Which was the cheapest supermarket in July 2022?
Aldi was the cheapest supermarket in July, according to the latest monthly analysis from Which?.
We compared the prices in a basket of 47 popular grocery items in July. Our pricing analysis found that shoppers would have paid £74.23 for the shop at Aldi.
In our wider analysis – including 152 items across the six 'traditional' supermarkets – we found that you could save nearly £50 by shopping at Asda over Waitrose.
Here, Which? reveals the cheapest and most expensive supermarkets of the month.
Cheapest supermarket for a basket of groceries
Every day in July, we checked the price of 47 popular groceries, including Heinz Baked Beans, milk and tea bags, at the UK's biggest supermarkets to see how they compare.
The table below shows how much our basket cost on average:
Aldi was the cheapest overall, with our shop costing £74.23 on average, beating rival discounter Lidl by £1.38.
The same shop at Waitrose was £99.46 on average, making it £25.23 more expensive than Aldi.
Of the 'big four' supermarkets, Asda was the cheapest at £83.22.
Of course, price is just one factor when you're deciding which supermarket to shop at. We also survey shoppers on their experiences in terms of product quality, customer service, store experience, online deliveries and a range of other factors to reveal the best and worst supermarkets each year.
- Find out more: how to spend less at the supermarket
How do bigger shopping lists compare?
We also compared the cost of a larger trolley of 152 items (the original 47 plus 105 more).
This trolley included a larger number of branded items, such as Andrex toilet paper and Cathedral City cheese. You can’t always find these items in discounter supermarkets, so we haven’t included Aldi or Lidl in this comparison.
Asda cost the least with this trolley of groceries, continuing its streak as the cheapest traditional supermarket, which started in January 2020. It cost £331.81 on average for our big trolley shop, beating the next cheapest, Morrisons (£350.69), by £18.88.
Waitrose was a whopping £49.54 more expensive than Asda, coming in at £381.35 on average for the same trolley of goods.
- Find out more: managing the cost of living
How Which? compares supermarket prices
We look at the prices of hundreds of grocery items at eight major supermarkets every day throughout the year, using an independent price-comparison website.
For each supermarket, we work out the average price for each item across the month, then we add those up to get each store’s average trolley price. To keep things fair, we include special offers, but we don’t count multibuys or loyalty-scheme discounts.
Our shopping list includes branded items such as Heinz Baked Beans and Dolmio sauce, as well as own-brand products such as apples and lettuce. Own-brand items won’t be identical across supermarkets, but we’ve used experts to ensure everything we’ve compared is as similar as possible, based on a number of factors including quality and weight.
- Find out more: supermarket price comparison over time
Shoppers shifting to discounters
Grocery inflation is continuing to rise, jumping 1.6 percentage points since June to hit 9.9% (as of 19 July). Supermarket bills are rising rapidly and people are now having to pay and estimated £454 more per year at the tills, according to research from Kantar.
This is leading to a shift in the way people are shopping – away from traditional supermarkets towards discounters.
Aldi is now just 0.3% behind Morrisons in terms of market share, according to the latest Kantar data. Morrisons has been the UK's fourth largest supermarket since 2004, but its sales fell 6.7% in the three months to 11 July and it's close to being overtaken by a discounter for the first time.
All of the 'big four' supermarkets saw a drop in their market share since the start of the year, but Aldi and Lidl grew their share of the market by 1.4% and 0.7% respectively.
- Find out more: the truth about food inflation
