Three NZ Supermarkets: Where the Lunchbox Basket Differs

Until recently I could only compare two chains honestly. New World is now in the index, and this is the first write-up with all three columns in it.

What it is not is one morning's shopping, and an earlier version of this article said it was. Behind the table are 54 readings — 18 items across three chains. 42 of them were taken in the week ending 7 September 2026. The other 12 are older than that, the oldest by 21 days.

That is the rule the table runs on rather than a slip: a row joins the three-way comparison when each chain's reading is within 30 days of the Woolworths round. Woolworths I can re-read automatically. Pak'nSave and New World price by store, and mine are read by hand — I cannot re-read twenty items at two banners on demand. Holding every row back until all three land in one week would leave almost nothing to compare.

But it does mean part of what follows is measuring the calendar as well as the shops, so here is exactly which part:

Every other reading in the table was taken within a week of 7 September 2026.

The totals

On the 18 items I can price at all three on those days:

Pak'nSave is cheapest, which surprises nobody. Two things about that are worth more than the ranking.

The first is the size. Woolworths is $5.62 dearer across 18 items — real money, but not the chasm the "Pak'nSave is way cheaper" shorthand implies.

The second is that New World is dearest, and New World and Pak'nSave are the same co-operative. Foodstuffs runs both. Whatever the gap between the two banners is, it is not a difference in buying power.

Most of the gap is five items

Those five lines are 94% of the entire Woolworths–Pak'nSave gap. The other 13 items, added together, account for the rest.

This is the practical finding and it is not the one the shorthand gives you. If you do one shop a week at one chain, you are not losing money across the board by picking the "wrong" one. You are losing it on a short list — and it is a list you could buy somewhere else without driving anywhere twice.

And it runs the other way on fresh produce

Woolworths is cheaper than Pak'nSave on four of the 18 items:

Three of those are salad vegetables. That is not a coincidence I can prove from one round, but it is the second time the fresh produce rows have leaned this way, and it is the sort of thing worth watching rather than announcing.

Counting cheapest-per-item rather than totals: Pak'nSave wins 13 of the 18, Woolworths 3, New World 2.

What is not in the table

wholegrain bread and cheese block are missing from the three-way comparison — I do not have a New World price for them in this round, so they sit out rather than being estimated. An estimated number in a price index is worse than a missing one.

The same rule applies to specials. Every figure here is a regular shelf price. If a chain has something on promotion this week, that is real money in your pocket, but it is not what an index measures — let specials in and the index reports deflation every time something goes on sale. The weekly deals are tracked separately, and what that record shows is its own article.

What I would not claim

These are online Click & Collect prices, not shelf tags, and the two can differ.

Pak'nSave and New World price by store, and mine are both Ormiston in East Auckland. This is one corner of one city's answer, not the country's.

And it is one round, not a trend. The five items carrying the gap here are not guaranteed to be the five carrying it next month — when I looked at the two-chain basket over a longer run, the concentration held but the items moved. That the gap concentrates looks robust. Which items concentrate it does not.

The full table, with every row's reading date and the reason for each exclusion, is on the NZ Lunchbox Price Index page, and the same rows are downloadable as price-index.csv — one row per chain per item, each carrying its own reading date.

One more thing that file will tell you about itself. A pinned product and SKU — so you can see exactly which brand and size was priced — is recorded for 18 of the 18 Pak'nSave rows and 16 of the 18 Woolworths rows, but only 2 of the 18 New World ones. The rest of the New World column was read by hand at the Ormiston store and the product was not logged at the time. Those prices are real readings, but you cannot check which yoghurt I priced, and I would rather say that than quietly leave the column blank. The CSV marks every row either way. Three-chain totals are the kind of number that is easy to assemble wrongly, so the rows are there to be checked. Published under CC BY.

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