An Aussie mum-of-seven has revealed how she is feeding her family healthy meals as cheaply as possible this year. Woolworths and Coles control nearly two-thirds of the grocery market, but the mum found it can be “so much cheaper” to cut out the middleman and buy meat directly from local farmers.

South Australian resident Nerita told Yahoo Finance she is “easily” spending $500 a week on her family’s grocery shop at Woolworths. With seven kids ranging from 7 months to 12 years, Nerita said careful meal planning and grocery shopping online were essential to sticking to her budget.

“That truly is our biggest expense and it’s sometimes really, really hard to keep it under $500,” she said.

“I think it’s really hard at the moment to balance eating well, as well as making it financially viable to do so.”

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Nerita said she had been looking for ways to “clean up” her family’s diet as cheaply as possible and discovered Farmer to Fridge, an online platform where customers can buy meat directly from farmers.

She purchased an eighth of a cow through the platform for $300, which includes flank and fillet steak, rump, T-Bone, Porthouse, mince, sausages and more.

That works out to about $11 a kilo based on the "dressed weight", which is the weight of a side of beef before it's cut up. The actual "boxed weight" is about 20 kilos.

For comparison, Woolworths and Coles sell 500 grams of beef mince for $6.50, which is $13 per kilo.

A 10-pack of beef sausages is $5.90 or $10.73 per kilogram at both supermarkets, while a T Bone steak is $31 per kilogram.

“We’ve only bought a small pack for now because it is a big outlay in cost for a family and it’s just been Christmas,” Nerita told Yahoo Finance.

“We’re hoping that this will give us a start and we’re starting to put money away so we can buy a deep freezer and half a cow.”

Nerita estimated an eighth of a cow would last her family about a month, but that’s with them not eating the meat every single night.

“My family is going to be trying new cuts of meat that we’ve never tried before. So we’ll see how well everybody eats those cuts of meat to see how much it’s going to impact our shopping every month,” she said.

Aussie come for deals but stay for quality

James Gilbert founded Farmer to Fridge two years ago and said he wanted to create a way for farmers to be paid the retail price of the meat, rather than the livestock price for the animals.