Breakfast shopping basket price comparison — Pick n Pay beats Checkers and Woolworths
Daily Investor created a basket of ingredients for a South African breakfast and compared the online prices at the top food retailers – Checkers, Shoprite, Pick n Pay, and Woolworths.
Online food delivery is growing among middle-class South Africans, with services like Checkers Sixty60, Pick n Pay Asap!, and Woolies Dash increasing in popularity.
The growth in online deliveries means that online prices are an important measure of affordability among this group.
Daily Investor created a basket of products and tracked the prices of these products through the food retailers’ websites.
The South African breakfast basket of food products contained the products below.
- 5 kg Iwisa Super Maize Meal
- 2.5 kg Selati Pure White Sugar
- 500 g Cerebos Iodated Table Salt
- 2-litre Sunfoil Canola Oil or store-brand
- 2-litre Douglasdale full-cream milk or store-brand
- 18-pack large eggs store brand
- 1 kg Tomatoes
- 1 kg Brown Onions
- 700 g loaf of Sasko Premium Sliced White Bread or store-brand
- 700 g loaf of Sasko Premium Sliced Brown bread or store-brand
- 450 g Rhodes Superfine Apricot Jam or store-brand
- 500 g Flora 50% Regular Fat Spread
- 200 g Nescafé Classic Instant Coffee
- 40 Pack Freshpak Pure Rooibos Tagless Teabags
- Rooikrantz Thick Boerewors per kg or store-brand
- 200 g Streaky Bacon
- 1 kg Jungle Oats Original Porridge
Pick n Pay had the lowest basket price, followed by Shoprite and Checkers, owned by the same parent company, Shoprite Holdings. Woolworths was the most expensive.
The three most expensive items in the basket were the boerewors, coffee, and cooking oil. The brown and white bread were the least expensive ingredients.
All ingredients came to R876.83 at Pick n Pay, R878.83 at Shoprite, R889.83 at Checkers, and R949.82 at Woolworths.
No specials or price deals were considered when making the price basket, only the listed online price on the retailers’ websites.
Breakfast price basket changes
Daily Investor also created a breakfast price basket earlier this year where Shoprite came out on top, Checkers in second place, and Pick n Pay in third.
Notably, when comparing the same items from Daily Investor’s first and last price baskets, Checkers saw the highest price increase of R82.50, while Pick n Pay saw the lowest increase at R13.39.
Pick n Pay’s basket price increased slightly from R729.85 to R742.86 when comparing like-for-like items from the two baskets.
Checkers’ basket increased from R684.36 to R766.86 – a significant R82.50 increase. Shoprite had the second-highest price increase of R69.00, while Woolworths came in third with a R27.00 increase.
It is interesting that Pick n Pay, which is the company’s premium food retail brand, offered better prices than Shoprite, which caters for the mass middle-income market.
Woolworths, which caters for rich South Africans, was the most expensive retailer in this and the previous comparison.
The company sells primarily private-label products, sometimes with a higher price tag than common brand names.
However, with some essential items like sugar and apricot jam, Woolworths had the lowest prices.
This article was first published by Daily Investor and is republished with permission.
Loading ...