A Manchester YouTuber Shares The Real Tricks Of Getting By

Food prices keep rising, even when the headlines say inflation is “down”, so what does getting by actually look like day to day? We sit down with Samantha, a Manchester YouTuber behind the channel Trying to Get By, who shares the practical systems that help her household stay afloat. Surplus food schemes, freezer routines, price tracking, and the kind of honest compromises that make vegan and vegetarian eating sustainable on a tight budget.

We also dig into the bigger picture behind the weekly shop. Samantha explains how she uses tools like Olio and Too Good To Go to reduce food waste, why yellow sticker sections can be a lifeline, and how loyalty cards and app-only vouchers create a digital divide. Along the way we talk about ultra-processed food debates, the real cost of “ethical” alternatives, and the surprisingly powerful idea of keeping a top-20 price list on your phone so you can spot a fake bargain in seconds.

Then we zoom out to what we are seeing across The Bread and Butter Thing community food clubs. When some households have £0 to £25 a month for food, “saving money” is not the only metric that matters. We share member survey insights that show a growing split between those who save and those who simply eat better, and why “stable” has become a new, sobering goal in the UK cost of living crisis.

Transcript

Welcome And What We Do

SPEAKER_02 0:13

Hello and welcome back to a slice of bread and butter with me, Vic, and Mark, who are from the Bread and Butter Thing.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

We run a network of mobile food clubs that take surplus food from supermarkets, farms and factories. We take it straight into communities where families are struggling to get by.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Yeah, for less than a tenner, our members get bags packed with fruit, veg, fridge food, and cupboard staples. It's a weekly shop that helps stretch the budget and takes some of the pressure off.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

And our members are at the heart of everything we do. They turn food into friendship and neighbours into community, and that's what makes

Meet Samantha From Manchester

SPEAKER_01 0:40

us tick.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

And today it's our very own YouTuber, Samantha.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Indeed.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

I'm not going to tell you how old I am.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

I'm not going to guess either.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

No, good. Live in Manchester and married, got a daughter, and three grandbabies. I work in a nursery in a variety of different roles, and my husband works for a sound and lighting

Vegan Shopping And Milk Debates

SPEAKER_00 1:15

company.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

How did you find bread and butter?

SPEAKER_00 1:17

I was walking the dogs and I kept seeing the van outside the scout hut near me and thinking, what on earth is this thing? Why is it here? And didn't kept forgetting to look it up and then eventually looked it up online and was like, oh, this is useful. This is something I could I could use as a resource because I'd been using things like Oleo.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

And oh, what's the other one called? Good to go. Too good to go. Like I say, I looked up you guys and was like, I'm gonna go for one of these. I'm gonna see what it's like, see if it's worth it. And you gave the option for vegetarian options as well, which is great. So you're veggie. I'm vegan. Husband's veggie.

unknown 1:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

And that's a tricky combo. Well, I'm 95% vegan. I occasionally slip up with cheese. But I've got I figured 95% is better than no percent.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Yeah, well, I I'm with you. I've been veggie for too long to remember. And I keep dipping in and out of veganism and just find it too hard because I miss my dairy.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Yeah. I could milk, I don't care. And I quite like the soy milk. I started off with the sweetened soy milk and then went to the unsweetened soy milk, and I found the unsweet. I got used to, you know, like when you used to have sugar in your tea.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah, I feel we're gonna go. And then you went to sweetened. I've got to taste with this one, Samantha. But I've got I've got to share with you. I I did hazelnut milk for a while. Right. But it's really expensive. Yes. And it's not great for the environment either.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Not as much, no.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

And I and I look at it and go, I'm trying to do this for the right reasons. Yeah. It doesn't, it's not saving me any money because it costs a couple. Yeah, it does. And actually, environmentally, it's not doing anybody any favours. So I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing here. And yeah, it was the only one I've I kind of could tolerate.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Yeah. Yeah. So the soy milk I buy is Tesco's own, 79p. Yeah. And that's that's fine.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

I don't want to tell you what I was paying for the eggs.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Oh, I can imagine. Yeah, because it'd be brandy prices as well.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

But I'll tell you what, he made bloody gorgeous porridge though.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

I can imagine, yeah. I can imagine it's really nice. So I I did over to the milk, no problem. Eggs doesn't really fuss me. I'm not that bothered about eggs.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Let's stick on the milk a sec, because the the other argument with it as well is is it not ultra processed?

