Moving to the UK - What U.S. food or products would you bring / will I miss?

When my husband goes over to the States on business he knows that if he doesn't bring back oyster crackers and cheez its there will be trouble.  
Neosporin as well if we are running low on it.  
He also tends to buy his clothes over there.  Perhaps it is due to him living in the States for 13 years and they tend to fit his body type better.  

Oh we get Levis at a Levis outlet (not dept stores) - DH likes the traditional button fly 501s & we can usually get two pair on offer at the outlet for about $60-65 total. They seem pretty good quality & last him ages.

I sort of put my foot down because he was buying pricey crap-quality Next jeans & trousers that wore out so quickly.

Oh we get Levis at a Levis outlet (not dept stores) - DH likes the traditional button fly 501s & we can usually get two pair on offer at the outlet for about $60-65 total. They seem pretty good quality & last him ages.

When I lived in New York I used to get them at any one of a variety of cheap jeans stores for about $30/pair.  I don't know if they were the crap ones CB was talking about or if they were good ones, but I still have about 5 pairs of them, and I left NY in 2007, so something was working.

And after all this discussion, I'm now getting Amazon ads on every web page trying to get me to buy expensive UK Levi's.  YOU'RE NOT LISTENING, GOOGLE!  THEY'RE CRAZY EXPENSIVE HERE!

...there are some things that are just practical, like the big bottle of ibuprofen!

There's ibuprofen in the UK.  (Or did I miss someone posting a massive UK ibuprofen price difference that I was unaware of?)

Oh we get Levis at a Levis outlet (not dept stores) - DH likes the traditional button fly 501s & we can usually get two pair on offer at the outlet for about $60-65 total. They seem pretty good quality & last him ages.

I sort of put my foot down because he was buying pricey crap-quality Next jeans & trousers that wore out so quickly.

If they're outlet 501s they're probably the real denim, made in the USA ones Especially if they're still $65 even at the outlet.

Just always amazes me when people bring back $25 Levis, you might as well buy jeans from Primark, all made in the same factories.

Yah the high street is rubbish for denim, getting a stiff pair of jeans from somewhere like albam you really notice the difference in the quality.

I'm pretty sure my husband is just a new type of dress up doll for me

There's ibuprofen in the UK.  (Or did I miss someone posting a massive UK ibuprofen price difference that I was unaware of?)

It's more the quantity you can buy in the US vs. the UK.

You cannot buy more than 32 ibuprofen tablets off the shelf in the UK, and no more than 100 tablets from a pharmacy counter. In the US you can buy bottles of hundreds of tablets off the shelf.

Same goes with paracetamol. In the UK you can't buy more than 32 tablets at once (maybe 64 at most, with permission from a pharmacist)... but in the US you can buy a lot more than that off the shelf.

I always stock up on ibuprofen and paracetamol in the US because of this.

No, we usually buy the jeans in a 2-for offer at the outlet - about $65 for two pair. Bought singly, they sell for about $40-45 each though. They are thick, stiff denim.

Ibuprofen - both quantity & price. You can get a 500-1000 count bottle for what - $10-15 in the US. Same situation for paracetamol. Shudder to think how much same amount would cost you, over time, here.

Lots of interesting stuff here, I am from the UK and lived with wife in the US for 15 years and we are looking to head back.  While I've learned to make a lot of the UK stuff over here, I've still failed on the pork pies, have to get them in the UK.  So my advice to people from the US is get some good basic cookbooks before you leave and start to experiment, I started with Be-Ro. 

My home made scotch eggs are WAY better than any I get in the UK now!!

It is nice to know though that something taste different.  I have been converted to like taco everything over here so we'll have to take that back with us when we go.  It looks like US Peanut butter is making its way into normal shops too, is that true?

I say bring what you like/ can to start off with then tweak it as you go along.  We are both USC so didn't have a spouse or anyone to ask questions about stuff too and found it really hard at first just because we had so much to learn all at once so having stuff from home to start was really helpful.  Now that we've been here I know what I like and know what equivalents there are and what I bring back has changed but the first few months at the grocery shops were really overwhelming. 

I think its easy for those of us who've been here awhile to forget about the learning curve we went through and as a result our "must" lists have changed.  For example- one of the first things I asked to be sent over after we moved was those twisty tie things that come on bread.  Here most bags are closed with a sticker and for me I preferred the other.  Now-- 4 years later I know you can get them online but 2 days after moving here I just wanted them and had too many other things I was trying to "figure out" to search for that too. 

You could look at the grocery shops like Tesco and Asda online to see what sorts of products they have and get an idea of what you might like to bring.  Also Costco has a lot of things from home.  If you think you might go there I'd get a membership before moving as it is a pain to get one here and you can just renew your US one online.  We go at least once a month.

Thge two that drove me crazy my first year were Miracle Whip (I'm not a mayo person, it's been MW all my life) and American Bacon.  I can get the Miracle Whip (Along with Jif peanut butter) at the American store in Manchester, but I've still never found an acceptable substitute for a nice crispy piece of bacon!

We had some US neighbors who had frequent vacation trips to the UK, staying in B&Bs. The husband would always tell them to "burn the bacon". 

Well i've been here 14 years and there are still some things i really miss and get when i visit back home.

real dill pickles
Dunkin Donuts coffee
Ivory shower gel ( i have fussy skin)
Gold Bond baby powder (see above lol )
Degree Deodorant (solid shower clean scent)
US smarties candy
Near East Rice Pilaf (original flavour)
Good n Plenty
Canada Mints (both wintergreen and peppermint)
Thats a start lol

I like to bring back cooking and baking ingredients so I can make things here to serve to friends and family. It's not that the food here isn't delicious and exciting--it is--but sometimes it's nice to prepare a meal for people here that they might not normally come across. I find people always appreciate it. I've brought ground chilli pasilla, epazote (although you can get that at Lupe Pinto's), posole and a jar of Busha Brown's jerk marinade. They're things that mostly last me through the year.

When we went back to the states for six months I brought some British ingredients, and I enjoyed preparing these things for my family.

Before we returned to the UK my mother gave me a tortilla press, so I bought a bag of masa harina to take back with me. It was fun to make corn tortillas for friends to eat with our chilli (with chilli powder and chipotles in adobo sauce from my suit case). And I've got a bag of farro stored away that I plan on using in a dish next week for my in-laws.

That's one of the pleasures of having lived in two cultures: sharing the unfamiliar foods with people.

M&S does a nice streaky bacon now that gets crispy and puts off a good amount of bacon fat to make country gravy if you like that sort of thing...

M&S does a nice streaky bacon now that gets crispy and puts off a good amount of bacon fat to make country gravy if you like that sort of thing...

Yes, it's not too difficult to find streaky bacon in most stores and butcher shops, often both smoked and unsmoked.   

For me, buying meat was required a learning curve.  Meat in general can be tricky though because there are different names and uses for many cuts, and on top of it, French or Italian terms for cuts are often used interchangeably as well.  Good luck finding something like a Boston butt or cottage butt in the UK.   The internet comes in handy for finding out how to describe the equivalent.  I now know what a hand and spring joint is and can speak British to the butcher.   

When I was in the UK last autumn, what I particularly missed were things like Kashi cereals (adapted to eating Puffed Wheat and Bitesize Shredded Wheat), Oikos Greek yogurt by Stonyfield Farms (did find that brand but wasn't the same) and Endangered Species dark chocolate with almonds and cranberries -- I like the individually wrapped squares so I don't go overboard. Never found a good substitute for the chocolate. As long as I can find orange juice with calcium I'm fine though.