Food: London Part 1

When we book locations, we research ahead of time to ensure our house is close to a grocery store. In London, we were about a half mile walk from a TESCO. TESCO is comparable to a Kroger. It’s a larger store with a bit of everything. You’ll find TESCOs all around London, but even more common is the TESCO Express, which just has groceries.

Upon arriving in London, TESCO was our initial stock up store. We got our basic supplies for the house at TESCO, things like; paper towels, sunscreen, laundry soap, toilet paper and I also got our initial food supplies including; coffee, milk, eggs, bread, creamer, cereal, fruit, nuts, cheese, etc.

Here’s my research data on TESCO:

18 apples varieties
39 bread varieties
12 milk varieties
12 aisles

Here’s a few other interesting things about TESCO:

The Brits are proud of their food. All of the products made or produced in the UK bore the British flag.
Eggs are not refrigerated, you’ll find them in an aisle like you would the bread and they are really fresh. We even got a few with feathers stuck to them.
Don’t ask where the “creamer” is located. I had to ask three different workers before I was able to locate what we would consider to be “half/half.” I eventually found it, but it’s called single-cream, double-cream, or triple-cream.
Nolan wasn’t overly pleased with the cereal selection. He couldn’t find any of his US favorites in the cereal aisle. He finally settled on O’s, which was basically Cheerios. During a later trip to TESCO, I did find a few US cereals, but they were in the candy aisle, which I found very interesting.
Bags are available for a cost. They were a surprisingly good quality and had great handles, so we saved ours from the initial shopping trip.
In the produce section, there was a bin of free fruit for kids to eat while shopping. One of the cashiers showed Nolan and it was by far one of his favorite parts of our shopping trips to TESCO.
The fruits and veggies were amazing. Really fresh, but I did notice we needed to eat it quickly.

Overall, we were able to find everything we needed and wanted from the TESCO. We made a couple stops back over to the TESCO throughout the month, but mostly visited the local market rather than the TESCO (check out Food: London Part 2).

What I realized is there isn’t a concept of bulk shopping in London. First, it is way too much to carry back to the house and second, the food doesn’t really stay fresh that long. For example, the single cream had a label that said, “use within 3-days of opening” and the strawberries, while amazing, started to go back within about 2-days.

Here are a few photos from the TESCO.

Product Section