bulk buys | organised castle

As promised, here is the second instalment of our day out in Shepparton.

We went to the SPC Factory shop and I had no real idea of what to expect apart from hoping to buy some tinned tomatoes.

Well it was an absolute eye-opener as they had all sorts of packaged food, drinks and some household goods.

I did buy 3 large tins (2.95kg each) of chopped tomatoes. You can see them on the top shelf as I had put some of our haul away before I thought to photograph it.

I also bought the 12 bottles of passata, 2 packs of gluten free gnocchi as well as a couple of other packs of gluten free pasta shown here.

Other items were 6 pairs of socks, 2 rolls of baking paper, a travel coffee plunger/mug, several tubes of toothpaste and facial scrub.

Everything that I bought was needed and well-priced. It would be easy to go overboard and be sucked into buying things that you do not need. You also need to know that you can successfully use and/or store various items as well as being aware of the pricing in regular supermarkets or other sources.

I am confident that the $114 that we spent was good value. I certainly would not need to shop here regularly nor would I make the 2 hour drive just to shop here. However, it is good to know what is available should we happen to be in the area in the future.

As you know, I am not a great fan of shopping. However, there are still things that need to be purchased.

I needed more eucalyptus oil which is an ingredient of the homemade cleaner and wool wash that I make. It is also a useful disinfectant and aid for removing labels from jars and the resultant glue residue. Needless to say, I use a bit of it and was keen to buy a larger quantity than the 200ml bottle that I had recently emptied.

After some online searching we managed to source a 4 litre bottle in Australia. It is the same brand as the previous bottle and was significantly cheaper. In fact, I calculated that it cost about 60% of the cost of buying an equivalent volume in 200ml bottles from one of the major supermarkets.

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Although it is in a plastic container, this quantity will last me a lifetime and I will not be buying any more 200ml plastic bottles of eucalyptus oil.

I understand that many people would not be interested in buying this sort of quantity as there is a significant financial investment as well as storage issues. Neither of these are a particular problem for me so I am happy to have been able to buy a large quantity of eucalyptus oil.

If you live in my vicinity and would like a smaller portion of this eucalyptus oil, please let me know and I will let you know all of the details including pricing which will be the same as I paid. I am not doing this to make a profit but simply to give others the opportunity to access eucalyptus oil with minimal packaging in quantities that are appropriate to your needs.

**Please note that this is labelled ‘Commercial Grade’ and the directions are for use in cleaning applications.

There are a couple of hyperlinks in the second paragraph to the ‘recipes’ for cleaning products that I make using eucalyptus oil.