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Well, depends on how you think about it. What you know is dairy milk's ultra processed in my mind, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 3:26

I'm with you, but I I suppose I wouldn't mind unpasteurised, which is provocative in itself. Which I get that's that's yeah. But but my kind of definition of ultra-processed is if you can't do it in your kitchen as a process, it's ultra processed.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

You can do soy milk in your kitchen.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Oh, go on, educate me then.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

You just need the right machine to do it. You can buy machines, you can buy nut milk blenders and make your own nut milk. And oat milk's quite easy to do at home as well. That just that just is literally in your normal blender. Yeah. You strain it.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Now, can I just tell you that is the most dull porridge I've had? Oat milk and okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Oat milk and oats. Yeah.

unknown 4:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Yeah, you need lots of extras to go on top of that.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Right, so you're doing this to grab a bargain?

Saving Money By Fighting Food Waste

SPEAKER_00 4:13

I'm doing it for budget reasons and also I hate food waste. That's why I use Oleo as well, because I can't stand food waste. I bought a small chest freezer, and I think over the past three years that I've been using Oleo, I've probably physically bought less than 20 bread products in that time.

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Because you're getting it all from there.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Because I get it all from there.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah. So my husband's sandwich bread sorted. Normally I get like five loaves, and I'm like, right, that's the next three weeks, three, four, five weeks worth of sandwiches sorted.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Anyway, we're doing it to save money, doing it to save the environment.

YouTube Hauls And Side Income

SPEAKER_01 4:54

You talk about us on YouTube as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

I do, yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

So are you are you a YouTuber?

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Sort of. I've got my own channel. It's called Trying to Get By. I've been doing it since 2021-ish, 22. I've got about at the moment 3,000 something subscribers. That's pretty cool. So my regular videos that I put out are anytime I do a bread and butter thing haul, I always do a video showing what I've got and what my plans are for it and encouraging people to come onto your website and go, come near me when you need it to. And I have had a few people say to me that they found it and are so glad that they know about it. Um, I always do a haul at the end of the month of everything I've bought. So basically, if I go shopping and buy food, I take a video of it and then compile it all together at the end of the month and put out a video showing how much we've spent for that month, resources that I use. So I do surveys on online.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Paid surveys.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Paid surveys online, ones where you get points, and then you can come and vote the points to vouchers. Often get lots of emails of people saying, Where are your vouchers? Where are these surveys? And I'll send out a big list of where I've got them from. Then I'll show my cooking and different things that I've made, maybe a week on a budget, or eating out of the cupboard, even using Chat GPT to make food. So, you know, type in what you've got on your oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah, it worked really well. So you type in what you've got, how many meals you want to make, what your likes and dislikes are, and it'll generate a menu for you for however many days you tell it to. Or if you say, you know, I've got three peppers and a dodgy looking onion, what can I do? It'll come up with a plan for you. I did a year of soups where I did made a different soup every week for a year and put those out.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

Is soup not a bit dull though?

SPEAKER_00 6:43

No, soup's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I suppose it is with a chest freezer full of bread.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Yeah, you've got plenty of things to dunk. And soup's great because we often, with the bread and butter thing, get loads of, especially after Christmas, parsnips, carrots.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

Yeah, yeah, that's true. They're a good base, really, aren't they?

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Yeah, yeah. So YouTube and doing surveys, busy. Do you work as well?

