy any herbs or spices because we could get them much cheaper at one of our local Asian supermarkets, and I can get own-brand cereal much cheaper at Lidl. Also, there were some things that we didn’t buy because of the quantities. For example, you can’t just buy one tin of kidney beans, you have to buy at least 24. Which is great if you’re regularly cooking chilli con carne, but otherwise is a lot of food to have to store. We’re lucky that we have a cellar and can put bulky items there until needed, but if you don’t have lots of storage, this could be a problem.

So, should you consider a Costco membership? If you can shop often enough to make the membership cost worth it, sure. Individual membership works out at around £3 per month and we saved more than that in one visit, although you also need to factor in travel costs.