Cuugo Grocery Price Index

This week's basket totals

Cheapest full basket: Aldi, $227.26, with all 60 items.

A change from last week is shown only like for like: the same items priced in both weeks, and no change to the method on the store's lines. Not comparable this week: Woolworths, because its chicken breast fillets, orange juice and broccoli lines were missing last week and are priced this week; basket v2.4 changed how its chicken breast fillets and broccoli lines are priced; Coles, because basket v2.4 changed how its pumpkin line is priced; Aldi, because its pumpkin line was missing last week and is priced this week; IGA, because its orange juice line was missing last week and is priced this week; basket v2.4 changed how its orange juice line is priced.

This week, item by item

Every line of the week ending 6 November 2026: what each store's line cost and the product it bought. The lowest price for each item is in bold. Each weekly report keeps the table for its own week.

The trend

Each line is one supermarket's total for the 60 item basket, from 4 September 2026. Weeks before that date used a different basket and a matcher that has since been rebuilt, so they are not plotted here. What changed, and why.

Weekly snapshots

• Grocery Price Index: Aldi wins at $227.265 Nov 2026
• Grocery Price Index: no store had all 60 items29 Oct 2026
• Grocery Price Index: no store had all 60 items22 Oct 2026
• Grocery Price Index: no store had all 60 items15 Oct 2026
• Grocery Price Index: no store had all 60 items8 Oct 2026
• Grocery Price Index: no store had all 60 items2 Oct 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Woolworths cheapest at $229.3725 Sep 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Woolworths cheapest at $238.4518 Sep 2026

Browse the full archive →

Methodology

The basket

A fixed basket of 60 everyday staples covering a realistic weekly shop: fresh food, pantry goods, chilled and frozen items, cleaning products and personal care.

• Full cream milk 2L
• Sliced white bread 700g
• Free range eggs 12 pack
• Chicken breast fillets 1kg
• Weet-Bix 1.2kg
• Apples 1kg
• Bananas 1kg
• Carrots 1kg
• Tasty cheese block 500g
• Beef mince 500g
• Long grain rice 1kg
• Penne pasta 500g
• Butter 250g
• Toilet paper 8 pack
• Laundry powder 1kg
• Baked beans 300g
• Tinned tomatoes 400g
• Tuna in springwater 95g
• Plain flour 1kg
• White sugar 1kg
• Olive oil 500ml
• Tomato sauce 500ml
• Pasta sauce 500g
• Peanut butter 375g
• Honey 500g
• Strawberry jam 370g
• Rolled oats 1kg
• Corn flakes 500g
• Muesli 500g
• Instant coffee 100g
• Tea bags 100 pack
• Orange juice 1L
• Long life milk 1L
• Thickened cream 300ml
• Sour cream 200ml
• Beef sausages 500g
• Vanilla ice cream 1L
• Milk chocolate block 180g
• Potatoes 2kg
• Brown onions 1kg
• Oranges 3kg
• Broccoli 500g
• Mushrooms 200g
• Paper towel 2 pack
• Facial tissues 95 pack
• Dishwashing liquid 500ml
• Laundry liquid 2L
• Garbage bags 20 pack
• Shampoo 400ml
• Toothpaste 100g
• Bacon 250g
• Leg ham 200g
• Pumpkin 1kg
• Margarine 500g
• Greek yoghurt 1kg
• Dishwasher tablets 30 pack
• Chickpeas 400g
• Soy sauce 250ml
• Frozen peas 500g
• Lemons 500g

How prices are collected

Cuugo records online shelf prices for Woolworths, Coles, Aldi and IGA daily. The Index freezes each store's prices for the basket every Friday morning (Melbourne time). The price used is the price a shopper would pay that day — if an item is on special, the special price counts. For each item we match the closest available product at the stated pack size at each store; where pack sizes differ, prices are compared on a per-unit basis against the reference size.

Where the exact pack size isn't the cheapest way to reach the target amount, the basket buys the cheapest option at or above it. That is why a line sometimes shows a larger pack than the one named: an 18 pack of toilet paper against an 8 pack line, or a 45 pack of dishwasher tablets against a 30 pack line. The same rule is applied at every store, so the comparison between them holds.

