Mid-Week Dinner Basket: Save $12 Choosing the Right Store

Thirteen items. Four stores. One goal: figure out where a family actually saves money on mid-week dinners without turning grocery shopping into a second job.

This basket covers a solid week of dinners, bolognese, stir-fry, pasta, a rice dish. The kind of meals that get made on a Tuesday night when no one's feeling ambitious. Beef mince, chicken breast, pasta, rice, a few pantry staples, and enough fresh veg to feel like you're keeping it together nutritionally.

Here's what we found.

What the Mid-Week Dinner Basket Costs at Each Store

• Coles: $66.79
• Woolworths: $88.10
• Aldi: $67.76
• IGA: $69.67 (one item unavailable)
• Cherry-pick cheapest at each store: $54.12

The Woolworths number is the one that jumps out. $88.10 is $21.31 more than Coles for the exact same basket. That's not a rounding error, that's a full extra bag of groceries.

Coles and Aldi are almost identical. $66.79 versus $67.76. The difference is 97 cents. You'd spend more than that in extra petrol driving between them.

IGA sits at $69.67, just under $3 more than Coles, and they couldn't stock one item from the list. For a mid-week dinner basket, a missing ingredient can derail an entire meal plan, something worth factoring in if IGA is your local.

According to Compare the Market, the average Australian household was spending $206.54 on groceries per week as of June 2025. Down from a January 2025 peak of $213.64, but still about $15 higher than the 2024 average. Every dollar on a regular basket matters right now.

Where the Biggest Savings Are, and the Surprises

Aldi wins on beef mince at $7.99 per kilogram. That's your bolognese, your meatballs, your midweek hash sorted. The Beef Central supermarket survey named Aldi the top-rated store for beef in 2025, so this isn't just a price play, shoppers seem happy with what they're getting.

Aldi also takes pasta sauce at $1.69 and jasmine rice at $2.99. If you're building a pantry-heavy week, Aldi does well.

Now for the counterintuitive part. Woolworths, the most expensive store overall by a significant margin, has the cheapest chicken breast in the basket at $4.20 per kilogram. It also has the cheapest penne ($0.90 for 500g) and cheapest diced tomatoes ($0.95 per tin). So Woolies isn't universally expensive, it just manages to be pricey on enough items that the full basket blows out badly.

Coles picks up the produce wins. Garlic (three pack) at $1.75, carrots at $1.70 per kilogram, and cup mushrooms at $6.00 for 500g are all cheapest at Coles. The mushrooms in particular are worth noting, 500g of cup mushrooms isn't cheap anywhere, but Coles has a clear lead on this one.

Where the Prices Are Basically the Same

Honest answer: not many items in this basket are close across all four stores. The spread is real.

That said, if you're comparing only Coles and Aldi, the two value leaders in this basket, you'll find the pantry items cluster together reasonably tightly. Brown onions (Aldi's $1.99 vs Coles' prices), zucchini, and soy sauce are all Aldi wins, but none of them are dramatic. The 97-cent total gap between Coles and Aldi across the full 13-item basket tells you that story.

Where the stores converge most is on the mid-range pantry items, things like soy sauce and pasta sauce, where the spread between cheapest and most expensive across all four stores is typically under a dollar. These items aren't worth routing a special trip for.

Is the Cherry-Pick Worth the Extra Trip?

The cherry-pick price is $54.12. The best single store (Coles) is $66.79. That's a saving of $12.67, about 19%.

For a family doing this basket weekly, $12.67 adds up to roughly $659 a year. That's real money. But here's the honest maths: to get the cherry-pick price, you'd need to stop at Aldi for the mince, pasta sauce, rice, zucchini, onions, and soy sauce, then swing past Woolworths for chicken breast, penne, diced tomatoes, and olive oil, then hit Coles for garlic, carrots, and mushrooms.

That's three separate shops.

Two shops, Aldi plus Woolworths for the meat wins, gets you most of the saving with a lot less hassle. Coles and Woolworths are often co-located in the same shopping centre, which makes the Coles-plus-Woolworths cherry-pick easier in practice. Aldi rarely is.

If you've got one Aldi near you and nothing else, doing the full shop there at $67.76 is nearly identical to Coles and much better than Woolworths. That's a straightforward call.

Who Should Shop Where for Cheap Mid-Week Dinners

One-store shoppers: Coles or Aldi. The 97-cent difference between them is meaningless. Go to whichever is closer, has better parking, or has the shorter queue on a Wednesday afternoon.

Families who meal-plan: The Aldi-plus-Woolworths combination is worth it if both stores are on your regular route. You get Aldi's cheaper mince, rice and pantry staples, and Woolworths' cheaper chicken and pasta, without needing a third stop.

Busy parents doing a quick top-up: Don't use Woolworths as your only stop for this basket. The $21 premium over Coles is steep for 13 items. Either of the other three stores serves you better if you're in a hurry and just need everything in one go.

IGA shoppers: If IGA is your local and getting anywhere else means a longer trip, the $2.88 premium over Coles is probably worth the convenience. Just check whether that one unavailable item matters to your meal plan before you go. It could be the beef mince, it could be the garlic, IGA availability varies a lot by store.

CHOICE's quarterly basket tracking found that Aldi and Coles prices have both moved lower over the past year while Woolworths has ticked up. This basket's numbers match that pattern exactly. The gap between Woolworths and the rest isn't new, but it does seem to be getting wider on this category of everyday cooking ingredients.

The $12.67 saving from cherry-picking is genuinely worth having if your routine makes two stops easy. If it doesn't, Coles or Aldi at under $68 is a solid result for a week of family dinners.