Morrisons’ new ‘Unbeatable Prices’ promise is more than just an ambitious campaign: it is a significant move in the supermarket price wars.
From today, the supermarket pledged to price match or be cheaper than Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda, Aldi and Lidl across 500 core grocery lines including chicken, Warburtons bread, cotton buds and cod.
It replaces the retailer’s previous ‘Price Match’ scheme in which it matched both Aldi and Lidl across 200 core grocery lines. By laying down the grocery gauntlet with its own version of John Lewis’ ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ pledge, today’s move makes Morrisons the only supermarket to explicitly pledge to beat both full-shop and discounter rivals.
In doing so, Morrisons is effectively promising to be the cheapest supermarket on the market.
But it also poses the question: have we reached the end of the Aldi Price Match era?
Aldi Price Match losing relevance
There is no doubt Aldi Price Match, alongside loyalty prices and EDLP, has been instrumental in helping Tesco and, later, Sainsbury’s protect market share against what seemed to be the all-conquering rise of the discounters.
At its peak in January 2024, more than 2,000 SKUs across both grocers were covered by Aldi Price Match. However, the schemes are notoriously complex to run, requiring significant resources to monitor and update prices in real time, as well as putting significant pressure on already wafer-thin margins.
The direction of travel has been clear for some time. Over the past two years, both Tesco and Sainsbury’s have been steadily reducing the number of SKUs in their schemes. In January 2025, Asda scrapped its own short-lived Aldi/Lidl price match in favour of general lower prices under Rollback and Asda Price.
Critics of the approach have long argued that Aldi Price Match is nothing more than an unimaginative race to the bottom. By advertising that you’re matching Aldi’s prices, you’re effectively telling your own shoppers that Aldi’s prices are cheaper, reinforcing the idea that they set the value benchmark for shoppers. (Unsurprisingly, Aldi has been more than happy to jump on this in its own ad campaigns.)
There has been an intentional effort by Morrisons to put clear water between that notion and its own price match schemes.
The supermarket first raised eyebrows when it announced it would match both Aldi and Lidl as part of its own scheme in 2024. However, it began quietly removing any reference to Aldi and Lidl from its own price match scheme earlier this year, despite playing down the significance of this when The Grocer asked for more detail at the time.
There is a clear logic in today’s new approach. If all of its other competitors are already matching Aldi, Morrisons is still price matching the discounter – just without plastering Aldi’s name all over its shelves.
Morrisons is playing to its strengths
With Unbeatable Prices, Morrisons is moving the dial further.
Traditionally, Aldi price matching has been a defensive tactic used to retain customers, reassuring them they do not need to shop anywhere else. Morrisons is not only broadening its scheme, it’s doing so in a way that sems to be strategically aimed at actively attracting new shoppers.
The retailer has extended the scheme to its famous Market Street counters and is including lines from its premium The Best range, instantly upping perceptions of quality as well as value. Why pay for a pre-packaged roll from rival supermarkets when you can pick up a freshly-baked pack in Morrisons, for the same price?
It’s a clever piece of marketing, particularly considering that Tesco came under significant flack from BBC Panorama in 2024 over the perception of “inferior” quality products in its own price match programme.
Morrisons also enjoys structural advantages. As a major manufacturer through its Myton Foods arm, it has much tighter control over margin of matched products than other retailers. Investments in AI-powered pricing tools and the rollout of electronic shelf-edge labels across its entire estate should also reduce the day-to-day burden of running the scheme.
It’s an “unbeatable” prospect. Morrisons must be hoping it can live up to the hype.
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