NZ grocery prices,
August 2026

Published 2026-09-03 · covers 2026-08-01 to 2026-08-31 · about 986 like-for-like products compared every day

August was a quiet month on the shelf tag and a busy one in the specials. Regular prices barely moved at any of the three chains, PAK'nSAVE stayed about ten percent cheaper than Woolworths on identical products, butter came down, bread came down a little everywhere at once, and the biggest price differences in the country were not between chains at all, but between one PAK'nSAVE and another.

The gap What moved Staples Biggest movers Specials Store to store Method

1. PAK'nSAVE vs Woolworths: the gap held

On identical products, same brand and same pack size, Woolworths charged a median 10.2% more than PAK'nSAVE in August. In the last third of July it was 10.0%. PAK'nSAVE was the cheaper chain on every one of the 29 days we have clean data for, and cheaper on 78% of the individual products on a typical day. Woolworths wins the other quarter, which is the part people forget.

The daily figure moved between 9.1% and 11.0%. The low points are Mondays. Both chains roll their specials on a Monday, and Woolworths runs a bigger specials programme (a third of its catalogue on any given day, see below), so on the day a fresh set of Woolworths specials lands the gap narrows by about a point, then widens again through the week as PAK'nSAVE's own specials catch up. It never closed.

This is measured at Woolworths' Club price where one applies. A shopper without a Club card faces a larger gap, not a smaller one.

2. What moved on the shelf tag

We priced every product that was on the shelf on both 31 July and 31 August, same pack, at each chain's reference store, and looked only at lines that were not on special on either day, so a change is the shelf tag itself moving rather than a promotion starting or ending.

Same product, same pack, priced at the reference store on 31 July and again on 31 August. "Regular-price" means the item was not on special on either date, so the change is a shelf-tag change rather than a promotion starting or ending. "Rose" and "fell" are moves of more than half a percent.

Most tags did not move. Where they did, rises outnumbered cuts at all three chains, by about two to one at Woolworths and closer to three to one at PAK'nSAVE and New World, but the net drift was under one percent everywhere. Including specials the picture is noisier (25% of PAK'nSAVE lines were dearer on 31 August than 31 July, 18% cheaper), which is mostly which items happened to be on special on each date.

Share of regular-price lines in each aisle that rose or fell between 31 July and 31 August. Aisles with fewer than 100 comparable lines are left out. Beer, wine and cider is tracked but not reported here.

Two aisles stand out, in opposite directions.

• Packaged bread got a little cheaper at every chain at once. A quarter of regular-price bakery lines at PAK'nSAVE and New World fell, and a sixth at Woolworths, almost all by the same one to two percent: a Tip Top Supersoft 700 g loaf went from $3.97 to $3.89 at PAK'nSAVE and $4.34 to $4.29 at Woolworths, Vogel's 750 g from $5.06 to $5.01, Ploughmans from $4.17 to $4.09, Pams Value white from $2.05 to $2.02. Every brand, every chain, the same month. That pattern is a supplier price change being passed through, not a retailer promotion.
• Pantry rises were concentrated in sauces, cereals and honey. At PAK'nSAVE a third of regular-price table sauces and condiments rose, as did a quarter of cooking sauces and stocks, a quarter of jams, honey and spreads, and three in ten breakfast cereals. The honey moves were large: Pams multi-floral manuka 500 g from $6.99 to $10.19 at PAK'nSAVE and $7.59 to $11.09 at New World, Pams Value creamed clover 1 kg from $12.39 to $15.94. Arnott's Shapes went from $2.99 to $3.49 across the range, Hubbards cereals rose eleven to eighteen percent, Cussons Morning Fresh dishwashing liquid from $2.49 to $3.99 for 400 ml at PAK'nSAVE and $6.49 to $8.99 for 900 ml at New World.

Fruit and vegetables are the volatile aisle by nature. A third of Woolworths' regular-price produce lines rose over the month and a sixth fell, which is winter ending, not pricing strategy.

3. The staples

Thirteen grade-locked staples, the same cut or the same pack at each chain, priced on 31 July and 31 August.

Price on 31 August at each chain's reference store, with the change since 31 July. ★ marks the cheapest chain that day. Grade-locked pairs: the same cut or the same pack, not a "closest equivalent". Woolworths prices are Club prices where they apply.

