Comparing the Cost of Protein Sources

With so many people caring about getting enough protein AND keeping food bills affordable, NimbleFins took a trip to Aldi and calculated the cost per gram of protein across over a range of popular food sources like chicken, mince, salmon and beans.

While prices vary from shop to shop and product to product, use this information to help you identify low-cost, high-protein foods for you and your family when you shop. Do you have any other helpful advice or thoughts on the topic of finding cheap sources of protein? Please feel free to share in the comments section below.

Cost of Protein

Protein ranges from a cost of 0.8p per gram of protein (dry chickpeas) to nearly 10p per gram of protein (prawns) at the cheapest supermarket in the UK (Aldi).

These prices represent the cheapest products we could find in the market—buying other products or shopping at other grocery stores could result in different (probably higher) protein costs.

Low Cost Protein

Low cost, high protein foods tend to be the legumes—beans, peas and lentils. Dry beans, peas and lentils are typically the cheapest, costing as little as 0.8p per gram of protein. An adult needing 50 grams of protein per day could spend just 42p per day getting their protein needs from dry chickpeas alone. Not that we're recommending that—it's an illustration of the lowest cost way to get protein.

Beans, lentils and peas, including chickpeas, cost as little as 1-2p per gram of protein when bought dry and cooked at home. Tinned legumes can cost multiples of this.

At Aldi, the cheapest tinned legumes cost around 2.9p/gram of protein, while more expensive tinned beans from other shops can cost up to 10p per gram of protein! At these prices, it can be cheaper to buy a steak than eat legumes. So don't just think legumes are always a cheap source of protein—they're not necessarily.

Cheap Protein Sources

After legumes, dairy products are relatively cheap protein sources, followed by meat and seafood. According to NimbleFins analysis of protein-rich foods in the UK, here is the ranking of cheapest protein sources.

This ranking should hold at the low-end of prices but will not work when considering higher-end products or markets. For example, an expensive, imported cheese can easily cost more per gram of protein than a local salmon fillet. Or more expensive tinned beans costing £1.60 per tin can be more expensive per gram of protein than a steak.

The daily cost of protein

An adult consuming 50 grams of protein per day can spend between £0.42 and £4.7 per day just to satisfy their protein needs. The cost depends on the total grams of protein they want, and the cost per gram of protein. Below, we've calculated the protein cost per adult per day by bodyweight, assuming needs of 0.75 grams of protein per day for each kg of body weight.

Daily cost of protein per person

Note, this daily spend could also go towards satisfying fat and carbohydrate needs as well, depending on the choice of protein source. For example, chickpeas provide carbohydrates and meat usually has some fat as well.

Cheap Protein Foods: Top Tip

When looking for cheap, high protein foods, check £/kg prices on pricing labels—chicken and beef can be found for under £5-£6 per kg, which is a cost of around 3p/gram of protein. We've highlighted this cost per kg in yellow on the image below, which is the pricing label for a 500g pack of Ashfields 20% beef mince at Aldi.

It's important to check these £/kg prices, otherwise it's very hard to compare costs across products of different sizes. Without this information, it's hard to tell if a 450g pack priced at £5.25 is a better or worse deal than a 550g pack priced at £6.25, for example.

Another way to save on more expensive types of protein is by clever use of meat in recipes. Check out our tasty salmon pasta recipe that uses just two salmon fillets for four people, and still provides 37 grams of protein per meal.

Is Protein Powder a Low Cost Alternative?

Protein powder is a low cost alternative to some meat protein sources, but it's cost is on par with the cost of protein from many chicken and beef products from lower-cost grocery chains like Aldi.

And protein powder is typically more expensive than dry legumes, on a £ per gram of protein basis. Dry beans and lentils can readily be found at a cost of 1-2p per protein gram, while protein powder from popular brands like Bulk and MyProtein costs around 3p per protein gram. Optimum Nutrition is more expensive at 3.9p/gram of protein.

Methodology

Unless otherwise stated, the NimbleFins team hunted for the cheapest available products at what has been hailed as the cheapest market in the UK—Aldi. In many cases, the cheapest products were in Aldi's 'Everyday Essentials' line of food. Aldi does not sell dry chickpeas or dry cannellini beans—for these, we used prices from Tesco.

Protein powder costs were sourced from Amazon UK.