There are a few things Australians just don’t stop talking about.

There’s the footy, how good our coffee is, how deadly our wildlife is, and more recently, the price of groceries.

With the rising cost of living, groceries have been putting a serious dent in household wallets. 

And as a result, those yellow special sticker items have become more popular than pickleball this year.

In fact, Choice found that the cost of food and groceries is a concern for 87% of households.

This number has remained high since March 2022, when the high cost of living first started to hit.

But when it comes to grocery stores in Australia, there are only a few main options - the two major players, Coles and Woolies, and German disrupter, Aldi.

So we decided to take a closer look at the prices of common grocery items across these three stores to see how they stack up against each other.

It probably isn’t too much of a surprise to see Aldi as the cheapest of the lot.

In fact, for the basket of items listed above, Aldi is 21.5% cheaper than Coles.

And our data isn’t the only one showing this discrepancy.

Choice’s quarterly survey on supermarket prices shows that a basket of Aldi groceries is $18 cheaper when compared with the same items at Coles or Woolies.

And as this becomes a growing concern for Aussies, there’s more investigation happening into how exactly our supermarket big dogs are setting their prices.

The price gouging inquiry

Yep, get out the popcorn, because the story is about to get scandalous!

Earlier this year, the ACCC led an inquiry to investigate the billion dollar profits supermarket giants were bringing in at a time of high cost of living.

Coles reported net profit of $1.1 billion while Woolworths reported a net profit of $1.7 billion in the 2023-24 financial year.

And the ACCC smelled something fishy in these profits. Price gouging.

When supermarkets set the prices for bananas or bread or pasta sauce, they take into account a range of costs. 

Think: production costs, transportation costs, labour, inventory, and more. And of course, their profit margin.

But when a business sets the price of its products above a reasonable level, it’s considered price gouging. 

Now that’s only the beginning, because this scandal could go beyond price gouging. 

The ACCC is also looking into Coles and Woolies for allegedly misleading customers with their “prices dropped” and “down down” claims.

If you’ve ever seen an item at a grocery store “on special” and looked underneath the special sticker to see that the OG price was the same…that’s what this is about.

The ACCC reckons that supermarkets offered some products at regular prices for 180 days, and then increased prices for a short period of time, and then put them “on special” when in fact the prices were higher than or the same as the regular price.

And they reckon this misleading has happened across over 500 products for over a year by Coles and Woolies.

If the ACCC is able to provide these claims in court, it could lead to a fine of up to $50 million per offence.

But until we have some answers, it looks like Aldi is going to continue to be the new Aussie favourite supermarket.