• Butter fell. A 500 g block went from $7.99 to $7.29 at PAK'nSAVE, and from $8.39 to $7.49 at both New World and Woolworths. Those are shelf-tag cuts, not specials, at all three chains in the same month, which points at the wholesale price rather than a retailer decision.
• Milk converged. Two litres of standard milk went up at PAK'nSAVE ($4.59 to $4.74) and down at New World and Woolworths ($4.91 to $4.82). The gap between the chains on the single most-bought item in the country is now eight cents.
• Steak is where specials distort the picture. PAK'nSAVE porterhouse reads as a twenty percent rise, but the July figure was a special and August's is the shelf tag; New World the same. Rump is the reverse. On beef the honest reading is that PAK'nSAVE's shelf price is a good deal below Woolworths', and either chain's special beats the other's shelf.
• Prime beef mince is the staple Woolworths wins, at $20.50 a kilo against $26.99 at PAK'nSAVE, unchanged at Woolworths all month. Chicken breast goes the other way, $12.99 against $15.40.

4. Biggest movers

Largest regular-price changes between 31 July and 31 August, items that started at $2 or more, one entry per product. Fresh produce dominates the rises, which is the season; the Woolworths falls are mostly end-of-winter clearance on clothing and hot water bottles rather than grocery prices, and are shown for completeness.

Up

Down

5. Specials: how much, and how deep

On a typical August day Woolworths had 36.2% of its catalogue on special, PAK'nSAVE 22.8% and New World 25.2%. When something was on special the discount was about a fifth off the shelf price at both PAK'nSAVE (mean 22.1%) and Woolworths (mean 24.1%). New World's online "special" flag does not reliably carry a different price in the data we can read, so we do not publish a discount figure for it.

Put those together and you get the shape of the market: Woolworths runs a shelf price about ten percent above PAK'nSAVE and then discounts a third of the range by about a quarter. On the items that are on special that week, Woolworths is often the cheaper store. On everything else, it is not. Which is why the useful question is never "which chain is cheaper" but "which chain is cheaper for the things on my list this week", and that is what the tool answers.

6. Same chain, different store

PAK'nSAVE prices each store separately, and we read all of them. On 2026-08-31 we priced the 1,240 products every store stocked at all 45 stores.

Every PAK'nSAVE store on 31 August 2026, priced on the 1,240 products all 45 stores stocked that day. Riccarton stands for the whole South Island: all 13 South Island stores share one price list, which the weekly zone audit re-proves.

How far apart the same product is priced across stores

The widest spreads

Read the first pair of tables carefully, because the headline number hides the real finding. Across the North Island, the cheapest and dearest PAK'nSAVE on that basket were 1.6% apart: Petone at the bottom, Hastings at the top, and the other forty-two North Island stores in between. The South Island is a different price list, 6.3% above Petone and 4.6% above the dearest North Island store. All thirteen South Island PAK'nSAVEs share that list, so this is not a Riccarton quirk; it is what a Christchurch, Dunedin or Nelson shopper pays for the same trolley.

Per item, the spread is far wider than per basket. Of 4,690 products stocked in forty or more stores, 3,190 were priced more than ten percent apart between the cheapest and dearest store, and 595 more than fifty percent apart. Loose garlic ran from $7.99 to $69.99 a kilo. Produce and health-and-body products vary the most; the fridge, eggs and pet aisles the least. This is why a small, specific shopping list can be worth a drive and a big general one usually is not.

7. Method, and what to be careful with

• Source. The same public shelf prices each retailer shows on its own website, read once a night for every store. PAK'nSAVE 10,095 products on 30 clean days, New World 15,770 on 31, Woolworths 17,534 on 29.
• Like-for-like. The chain gap uses only strictly matched pairs: same brand, same pack size, high name similarity, compared on price per unit. Every matched pair is published on the how it works page. Own-brand ranges are never silently cross-matched.
• Reference stores. Chain-level figures use PAK'nSAVE Lower Hutt and the North Island price lists for New World and Woolworths. The store-to-store section reads every PAK'nSAVE.
• Specials. Prices are what you would pay at the till that day, including specials and Woolworths Club prices. The "regular price" figures in sections 2 and 4 exclude any item on special on either date.
• Days dropped. A day is excluded for a chain when the night's read came back more than ten percent short, rather than averaged in.
  • wool 2026-08-10 excluded: partial load (8746 vs median 17577)
  • wool 2026-08-25 excluded: partial load (15116 vs median 17577)
  • nw: promo flag carries no price effect for most products (median discount 0), discount figures not publishable
• Reproducible. Every number here comes from one script run against the price database, and the raw upstream responses are kept. If you want a figure checked or cut a different way, ask.

Next report: September 2026, early October. The live comparison at isitworththetrip.nz updates every night; the cheapest-in-NZ pages update with it.