Supermarket break-up: NZ First to campaign on splitting Pak’nSave and New World
Sunday, 19 April 2026
NZ First says it will campaign on breaking up Foodstuffs’ two major supermarket brands ‒ Pak’nSave and New World.
The party, surging in the polls right now, announced the policy on Sunday afternoon.
NZ First leader Winston Peters said the “supermarket duopoly” with Woolworths and Foodstuffs owning 80% of the market was hurting both consumers and food producers.
“The massive imbalance is being felt across the supply chain ‒ recently a grower received just 60c per kg of peas, while those same peas retail for as much as $5.79,” Peters said.
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“The current system sees job losses and uncertainty hit food producers such as McCain Foods and Heinz Wattie's ‒ it means less for producers, less for workers, and more pressure on families,” he said.
“NZ First will introduce legislation to reform the system and break up Foodstuffs into two nationwide cooperatives based on brand: one for New World and Four Square, and another for Pak’nSave ‒ putting both in direct competition with Woolworths New Zealand.“
Peters cited a Commerce Commission study undertaken under the last Government into the grocery sector which found the two giants were making about $430 million a year in “excess profits” ‒ as Peters described it, “one million dollars a day”.
The Commerce Commission study estimated that Countdown and Foodstuffs’ combined profit would fall by $430m a year if they earned a 5.5% return on the capital invested - instead of the 12.9% annual return it said they had seen between 2015 and 2019.
However, the commission recommended against breaking up the giants, saying it would be far too complex.
In the years since, the Foodstuffs North and South Island co-operatives have proposed merging.
Peters said the Commerce Commission should also be given new powers.
“Our policy will include tougher penalties, faster investigations, and real enforcement powers for the Commerce Commission ‒ penalties for serious breaches will be lifted to match Australia, including fines of up to $10 million, three times the gain, or 10 percent of turnover,” Peters said.
“The role of the current toothless Groceries Commissioner, belatedly established by Labour in 2023, will also be reformed giving the position the proper powers to investigate, make binding decisions, and impose penalties directly ‒ not just sit on the sidelines and give warnings.”
Finance Minister Nicola Willis has discussed a potential breakup of the supermarket brands since in Government, but ended up making a range of other regulatory changes to attempt to encourage a third player to enter the market. Thus far these have not found much success.
Overseas discount chains Aldi and Lidl both refused to take part in a proposed facilitation scheme.
A Foodstuffs spokesperson said the proposal would not lead to lower prices, as the co-operative model allowed both scale and internal competition.
“It is a distinctly New Zealand business model, with members working together, buying together, and collectively owning their supply chain, support functions, and technology systems. This creates the scale needed to deliver the best possible value to their local communities no matter how remote they might be,” the spokesperson said.
“The co-operative model allows us to achieve the scale and efficiency required to keep costs down and compete effectively against a much larger overseas-owned competitors, and among our own operators, in a challenging market.”
“New Zealand grocery prices are broadly in line with comparable international markets, particularly when factors such as GST on food and the cost of operating in a small, geographically remote market are taken into account.”
This is far from the first time NZ First has campaigned on some kind of shakeup in the grocery sector.
In 2023, Peters said in Government he would “ensure that there’s a full-scale investigation into cost of living in terms of supermarkets and unfair competition and also in many cases their abuse of New Zealand grower/suppliers, because they’re not getting the profits at all”.
Senior NZ First MP Shane Jones also campaigned on the issue as a Labour MP.