Expedition eats: a budgeting quest

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There’s also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
• Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help.

Planning and setting up the activity

• Gather together or print pictures of a range different foods, including both essential (such as bread, milk) and non-essential foods (such as chocolate bars, ice cream).
• You may need to include some alternative items, such as vegetarian or gluten-free.
• Set up a ‘supermarket’ with the pictures of the different food items.
• Add how much each item costs and how much it has in the packet or how many people it serves.
• You may wish to print out some recipe cards.
• Print or write out the scenario cards. 

Running the activity 

1. Ask everyone to get into small groups.
2. Explain that they’ll each be given a challenge to feed everyone on camp.
3. Their challenge is to create a menu, using the items from the supermarket, but they need to stick to their budget. The supermarket has a selection of essential and non-essential foods. They’ll need to think carefully and may need to prioritise their needs (essential items), rather than wants (luxury items).
4. Give out pens and paper. 
5. Give everyone the starting scenario: 20 Scouts and 5 adults are going on camp from Friday night to Sunday lunchtime. You’ll be doing lots of high energy activities and camping outside. The weather is set to be dry. Two people are vegetarian. You’ll have access to a campfire and gas cookers, as well as a small kitchen, fridge and running water. The campsite provides toilet roll, kitchen roll, washing up liquid and so on.
6. Give each group a budget. You may wish for this to be the same or different.
7. Groups should visit the supermarket and choose their ideal items for a good camp menu and snacks. 
8. Someone in each group should write down their choices. You could also ask them to write down whether it’s a want or need.
9. When everyone’s ready, read out one of the scenarios.
10. Now, give the groups two minutes to react to each scenario. They should discuss their items and decide if they want to make any changes to their shopping list.
11. At the end, everyone should read out their shopping list and you could vote on who’s made the best decision. An adult volunteer could also be the judge and give out points. 
12. Keep going until you’ve done all the scenarios. You could continue by making up your own scenarios.
13. To make it harder, you could have some rounds where some items have sold out, some items are buy one get one free or when the supermarket is closed.