SPEAKER_00 7:05

I do, I work in a nursery. I'm classes bank staff, so I go in when I'm needed. Um, husband works full-time, but I'm I'm probably three days a week. Wednesdays are my YouTube day.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Fridays are my podcast day.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Yeah, you've got to schedule it in. If you don't schedule it in, it doesn't get done.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

I'm assuming you don't make any money off it.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

I do make a little bit. Yeah. Took me a while. You have to get a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch time hours. I'm not even getting enough to pay for my food bills yet, but if I could get enough subscribers and enough viewers where the money I made off YouTube paid for my food bill each month, that is a success. The main thing that I really, really like about it is when people comment on the video and say, thanks for that, it really helped, or you've introduced me to a new thing, such as the bread and butter thing, and it's really going to help me out. It's the community I like.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

So you you're a good savvy shopper, you know how to make a few quid doing this and that as well to

Price Rises After Covid Reality

SPEAKER_01 8:02

get by. So, what do you think are the big things that have really changed over, I don't know, post-COVID?

SPEAKER_00 8:09

It's prices of basic items that have gone up. I mean, we were talking about my soy milk. My soy milk was 50p, sort of like end of last year, and it's gone up to 79p. And people go, Oh, that's not much, that's not much. But if you work it out percentage-wise, that's a heck of a lot.

unknown 8:24

It is.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

You things like you downgrade your coffee from the main brand coffee to the not Sunane brand coffee.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

So everything you're talking about is circa 50% increase.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

In it in let's say the last six months.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Yeah, definitely. So for me and my husband, we've managed over the past three years to keep our food bill per month under £100.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

And just in this past, what are we on end of May? Five months, I've don't think I've had, even when I've been using vouchers, I don't think I have had one month that has been under a hundred pounds yet.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

And that's with all the savvy things that you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

Yeah. But I have a feeling by the end of this year, unless I get a really good windfall of vouchers, because sometimes they do prize draws and you might win, you might win some, I don't think we're gonna get the target of £100, under £100 this year at all.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Wow. Okay, I'm gonna ask you for top tips.

Practical Tips To Cut Food Bills

SPEAKER_01 9:24

If people can't get older or bread and butter in their lives, what can they do to save a few quid on the food bills?

SPEAKER_00 9:29

First thing I do, I go shopping with my dad on a Saturday because we have to take him, and I first thing I do is I'm straight to all the yellow sticker sections. I know exactly where they are in all the shops I go in.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Is there a particular time of day for the yellow stickers or are they an all-day phenomenon?

SPEAKER_00 9:42

I'm going on a Saturday morning at about 10 o'clock and there are yellow sticker items already there. I mean, I know they do reduce them even more later on, so you're gonna get cheaper prices later on, but you're gonna get less choice later on. Use your club cards. You know, they'll they'll put those prices up for other people, but if you've got your club card, I don't mind them having my data and finding out about what I eat.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

So I if you this is where we're part of the opposite, Samantha. I take issue with uh the uh loyalty cards because of that. Yeah. Um because I I I see a lot of people actually are digitally divided and can't get that. So I am a data snob, I like my own data for my own privacy, etc. So I don't have a club card, but I cheat because I use somebody else's, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

So I had the club card and then I've moved to the app because the app gives you extra vouchers as well. So which is I think is very unfair for those people who can't do it. Like my dad wouldn't do it, but I get my dad's club card for if you see in my purse, I have all the cards for all of the places.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

So that's the answer.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

Yellow stickers, get all the cards, get all the cards, uh sell your soul, know you know your prices.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

If you really want to get into your prices, maybe write down the top 20 things that you buy and write down what your what the price is next to it. So if you are out and about somewhere else and see, you know, your peppers that are what not 179 or 159 or 149, you can get them from somewhere else because you know how much you're paying for them.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Oh, someone must like have a little list with you, even on your phone.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Even on your phone, just somewhere where you can track the prices so you know if you've got a bargain somewhere else, because you can't always remember every price for everything you buy.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

No.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

The other thing I was just thinking is use up everything, don't waste anything. I got something like seven bags of sliced mushrooms on an oleo haul, stir-fry bags, I'll freeze anything.

