Vegetarian Mid-Week Basket: Save $14 Choosing Right

Fourteen items. Four stores. One question worth answering before you load up the trolley: does it actually matter where you shop for a vegetarian mid-week basket?

The short answer is yes, to the tune of $15.82 between the cheapest and most expensive single-store option. That's not life-changing money, but it's a decent lunch out. Here's exactly where it comes from.

What the basket costs at each store

Shop the whole lot at Aldi: $52.13. That's your cheapest single-store run.

Coles comes in at $57.05, $4.92 more than Aldi for the same trolley. Woolies sits at $61.60, which is $9.47 dearer than Aldi. And IGA clocks in at $67.95, though two items weren't available there at all, so that number would only go up if you had to source them elsewhere.

The cherry-pick total, buying each item at whichever store is cheapest, lands at $47.38. That's $4.75 less than just going to Aldi. Whether that's worth two stops depends entirely on your week, and we'll get to that.

Where Aldi pulls ahead by the most

The pantry staples are where Aldi really separates itself.

Chickpeas (400 g) are $0.95 at Aldi. You've got three tins in this basket, so that's $2.85 total. Coles and Woolies both charge more, and over a year of regular cooking, the gap adds up fast.

Lentils (400 g) are also $0.95 at Aldi for two tins, another category where Aldi's house-brand pricing is hard to beat.

Halloumi (200 g) is $4.99 at Aldi. It regularly sits $2, 3 higher at Coles and Woolies, and it's the most expensive single item in this basket. If you're cooking halloumi once or twice a week, that difference is real money by month's end.

Firm tofu (375 g) at $2.59 and baby spinach (120 g) at $1.99 are both cheapest at Aldi too. Jasmine rice (1 kg) and brown onions (1 kg) round out Aldi's clean sweep of the pantry and produce categories.

Pasta sauce (500 g) at $1.69 is another Aldi win, and at that price, there's no real reason to pay more anywhere else.

Where Coles and Woolies hold their own

Not everything goes Aldi's way.

Cup mushrooms (500 g) are cheapest at Coles for $6.00. Mushrooms vary a lot week to week, but Coles has been consistently competitive on loose and pre-packed mushrooms this year.

Free range eggs (12 pack) are $5.70 at Coles, a solid price for free range. If eggs matter to you ethically (and plenty of vegetarian households do care), Coles is the pick here.

Garlic (3 pack) is $1.75 at Coles, which is the lowest in the basket.

Woolies picks up a few wins too. Penne (500 g) is $0.90 each at Woolies, there are two packs in this basket, so you're saving a few cents per pack versus Aldi. Small, but real. Diced tomatoes (400 g) at $0.95 each are also cheapest at Woolies. Olive oil (500 ml) at $4.00 is Woolies' strongest result, this is one of the more price-variable items in the basket, and $4.00 is a good price for 500 ml.

Is cherry-picking actually worth it?

The cherry-pick saves you $4.75 versus just going to Aldi. That's the honest number.

For a lot of households, $4.75 doesn't justify the extra petrol, the extra parking, and the extra 30, 45 minutes. If Aldi and Coles are already next to each other in your local shopping strip, you might consider grabbing mushrooms, eggs, garlic, penne, diced tomatoes, and olive oil at the cheaper store. But if it means a separate trip across town, the maths stops working.

The gap between Aldi and Woolies is bigger ($9.47), so if you're currently defaulting to Woolies for your weekly shop, switching to Aldi for this basket alone saves you almost $10. That's a much stronger argument for changing where you shop than the incremental cherry-pick.

IGA is harder to recommend here. Even before accounting for the two missing items, it's $15.82 more expensive than Aldi for the same basket. IGA works well for top-up shops and when convenience is everything, it's not the right tool for a planned mid-week pantry run.

Who should shop where

Aldi-first families doing a proper weekly shop will do best overall. If you're cooking vegetarian mid-week meals a few nights a week, lentil curries, tofu stir-fries, pasta with roasted mushrooms, the pantry staples at Aldi are where the savings stack up. Chickpeas, lentils, rice, pasta sauce, onions, tofu: Aldi wins all of them.

Coles shoppers who don't live near an Aldi aren't doing badly. At $57.05, you're only $4.92 off the cheapest single-store price. Grab the mushrooms, eggs, and garlic there and you're buying those items at their lowest price anyway.

Woolies shoppers paying $61.60 for this basket have the most to gain by switching. Even swapping to Coles saves you $4.55. Switching to Aldi saves $9.47. If vegetarian cooking is a regular part of your week, those savings compound across a month.

Households watching every dollar, and plenty of Australian families are doing exactly that right now, should strongly consider the Aldi-plus-Coles approach. Hit Aldi for the pantry, get mushrooms and eggs at Coles, skip the Woolies run for this shop entirely. You'll land at close to the cherry-pick price without too much effort.

The basket itself is good value by any measure. Fourteen ingredients, mostly pantry staples and produce, covering multiple meals. The price story is less about any one item being outrageously expensive and more about Aldi's consistent house-brand pricing making small savings on every single line add up to a meaningful total.