How the actress and mom-of-two served 10 for P2,000
For most people, healthy, affordable eating doesn’t just magically happen. You need to build a strategy: when you’ll shop, prep, and when you’ll cook the components you’ll use in dishes for the week.
The promise of meal planning is that by automating the shopping, planning, and cooking process, you’re not coming up with food ideas on the fly—you’ve put in some legwork upfront so you’ll have some delicious, crowd-pleasing options.
Take it from actress Marian Rivera, who’s been busy experimenting with food and whipping up with new dishes for her loved ones.
Most recently, she led WalterMart Supermarket’s “P2,000 Salu-Salo Challenge” on Facebook, which is a fun and exciting component of the grocery chain’s new “10.10 Double Deals” promotion. The challenge is an offshoot of a letter whose sender asked the actress for tips on how to budget the amount for a group meal for 10 persons.
To show just how, Marian navigated the WalterMart Supermarket’s Grocery Delivery (GD) app, which features a list of meal suggestions where customers can simply click on a recipe and conveniently find all the ingredients needed added to her cart.
And so, with a P2,000 budget, Marian was able to make four of her family’s favorite recipes—spaghetti, menudo, barbecue, and lumpiang shanghai—with change to spare. With this extra money, she went ahead to buy through the GD snacks via the app’s Promo Tab.
How did she do it? Here are her tips.
Plan your budget well
Marian identified what she would need to prepare the meal. “WalterMart helps you budget easily because it has meal recipe suggestions that will help you forecast how much you would need for a certain meal,” she says.
Stick to your budget
Marian says we need to be practical when buying ingredients. “Look for alternatives of the same quality but with better value,” she says. “You don’t need expensive ingredients just to cook your favorite recipes. We can explore other options.”
Schedule your grocery shopping
She says the earlier you shop in the day, the better. “It’s better to avoid the rush and the crowd, especially now since safety is our priority,” Marian says.
Look for promos
For the budget-conscious, Marian said it’s possible to save through promos. She was surprised that with WalterMart’s daily promos, she had extra money left for her guilty pleasures like snacks or things for her kids.