Out-of-stock items

If an item can't be matched at a store in a given week, that store's total is published with the number of missing items clearly flagged, and is not treated as directly comparable to complete totals for that week. We don't substitute a different product, and we don't silently carry forward old prices.

The cheapest store, and the change from last week

The cheapest store is the cheapest that priced every item. When no store priced every item, the Index says so and gives the lowest total with the items it leaves out.

A store's change from last week is given only like for like: when it priced the same items in both weeks, and no change to the method touched its lines. Otherwise its two totals are not comparable, and the Index says why instead of giving a figure.

Prices too cheap to be right

Each line is matched to a product automatically, and now and then the match is wrong in a way that makes a store look cheaper than it is: a single apple priced as a kilo, or a six-pack of eggs counted as a dozen. So before a store's price is counted, it is checked against the other stores. Where at least two other stores have priced the line, a price that is less than half their middle price for the same amount is set aside. A matched egg pack whose weight works out at under 40 g or over 80 g an egg is set aside too.

This catches the most common kinds of wrong match, not every one.

A line set aside is published as missing for that store, under the rule above: never replaced, and never counted at a price we doubt. Each one is listed for review. Where the price is genuine, usually a store's own brand, it is confirmed and counts from the next week for as long as that price holds. This check began with the week of 9 October 2026 (methodology version 2026-10-09).

What could not be priced, and why

In the week ending 6 November 2026, Woolworths priced 58 of the 60 items (not baked beans or muesli), Coles 59 (not white sugar), Aldi all 60 and IGA 57 (not chicken breast fillets, bacon or pumpkin). A total that leaves items out is not directly comparable with one that does not. Every line this week.

4 September 2026, when the current series started: six of the 240 store lines cannot be matched. IGA publishes 56 of 60 and Aldi publishes 58 of 60, so neither total is directly comparable with Woolworths and Coles, which price all 60. The six are named here rather than left as a count, each with what has happened since:

• Pumpkin at IGA. IGA's catalogue had no fresh pumpkin, only prepared foods that carried the word, such as soup and ravioli.
• Tomato sauce at IGA. IGA stocked it, but it sat far enough down the product search that the Index could not reach it, and the products it could reach were a different thing at a different price. Priced from 11 September 2026.
• Bacon at IGA. No product in IGA's catalogue was classified as bacon. Everything the search returned was something else that happened to be bacon flavoured.
• Mushrooms at IGA. IGA had no plain fresh mushroom in a 200 g pack, only tinned pieces and speciality punnets. Priced from 2 October 2026.
• Long life milk at Aldi. Aldi's plain long life milk was out of stock at the time of pricing, and the line was left empty rather than filled with the nearest thing available, which was the same 2 litre carton of fresh milk the full cream milk line already bought.
• Sour cream at Aldi. Aldi sold sour cream, and cheaply, but listed it by weight where this line is measured in millilitres, so the Index could not read it. Rather than take the sweetened cream sitting next to it on the shelf, the line was left empty. Priced from 11 September 2026.

Four of these were gaps in what the shop had listed that week. The other two, tomato sauce and sour cream, were limitations of the Index rather than of the shop, and they are recorded as ours. In every case the line was published as missing, which is the rule above applied to ourselves.

Changes to the basket

The basket composition is locked. An item is only ever replaced if a product is permanently discontinued, and any such change is recorded here, dated, with the reason.