Host Debrief And AI Recipe Tools

SPEAKER_02 11:40

So you run a nerd out here. That was that was quite some charge.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Uh yeah, I I listening back was quite funny as well, because it was just like, are you a YouTuber? And he was just like, Why why couldn't I just say youtuber?

SPEAKER_02 11:55

I separated the two words and okay, that's what wasn't where I was going, but that's fine. The uh whole veggie vegan, yeah, yeah, plant-based, ultra-processed, yeah. You met your match with some of that though.

SPEAKER_01 12:11

I think uh definitely some pushback for sure on the UPF.

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Yeah, I loved it. So have you tried to make your own soy milk?

SPEAKER_01 12:18

I have not. I have not even looked for the machines yet. Okay. Because it did feel like it would be another bit of kit that you've got to buy, and it was a processing thing. So I my jury's still out as to whether it's still acceptable if you put it in the kitchen. So she's changing my definition rather than changing my view.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Okay. I did quite enjoy your uh oat milk porridge. Like, did you think it was gonna be interesting?

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Well, no, it need it needed quite a bit of golden syrup. Do we want to talk about AI? Because do you know what I felt from it? It was a really good demonstration of how AI is killing a lot of other websites or or apps because I remember things like Broken Spoon that was an iPhone app, and you'd put the ingredients in it, and it would say, Oh, try this. But all that the um AI has done is scraped all of the menus and websites and just giving you the answer. There's a little tuck of my heart to say everybody that's putting these recipes up and making time and effort to do it, I felt sorry for.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

So I thought that your AI wouldn't be I feel sorry for the rest rest of the web. I thought it would be well, half the world can't still access it.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Just to be clear, there's a lot of the web I don't feel sorry for.

unknown 13:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

Glad we've got that sorted.

Price Tricks And Multi-buy Myths

SPEAKER_02 13:41

So I mean, the thing that struck me about Samantha is like how canny she is. Yeah. If you could have a degree in thrifty shopping, it should be the professor. And kind of the energy that she's put into having that. And I loved the top tip of write down the cost of your top 20 things.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

I love that. Being a price nerd.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

Because I'll go into a shop and be like, is this cheaper? I don't know. And I don't hold it in my head, but what's stopping me from having the twent top 20 list in my phone?

SPEAKER_01 14:11

And it's retail naughtiness, right? Because it if you just put this big store around it and put a price up, everybody thinks it's cheap. Because you're going, This is really cheap, and shouting from the shelf or from the promotion or whatever. And it it isn't always. You just want somebody's attention for it.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

I mean, I guess it's just retail.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

But um the other bit that goes hand in hand with that, as I think, is is the buy to get the multi-buy thing, yeah. Yeah. Do they always work out cheaper? Because I don't think that they do. But it's like then you've got people that are struggling to do the mental maths in the shop.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Now, wouldn't that be a cool app if you could actually go in and scan all of this sort of stuff on your phone and it'd tell you whether it's cheaper or not?

SPEAKER_02 14:55

Yeah, but again, you've got to have a phone.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Yeah, you do.

SPEAKER_02 14:57

So if we really want something that's gonna help everyone, then we need to make sure that everybody is digital. Like it's digital by default, the world now, isn't it? Yeah, really.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

I guess the other one which was a theme for us currently with price hikes, you know, we're not gonna challenge somebody like Samantha on savvy shopping, right? And even even she is saying, My soy milk's gone up best part of 60% in six months.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

Yeah, it's true though, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

And I say this every time about inflation, it's still going up, even if inflation's down. Like it feels like it's a good news headline, like, oh, inflation's down. Oh, but I'm still paying more. Yeah. I'm just paying slightly less than I could have been. And is it 50%? It's in the last five years, yeah. Which is ridiculous.

