Wow: this is now the most expensive supermarket
Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: the most expensive supermarket in the Netherlands.
The prices in the supermarket have been skyrocketing for months. Every time we go grocery shopping, we are shocked again when we check the receipt. ‘Inflation is hitting hard – all to Aldi and Lidl‘, we wrote once. But now it turns out that we might want to take that statement back. Research by Kassa (March 2023) shows that you are currently paying the most for your groceries at Aldi.
Huh? Aldi?! Isn’t that the discount store you go to when you want to save money? Well, not anymore.
The prices of your daily groceries
Kassa checks the prices of products from six supermarkets annually, which they call the Kassa Grocery Basket. They investigate the prices of 27 products from Albert Heijn, Jumbo, Aldi, Lidl, Plus, and Dirk van den Broek. These are everyday products. Tea for example, and apples and peanut butter, but also toilet paper and dish soap. Things we all have in our pantry. With the research, they want to check which supermarket is the most expensive and how much more we are spending compared to the last research. That was in this case in September 2022.
Rules of Kassa’s research
Kassa has established a number of rules for the research. This way, they remain as fair and objective as possible. For each product, they take the cheapest variant, so not a jar of peanut butter from a brand name at supermarket A and a jar from a private label at supermarket B. Additionally, they disregard price reductions due to promotions. These are always cheaper than the normal price at that moment. Finally, they pay close attention to the contents of the products. Within a product category, the contents must be equal or as similar as possible to each other. To keep this as fair as possible, Kassa converts the prices of the products to the price for the desired content.
The results
And yes, it turns out that groceries at Aldi are the most expensive. Kassa paid €66.46 for the products in their basket. A whopping €10 more than (as the test shows) the cheapest supermarket: Dirk van den Broek. There, Kassa only paid €56.46. Lidl also turns out to be one of the cheaper ones: €61.21. Looking again at the top of the list of most expensive supermarkets, we see Jumbo in second place (€65.36), Albert Heijn in third place (€64.84), and Plus in fourth place (€64.12). The supermarket with the largest price increase is Jumbo. The groceries there have become a staggering 16.99% more expensive compared to their prices in September 2022. Ouch.
Aldi always the most expensive?
Does this mean that you are guaranteed to always spend more at Aldi than, for example, Lidl? No. This grocery basket is of course not exactly the same as what you take home from the supermarket every week. Moreover, no account has been taken of promotions – products that you undoubtedly pick up. Still, it is a striking result that we did not see coming at all. Curious about the reactions from the supermarkets? Kassa has collected them and put them on their website.
Image: Sarah Shatz/Netflix
