For media
The Cuugo Grocery Price Index
A fixed basket of 60 everyday staples, priced every Friday morning at Woolworths, Coles, Aldi and IGA. Free to quote with attribution.
What it is
The same 60 items, every week, at the same four supermarkets. No sponsored products, no cherry-picked specials, no rotating basket. If an item is on special, the special price counts, because that is what a shopper pays that day.
The Index publishes four single-supermarket totals and one cheapest-at-each-store total, so the gap between shopping at one shop and shopping across four is visible every week. See the latest week.
How a figure is produced
- Cuugo records online shelf prices at the four supermarkets daily.
- Every Friday morning, Melbourne time, prices for the locked basket are frozen.
- Each basket item is matched to the closest available product at the stated pack size at each store. Where the exact pack size is not the cheapest way to reach the target amount, the basket buys the cheapest option at or above it, and the same rule applies at every store.
- Every line of every week is stored: the item, the store, the product that answered it, the pack, the unit price and the line price. That is 240 rows a week, kept so a figure can be checked rather than taken on trust.
What may be quoted
Any published figure, with attribution to Cuugo Grocery Price Index and a link to the report it came from. Weekly URLs and monthly URLs are permanent. Every report carries a "Cite this report" block with the wording, the period, the basket version and the methodology version.
Please quote the period as well as the number. A basket total without its Friday is not a fact anyone can check.
What the Index is not
- Not a measure of inflation. It is 60 grocery items, not a cost-of-living index, and it is not weighted by what households actually buy.
- Not a claim about any supermarket's overall pricing. It says what this basket costs at each store, nothing wider.
- Not comparable across a store with missing items. When an item cannot be matched at a store, the line is published as missing and the total is flagged rather than filled in. Those totals are not directly comparable with a complete store's. Which items, and why.
The retired series
An earlier version of this Index ran weekly from 12 June to 21 August 2026 on a 15 item basket. A review found its product matching was picking the wrong product on roughly 40% of lines, including pricing sausage mince as beef mince and, on one week, a $195 case of banana snack puffs as a kilogram of bananas.
Those eleven reports should not be cited. They remain online, each carrying a notice, because they were published and deleting them would be worse than labelling them. They are excluded from search. The current series starts on 4 September 2026 and does not connect to them, and no chart, total or rollup crosses that boundary. What was wrong, and what changed.
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. No supermarket sees a figure before it is published.
Contact
Media enquiries, data requests and corrections: contact Cuugo. If you have found something wrong in a published figure, say so and it will be checked and, if it is wrong, corrected in public.