Value Ranges Shrink And Survival Mode

SPEAKER_01 15:48

And there's another reason to this that Jack Monroe did during Covid and it's still going on. The own label and value ranges are shrinking.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

I remember the Jack Monroe piece on that. And they lobbied really hard and got some of them brought back, I think.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Yeah, that for me is maybe somewhere where government should focus their attention. You know, when they're saying, Oh, we're gonna make sure nobody's making too much money out of the current crises, etc., it'd be much easier for them just to look at the value ranges and say, why are they shrinking? Why is it that your cheap basics are coming off the shelf?

SPEAKER_02 16:26

I mean, really, isn't government's job just to make sure that there's a proper welfare system if we're gonna talk about government's job.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

You're not wrong, but how many episodes of the pod are we actually gonna talk and just say what is a good welfare system and who is gonna actually vote for the money to put into a good welfare system? Answer nobody.

SPEAKER_02 16:48

I get it, but I think the rest of the stuff is just tickling around the edges.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

I see that, but I almost feel like what's normalized is survival mode.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think in the last year, based on our surveys, we've started seeing that people are just stable. And we would never have seen stable as like a success. No, like that was not, you know, that's not what you're aspiring for. No, no, it's like make life affordable. Now it's just keep your head above water, and if we can help you keep your head above water, then we'll take that and we get all the additional services to try and help as well, and it's bringing that together, and that's just different goalposts, exactly, but not because we're doing anything differently or that we're doing anything less well or anything just because the world has changed so much.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

And there's a really interesting perception as well, isn't there? Because pre-COVID, if people used to say to us that the bags that we offer were worth more than they are, and they were saving more than they are, but I think everything's hardened and tightened, and everybody's just gone into you say stable, I say survival mode, and people can't actually see beyond

What Member Survey Data Reveals

SPEAKER_01 18:01

that.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

So I've got some stats on this. So 63.7% of our members in our last survey of 9,000 responses or thereabouts said that they strongly agreed that they saved money. And I was like, 63.7% strongly agree. I don't know how comfortable I am with this. So I went and did some nerding and found out that when you looked at the people that couldn't strongly agree, they had 0 to 25 quid, the majority of them, a month to spend on food, including takeaways, because we know that our members don't have that imaginary secret takeaway budget. So 0 to 25 quid a month that they're spending on food, that is no money, no matter what the size your household is. Yeah. So those people didn't answer that we'd saved them money, they answered that they ate better because of us. So the first time in our kind of like cohort of members, if you like, we're seeing that division where some people absolutely aren't saving, but they still want to shop with us because they can eat more, they can eat better, they'd be skipping meals more, whereas other people are saving and it goes down to that budget. And I don't think we've really seen that as much.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

That's really interesting because that's more about the structure of the question, not actually being representative anymore.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Yeah, but it kind of is kind of nice to see the two and correlate with that.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

I love it, and I I love the nerdy knight you did there.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

Thanks. I did my homework in advance, everyone.

How To Find Us And Get Involved

SPEAKER_02 19:46

So if you'd like to know more about the bread and butter thing and what we get up to, you can find us at Team TBBT on Instagram and Twitter, on LinkedIn, TikTok, online, at breadandbutterthing.org. That was terrible.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Keep practicing. Just lots of places. You'll get it.

SPEAKER_02 20:02

Just find us everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 20:04

And if you have any feedback or thoughts on the podcast or you want to come and have an attack, because obviously Vic's out of practice, just drop us an email at podcast at breadandbutterthing.org.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

Yeah, and we're always open to new members at all of our hubs. So if you or someone you know would benefit from our affordable food scheme, you can find your nearest hub on the Become a Member page of the website.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Please, lastly, do all those things. See you've got me stuffed in this catchy now. Please do all those things that podcasts ask you to do. Like us, subscribe to us, leave us a review, share us with your mates, and chat about us on social. And I promise we'll be back next time.

SPEAKER_02 20:36

Yeah, I'm going for a lie down.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

See you.