Supermarket competition is slowly increasing, but where are the best prices?

Tuesday, 28 February 2023

How do supermarket prices compare to smaller sellers?

Most shoppers want to find a good deal on their supermarket shopping. But could you get the best price by skipping the big players?

Since August, Stuff has been collecting grocery price data at three different supermarkets in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, to look at how prices are moving.

This month, we’ve expanded our comparison to check out how some of their competition stacks up.

We looked at three: Supie, Farro and The Warehouse.

* Price drop: The small supermarket undercutting the major players

* Countdown charges online shoppers twice as much for broccoli

* Cost of living crisis: Save money by growing your own vegetables on the cheap

Supie is a business that sells grocery items online and delivers around Auckland.

It recently lowered its grocery prices to undercut the big players, Pak 'n Save, New World and Countdown.

Farro promises to showcase the best of New Zealand food in retail stores across Auckland, and The Warehouse recently started offering fruit and vegetables at selected stores.

Here’s what we found.

The Warehouse, Supie and Farro don’t offer all the products on our monthly grocery list, so we took the items that they all had and compiled a shopping basket to compare the prices with a New World, Pak ‘n Save and Countdown in Auckland.

The big supermarkets’ prices were obtained on Monday, while the competitors’ prices were gathered on Tuesday.

High prices at supermarkets are pushing Cantabrians to shop around for cheaper options at smaller stores.

All stores offered 1kg of loose tomatoes, brown onions, carrots and bananas, a head of broccoli, a 12-pack of size 7 eggs, a 2L bottle of milk, a 1kg block of cheese and a loaf of bread.

The cheapest place was Supie, which came to $42.78 for the eight items. This was followed by Pak ‘n Save, which was the cheapest supermarket – $43.51.

Pak ‘n Save has no loyalty programme, whereas Supie has a $1.90 a week membership, which allows customers to get free shipping for orders over $70 and 2% to 10% cashback on all products, which saved on average $8 per order.

The most expensive place for the items was Farro, with a basket total of $57.93, which was $10 more than the most expensive supermarket, which was New World.

Foodstuffs had not responded by deadline.

Countdown did not want to comment.