• 30 October 2026, basket v2.4: lines refuse products that only share a word with the item. No item changed. A review of every line the current series had priced found products that were not the item named: a fruit drink of 25% juice as IGA's orange juice in every week, crumbed chicken snacks as Woolworths' chicken breast fillets, a French vanilla latte mix as IGA's instant coffee, ice cream novelties and small tubs as vanilla ice cream, and one Halloween mini pumpkin as Coles' pumpkin. Each line now refuses the words that mark products of that kind, 336 refusals across 41 lines, each checked against the whole catalogue so that it refuses no product a store had bought correctly. On the Index this changes four lines: Woolworths' chicken breast fillets (1 kg), IGA's orange juice (1 L), Woolworths' broccoli (500 g) and Coles' pumpkin (1 kg). Weeks before 30 October are unchanged.
• 16 October 2026, basket v2.3: packs and loose produce are priced at the size the store sells. No item changed. From this week a multipack is read at the size the store sells; before, its listed size was multiplied by the number in the pack, which is too large where a store lists the whole pack. Produce sold loose by the kilo is priced at the store's rate for the weight the line asks for. A banana sold each is counted at 180 g, its weight with the skin, where it was 120 g. On the Index this changes six lines: Woolworths' bananas (1 kg) is six bananas where it was nine, about $2.00 less; Woolworths' beef sausages (500 g) is priced from a 550 g pack where a 450 g pack of six had been counted as 2.7 kg, $2.50 less; Aldi's bananas (1 kg) is priced loose at the kilo rate, 27 cents less; Aldi's broccoli (500 g) is priced loose at the kilo rate, 29 cents less; Aldi's Greek yoghurt (1 kg) has a price again; and Aldi's vanilla ice cream (1 L) is priced from a 2 L tub, 1 cent more. Weeks before 16 October are unchanged.
• 9 October 2026, basket v2.2: prices too cheap to be right are set aside. No item changed. From this week, a store's price that is less than half what the other stores charge for the same line, or a matched egg pack too light or too heavy for the eggs it was counted as, is published as missing rather than counted. The rule is explained under Prices too cheap to be right. Weeks before 9 October are unchanged.
• 30 September 2026, basket v2.1: two IGA lines corrected. No item changed. IGA's apples (1 kg) had been matched to a single apple, and its free-range eggs (12 pack) to a six-pack priced as a dozen, which understated IGA's total in the weeks of 18 and 25 September. Both lines now refuse those products, and each of the two weeks carries a correction note with the corrected totals.
• 4 September 2026: the rebuilt Index starts here, and the earlier series is retired. Full explanation below.

The August 2026 rebuild

What was wrong. The Index ran weekly from 12 June to 21 August 2026 on a 15 item basket. A review of every line found the product matching was picking the wrong product on roughly 40% of them. Some were obvious once looked at: at Coles and Woolworths "beef mince" was priced as sausage mince, and at Coles "chicken breast fillets" was priced as frozen crumbed nuggets. "Tasty cheese block" was priced as cream cheese or cottage cheese at all four supermarkets. On 21 August "cavendish bananas" at Coles matched a $195 case of banana snack puffs, which pushed the published Coles total to $267.75 against a normal week of about $73.

The cause was that thirteen of the fifteen items carried no rules about what the matched product had to be called, so the matcher was free to take the closest-ranked product rather than the right one.

What changed. Four things. Every item now carries explicit name rules, both words the product must contain and words that disqualify it, so sausage mince can no longer answer to beef mince. The product search was changed to stop the shelf category crowding out the item itself, which was hiding the correct product below the results cut-off. The basket was expanded from 15 items to 60 across fresh food, pantry, chilled, frozen, cleaning and personal care. And the new basket's 240 store lines were to be read by a person before the first week was published, rather than only being checked for whether they produced a number. That did not catch every wrong product: in the first week, 4 September, IGA's carrots line was priced from a three-pack of wet dog food. Basket v2.4, under Changes to the basket above, makes each line refuse a product that only shares a word with the item.

Why the old weeks were not corrected. Recomputing them would mean knowing what the corrected basket would have cost on each of those Fridays. That cannot be established honestly. Cuugo's stored price history is a record of changes rather than a daily snapshot, and it has missed changes: re-pricing each published week from it reproduces only 28 of 58 lines for the first week and 44 of 58 for the last. The matched products also moved from week to week, so there is no single product to substitute in. Restating the series would mean publishing prices no shopper was ever charged, which is worse than retiring it.

The 11 weeks from 12 June to 21 August 2026 are therefore retired. Their pages are still online and still readable, each carrying a notice, and they are excluded from search. They should not be cited. The current series starts on 4 September 2026 and does not connect to them.

There is no report for 28 August 2026. The rebuild was aimed at that Friday and was not finished in time, so that week was not priced by either basket. Rather than fill the gap with a number nobody collected, it is left as a gap.

Independence

Cuugo is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or paid by any supermarket. The Index is generated automatically from the same public price data that powers Cuugo's grocery price comparison.

Citing the Index? Link to this page - the URL is permanent and always shows the latest week. Media enquiries: contact Cuugo.