Cheap Weeknight Dinners: Aldi Saves You $10.20

Feeding the family five nights a week is the grind nobody puts on Instagram. You need spag bol, a roast chook, a stir-fry, a pasta bake, and something built from leftovers, real food, not a recipe blog fantasy. We priced exactly that basket across Coles, Woolies, Aldi and IGA, using the proteins and pantry staples ABS data says households actually buy.

The short version: Aldi is $10.20 cheaper than Woolies on this basket. IGA is not worth it unless you're already there.

What This Basket Costs at Each Store

Thirteen items. Five dinners' worth of shopping. The spread from cheapest to most expensive is $18.30, that's nearly a full extra dinner's worth of ingredients, gone, just because of which car park you pulled into.

CHOICE's most recent supermarket survey backs this up. Their June 2025 fieldwork across 104 stores in 27 locations found Aldi averaged $55.35 on their comparison basket, with Woolies at $58.92 and Coles at $59.22. IGA trailed well behind at $69.74. The pattern on our basket is exactly the same shape.

Where Aldi Pulls Ahead: The Items That Matter

Three items do most of the heavy lifting in Aldi's lead.

Beef mince (1 kg) is $6.49 at Aldi. That's the single most important line item in this basket, it's in the spag bol, it can stretch into a pasta bake if you buy enough, and it's often the protein people reach for when they're trying to keep the shop under budget. Mince at IGA runs significantly higher.

Penne (500 g, x2) costs just $0.89 per pack at Aldi. You're buying two packs for this basket, so $1.78 total. That's cheap enough to not bother price-comparing. Pasta is one of those categories where Aldi's home brand is genuinely fine, it cooks the same way, it holds the sauce the same way.

Pasta sauce (500 g) is $1.59 at Aldi. Jasmine rice (1 kg) is $2.99. Soy sauce (250 ml) is $1.79. The pantry items stack up. Across the five pantry lines where Aldi wins, you're saving around $4, 5 compared with Coles and more again compared with IGA.

Zucchini (500 g) is $1.40 at Aldi, the cheapest in the basket. It's not glamorous, but zucchini shows up in stir-fries, pasta bakes, and as a side, so it's earning its place.

Where the Stores Are Basically Even

Not everything is a Aldi blowout. A few lines are close enough that they shouldn't drive your decision.

Brown onions (1 kg) are $2.50 at Coles, which is the cheapest in this basket. Woolies and Aldi are typically close on root veg. Onions are in nearly every dinner this week, so this matters, but it's cents, not dollars.

Carrots (1 kg) are $1.70 at Coles. Again, cheap at all four stores. Produce pricing on commodity veg like carrots and onions tends to move together, especially when supply is stable.

Diced tomatoes (400 g, x2) come in cheapest at Coles at $0.95 per can. Two cans for $1.90. If you're already shopping at Aldi, their equivalent will be close. This isn't a reason to change stores.

Garlic (3 pack) is $1.98 at Coles. Aldi's equivalent is competitive but Coles wins here. One of only two produce lines where Coles or Woolies edge out Aldi on this basket.

Chicken breast (1 kg) is $4.20 at Woolies, the cheapest across all four stores. It's a meaningful win for Woolies, chicken breast is usually the priciest protein per kilo at budget stores. That said, $4.20 is quite cheap and worth double-checking at your local store, since poultry prices can shift week to week.

Is the Cherry-Pick Trip Worth It?

If you bought every item at whichever store had it cheapest, you'd spend $56.34. That's $6.24 less than Aldi, the best single-store option.

Honest answer: probably not worth it for most people.

Six dollars and twenty-four cents is two school canteen orders. It's not nothing. But you'd need to run to at least three stores, Aldi for the pantry items and mince, Woolies for the chicken breast and olive oil ($7.00, cheapest there), and Coles for onions, carrots, garlic, and diced tomatoes. That's three separate shops, three car parks, three queues at self-checkout.

If you live somewhere with an Aldi and a Coles or Woolies in the same shopping centre, the maths changes. Grab the chicken breast from Woolies and the olive oil while you're there, then do the rest at Aldi. You'll capture most of that saving without a second trip.

The Aldi win on olive oil is worth knowing about: $7.00 at Woolies is the cheapest across the majors, but Aldi's house-brand olive oil tends to be competitive too, and if you're already in the store, it's not worth a separate trip for the difference.

Who Should Shop Where

Aldi suits you if you've got an Aldi nearby and you're cooking from scratch most nights. The pantry items, pasta, sauce, soy sauce, rice, are where Aldi's house brands genuinely shine. You're not sacrificing quality on any of the five dinners in this basket by going Aldi on those lines.

Woolies makes sense if you're already a Everyday Rewards member, you're picking up chicken breast anyway (cheapest there at $4.20/kg), and you can grab the olive oil at the same time. You won't match Aldi's total, but you'll be $3.45 behind, and if the rewards points add up for you, that gap narrows.

Coles is a reasonable fallback if there's no Aldi near you. The total is $72.78, $10.20 more than Aldi, but $8.10 less than IGA. Coles wins on carrots, onions, garlic, and diced tomatoes, so if you're doing your whole shop there, you're at least getting those lines right.

IGA is worth using for top-up shops only. At $80.88 for this basket, you're paying $18.30 more than Aldi. That's the cost of guilt-free impulse buying that then makes you feel bad. IGA is genuinely handy for late-run missing ingredients, a bag of onions, a can of diced tomatoes, but it's not a destination for a full weeknight dinner shop.

Cup Mushrooms: The Line That Will Sting You

One item worth flagging: cup mushrooms (500 g) are $6.00 at Woolies, which is the cheapest we found across the four stores. Mushrooms are priced higher across the board, it's a fresh produce category where supply and transport costs hit harder.

If your family isn't fussed about mushrooms in the stir-fry, swapping them for an extra zucchini or capsicum will cut costs. But if you want them, Woolies at $6.00 is your best bet from this basket.

The Broader Picture

Australia's supermarket price war hasn't stopped. In June 2025, Coles dropped prices on 307 winter staples for a 12-week window, and Woolies has been cutting prices on selected lines to defend market share against Aldi's growth. That's good for shoppers in theory. In practice, the discounts rotate and don't always land on the items your family actually eats.

Aldi's advantage on this basket isn't built on specials. It's built on consistently lower everyday prices for pantry staples and proteins. That's been the CHOICE finding year after year, and our basket backs it up again.

For five weeknight dinners, the $62.58 at Aldi is hard to beat.