Cuugo Grocery Price Index

This week's basket totals

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: Woolworths cheapest at $238.4518 Sep 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Woolies Wins at $232.4911 Sep 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Woolies Wins at $251.404 Sep 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Woolies wins at $69.7921 Aug 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Aldi leads, down $2.9114 Aug 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Coles $73.44, Aldi $77.637 Aug 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Aldi $77.63, Coles $73.5531 Jul 2026
• Grocery Price Index: Woolies Up $8.65 This Week24 Jul 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.

What could not be priced, and why

Six of the 240 store lines could not be matched when the current series started. 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:

• Pumpkin at IGA. IGA's catalogue has no fresh pumpkin, only prepared foods that carry the word, such as soup and ravioli.
• Tomato sauce at IGA. IGA stocks it, but it sits far enough down the product search that the Index cannot reach it, and the products it can reach are a different thing at a different price.
• Bacon at IGA. No product in IGA's catalogue is classified as bacon. Everything the search returns is something else that happens to be bacon flavoured.
• Mushrooms at IGA. IGA has no plain fresh mushroom in a 200 g pack, only tinned pieces and speciality punnets.
• 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 buys.
• Sour cream at Aldi. Aldi sells sour cream, and cheaply, but lists it by weight where this line is measured in millilitres, so the Index cannot currently read it. Rather than take the sweetened cream sitting next to it on the shelf, the line is left empty.

Four of these are gaps in what the shop had listed that week. The other two, tomato sauce and sour cream, are limitations of the Index rather than of the shop, and they are recorded as ours. In every case the line is 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.

• 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 every one of the 240 store lines was read by a person before the first week was published, rather than only being checked for whether it produced a number.

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.