Buy the same items somewhere cheaper. On CHOICE's own basket, a year of groceries cost $3,368.30 at Aldi, against $3,911.32 at Woolworths and $3,962.14 at Coles. Loyalty points on that same shop returned $10.
That is the whole hierarchy in one comparison. Nearly everything else — points, apps, timing the markdowns — competes for what is left after the question of where each item comes from has been settled.
Below is each common piece of grocery advice, with the Australian evidence for it and what it appears to be worth. Where the evidence is thin, we say so.
What each move is worth
| Move | What the evidence shows | Roughly worth |
|---|---|---|
| Buy the same items somewhere cheaper | $543 to $594 a year between chains on CHOICE's annual basket | Hundreds a year |
| Waste less of what you bought | About $2,500 of food discarded per household a year (2021 estimate) | Large, but partly unavoidable |
| Compare unit prices | Best-value picks rose from 63% to 76% when unit prices were shown | Per item, compounding |
| Ignore the "was" price | A court found 13 of 14 sample Coles discount tickets misleading | Avoids paying a fake discount |
| Collect loyalty points | $10 a year on a $3,900 shop | About a quarter of one per cent |
The arithmetic in this article is ours, done on figures published by CHOICE, the ACCC and the ABS. Every figure is dated, because grocery prices move.
1. Buy the same items somewhere cheaper
This is the largest lever, and it is not close.
CHOICE runs a government-funded quarterly basket survey. Across its 2025 surveys, a year of the same groceries came to $3,368.30 at Aldi, $3,911.32 at Woolworths and $3,962.14 at Coles. On those figures the gap is $543.02 between Aldi and Woolworths, and $593.84 between Aldi and Coles — about 13.9% and 15.0% of the dearer bill.
Three caveats, because the number is easy to over-read.
The baskets are not brand-for-brand. In the March 2026 survey, Aldi's basket held one name-brand product and the Coles and Woolworths baskets held three each. Part of the measured gap is an own-brand product priced against a branded one, not the same product at two prices.
You do not buy that basket. It is 16 products. Your fortnight is not.
There may not be an Aldi near you, and a longer drive eats the saving.
Which is why "shop at Aldi" is weaker advice than it looks. The move that actually survives all three caveats is narrower: for the specific things you buy, check which chain is cheaper this week. Some items are dearer at the chain that wins the basket, and those are the ones worth knowing about.
We looked at the chain-level question in more detail in the cheapest supermarket in Australia.
Doing that by hand across three websites is why almost nobody does it. Price your own list across the three chains — each product card shows the retailers we hold a matched price for, with the unit price alongside each one wherever the retailer publishes it. The three catalogues do not line up item for item, so some products carry all three prices and many carry two. It is free and needs no account.
There is a second piece of friction that quietly undoes the saving, and it is worth naming because it is the reason people stop doing this after a fortnight. Having worked out that six things are cheaper at one chain and four at the other, you still have to find all ten again on two retailer websites. Grovena Pro sends your cart straight into a Coles or Woolworths trolley instead, at $5.99 a month. It runs through our Chrome extension on a computer, so it is built for the online shop specifically — an in-store trip is already served by the list on your screen.
2. Compare unit prices, not shelf prices
The shelf price tells you what leaves your account. The unit price — dollars per kilo, per litre, per 100g — tells you what you are getting for it, and it is the only way to judge a 900g pack against a 1kg one.
CHOICE tested whether it changes decisions. Shown products without unit pricing, 63% of shoppers picked the best-value option. With unit pricing shown, that rose to 76%. The survey covered 1,011 Australians who are the main or joint grocery buyers, with fieldwork from 4 to 18 June 2025.
That is a thirteen-point improvement from reading a number already printed on the ticket.
The catch is that the number is often hard to read. In the same survey, the share of shoppers finding unit prices useful fell to 61%, down from 71% in 2022. Of those reporting problems, 38% hit inconsistent units of measurement, 38% found the text difficult to read, and 32% found it obstructed or covered.
Inconsistent units are the worst of these, because they defeat the comparison entirely: one product priced per 100g beside another priced per kilo cannot be compared at a glance, and that is precisely the moment most people give up.
3. Treat the "was" price as unproven
On 14 May 2026 the Federal Court found that Coles made false or misleading representations about "Down Down" discounts. The ACCC's case alleged the conduct covered 245 products sold between February 2022 and May 2023; the liability hearing itself turned on a sample of 14 tickets, and the Court found 13 of those 14 misleading.
That distinction is worth keeping straight, because it is the sort of thing coverage routinely blurs: 245 is the scope of the ACCC's allegations, not the number of tickets a court has ruled on.
The mechanism matters more than the verdict. Coles temporarily raised prices by at least 15%, held them briefly, then moved the products onto "Down Down" at a price the ACCC said was "still higher than, or the same as, the price it had previously sold for before the price increase". The products named in the proceedings included Coca-Cola, Cadbury chocolates, Colgate toothpaste and Sanitarium Weet-Bix.
