18-07-2025
Eat Well For Less NZ couldn't have returned at a more appropriate time
Tara Ward watches the return of TVNZ's popular lifestyle series that teaches us how to eat healthier while saving money.
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Amid the all-you-can-eat buffet of depressing news this week, the revelation that the price of butter has doubled in a year had me crying into my dry toast. The cost of living crisis appears to be just normal life now, so even if you don't buy luxury food items like butter, cheese, eggs or milk, there's no better time for Eat Well For Less NZ to teach us how to make our hard-earned bucks go that little bit further.
Food educator Ganesh Raj and chef Michael Van de Elzen returned this week for a fifth season of encouraging New Zealand families to cook healthier meals while spending less money. In the first episode, the pair were fizzing to help solo mum Laura from Hamilton, whose busy lifestyle means she often turns to takeaways and convenience food. It's a tale as old as time: life is full on, everything is expensive, and sometimes you just want your kid to eat something so you can go to sleep and do it all again tomorrow.
But Raj and Van de Elzen are here to help. They watch Laura shop at the supermarket, even though they could just check her receipt to find out she spends $254 a week on groceries. 'She's buying a lot of ready-made foods,' they worry, pointing out Laura's shopping sins: chicken nuggets, chicken tenders and mac and cheese bites. The pair estimate a family of Laura's size should spend $260 a week to meet nutritional requirements, but it's the additional $176 a week on cafe food and takeaways they reckon is key to Laura saving thousands of dollars a year.
The pair proceed to make simple swaps to save Laura money and teach her how to cook a variety of fast and healthy meals, using leftovers and simple ingredients with value-for-money recipes that viewers at home will appreciate. It's a familiar format for Eat Well For Less, but what's apparent this season is that it's becoming harder to find significant savings at the supermarket.
Ditching processed cereal for a healthier home-made porridge saves $0.73 cents, while upsizing a satay tuna can frees up $0.64. The biggest saving of $6.24 comes from swapping spreadable butter for a budget brand of regular butter. Replacing a Maggi Spaghetti Bolognese packet with raw ingredients that need to be cooked from scratch saves a measly two cents.
Last time I wrote about Eat Well For Less NZ, I was steaming mad that a show sponsored by a supermarket (which was part of a duopoly making one million dollars profit a day) was telling a young family living in a sleepout about how to save money on their groceries. Eat Well for Less NZ is no longer sponsored by a supermarket, and the show feels more authentic for it (apart from the scene where Van de Elzen recommends Laura's daughter give up her Vanilla Cokes for a Sodastream drink – Sodastream being one of the show's partners).
And weirdly, while Raj and Van de Elzen tell Laura to stop buying unhealthy mince pies for lunch, there's a segment in the same episode where a panel of pie makers taste test a variety of mince and cheese pies (the winner was Dad's Pies Mince and Cheese, $2.15 per 100g).
But Eat Well For Less NZ isn't here to rage against the machine, although sometimes I wish it would. Imagine if instead of watching strangers eat pies, Raj and Van de Elzen popped into the Beehive to ask Nicola Willis what she's actually doing about the supermarket duopoly? In the same way that Location Location Location skims over the unfairness of the housing market, it feels tough to be placing all the onus solely on consumers to eat and budget better, without acknowledging that our choices aren't made in isolation.
Ultimately, Eat Well For Less NZ has its heart in the right place. Raj and Van de Elzen are full of energy and experience and reckon with the changes they suggest (mostly: don't spend money outside of your grocery shop), Laura's family can save over $9000 a year and live a healthier life while doing it. As food prices continue to rise, the show's practical advice will help many New Zealanders get through these challenging economic times – especially when the shopping receipts leave such a bitter aftertaste.
