Pak'nSave vs New World vs Woolworths: which is cheapest?
In Consumer NZ's June 2026 basket study — 16 items, four cities, fresh meat and produce excluded — Pak'nSave had the cheapest overall food prices, about $5 a week below the average for New World and Woolworths loyalty members. A fixed basket can't match your list, so the cheapest chain depends on what you buy.
Ask which supermarket is cheapest and three different answers come back: the study answer, the this-week answer, and the your-household answer. All three are real. The study answer is public and worth knowing; the other two shift with specials and with what a household actually buys — which is why the question keeps getting argued at Kiwi dinner tables.
What did Consumer NZ’s study actually find?
Across eight weeks in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, Consumer NZ priced a fixed 16-item basket at 12 supermarkets, using University of Auckland food-price data (June 2026). Pak’nSave averaged $84.38 for the basket — roughly $5 a week under the New World and Woolworths loyalty-member average, or more than $250 a year. Fresh meat and produce were excluded from the study for quality-variation reasons (Consumer NZ).
Why can’t one study crown a cheapest supermarket?
A fixed basket answers for the average of 16 items, not for any real household’s trolley. Chains win different products in different weeks, specials churn constantly, and the two Foodstuffs banners — Pak’nSave and New World — price store by store, while Woolworths lists national online prices. Whatever a study measured months ago, the ranking for one specific list, this week, at nearby stores, can genuinely differ.
How do you compare the three chains yourself?
A manual version costs about twenty minutes a month: pick the ten items your household actually rebuys, price them on each chain’s own website against the stores you can reach, and total the three columns. Repeat monthly, because specials shift the answer. The method works without any app — the limitation is only that ten items stand in for the whole trolley, and the checking never automates itself.
What does Marsonya do differently?
Marsonya prices the whole list, not a sample: live prices from all three chains across roughly 206 stores, refreshed nightly, totalled per store for the exact items a household buys. A list can then become a per-store buy plan — these items at Pak’nSave, those at New World — with checkout finished in each retailer’s own app. Marsonya never holds the card and never places the order.
The wider playbook — deals, substitutions and the habits that compound — lives in the pillar on spending less at the supermarket. A live version of the comparison, priced on a real basket, sits in the home page’s three-chain price table, and the structural half of the story is in why groceries cost so much in New Zealand.