Penalties have not yet been decided, and a separate case against Woolworths over its "Prices Dropped" tickets is still awaiting judgment. Nothing here is settled against Woolworths.
The practical consequence is narrow and useful: a discount ticket is a claim, not evidence. The saving on the label is calculated against a "was" price you cannot see and did not observe. What tells you whether something is genuinely cheap is what it has actually cost over recent weeks, and what it costs at the other two chains right now.
This is not a hypothetical gap in shopper information. The ACCC's supermarkets inquiry recommended minimum information requirements for discount price promotions, backed by record-keeping obligations, and that the largest chains provide APIs "to third parties such as online price comparison tools". That was one of 20 recommendations in the final report, which the ACCC published on 21 March 2025. No chain publishes that feed today, so the comparison still has to be assembled the hard way.
Grovena records price history on the products it tracks, so a "was" price can be checked against what the product has actually cost. What that changes is the buying decision rather than the ticket: a staple that drops every six weeks is something to wait for, and one that drops twice a year is something to stock up on when you see it. The ticket looks identical in both cases. History charts and price alerts are part of Grovena Pro.
We went through the Coles judgment, and the far more common legal version of the same problem, in when a half-price ticket is a real saving.
4. Waste less of what you already bought
The biggest single number in Australian grocery spending is not a price. It is the food that gets thrown out.
Research by Karunasena, Pearson and the Fight Food Waste CRC, published in 2021 and summarised in End Food Waste Australia's fact library, puts household food waste at about $2,500 a year, or more than four kilograms a week.
Treat that figure carefully. It is five years old, it is the estimated value of food discarded rather than money you can simply reclaim, and no household gets to zero — some waste is peel, bone and genuine spoilage. Anyone quoting it as "$2,500 you could save" is overstating it.
Even discounted heavily, it dwarfs the loyalty section below. And it responds to planning rather than price: buying what you will actually cook, in sizes you will actually finish. The bulk pack with the better unit price is not cheaper if a third of it goes in the bin, which is the one case where the $/kg figure will mislead you.
5. Loyalty points: join, but do not plan around them
Both major programs work the same way: one point per dollar spent, and $10 off once you reach 2,000 points.
Run against CHOICE's annual basket, that is $10 across a year on a shop of roughly $3,900 — about a quarter of one per cent of what you spent. The gap between chains on the same basket was more than fifty times that.
The paid tiers do not change the picture. At $7 a month, CHOICE calculated the net annual benefit at $13.78 at Woolworths and $15.05 at Coles after the $84 in fees. Its conclusion was that shoppers "would still have been far better off buying the cheaper groceries at Aldi".
None of which is an argument against joining. They are free, and the personalised offers occasionally beat the base rate. It is an argument against treating points as a savings strategy, which is how most articles present them.
What nobody can tell you
How much you will save. Not us, and not the sites promising "$500 to $1,200 a year" — we could not trace those figures to any published source.
Your saving depends on your basket, your suburb, which chains you can reach and what happens to be discounted the week you shop. The honest version is that the evidence shows the ranking of these moves clearly and the size only roughly.
The same problem sits under the question people usually ask first — am I spending too much? There is no current official figure for what an Australian household spends on groceries, which is why every published "average" disagrees with the next one. We took that apart in the average grocery bill in Australia.
For context on the pressure everyone is shopping under: food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 3.3% in the year to June 2026, though that group is led by meals out and takeaway rather than supermarket shelves. Meanwhile the ACCC found Aldi, Coles and Woolworths to be among the most profitable supermarket businesses among global peers, with average product margins rising over the past five financial years.
Common questions
What is the single most effective way to cut a grocery bill?
Buying the same items somewhere cheaper. On CHOICE's annual basket the gap between chains was $543.02 to $593.84 a year, against $10 from loyalty points on the same shop.
Are supermarket specials real discounts?
Sometimes. In May 2026 the Federal Court found 13 of 14 sample Coles "Down Down" tickets misleading, because the products had not sold at the stated "was" price for a reasonable period. A ticket asserts a saving; it does not demonstrate one.
Are Flybuys and Everyday Rewards worth it?
Worth joining, not worth planning around. Both return $10 per 2,000 points at one point per dollar, which came to about $10 a year on CHOICE's basket. The $7-a-month paid tiers netted $13.78 at Woolworths and $15.05 at Coles.
Is buying in bulk always cheaper?
On unit price, usually. In practice, only if you finish it. The larger pack with the better $/kg is a false economy when part of it is thrown out, and Australian households discard an estimated four kilograms of food a week.
Do I need to shop at multiple supermarkets?
Not necessarily. The saving comes from knowing which items are cheaper where, which is worth checking even if you then buy everything in one place. Two extra trips can cost more in fuel and time than they return.
The short version
Where you buy the items is worth hundreds a year. Not wasting them is worth more still. Unit prices decide individual purchases, and discount tickets have now been found in court to be an unreliable guide to value. Points are worth about $10.
Sort the first two and the rest is rounding.
Check the items you buy most before your next shop.