With Sainsbury’s value as an investment opportunity highlighted by the 3.45% stake taken by Bestway of its shares last Friday, Sainsbury’s underlined its competitiveness in the market with the cheapest Grocer 33 basket by some distance this week.
At £69.70, Sainsbury’s was more than a fiver cheaper than Asda helped by a flurry of promotional activity as it offered a straight discount on nine of the products on our list.
This helped it offer the lowest price for 14 products, of which 12 were exclusively cheapest, including the Activia yoghurt, Birds Eye fish fingers, carrot cake and cherry tomatoes.
Asda was cheapest for nine products and exclusively so for six including the basil, mango and pine nuts.
Morrisons took third spot with its £76.37 trolley £6.67 more expensive than Sainsbury’s. Like Asda, it was exclusively cheapest for six items, including the croissants, eggs and wafer-thin ham.
Tesco was a long way off the pace this week – £8.22 more expensive than Sainsbury’s. Even factoring in its Clubcard Prices deals would only have saved £1.40, reducing its total to £76.52, still 15p more expensive than Morrisons and £6.82 more expensive than Sainsbury’s.
Waitrose has been showing signs of competitiveness throughout January, but not this week. It came in £22.75 more expensive than Sainsbury’s at £92.45.
Overall year-on-year inflation was tracking at 10.5%. The sharpest riser was the Heinz Beanz (see right), up 28% yoy and 6% since last month, while the wholemeal rolls and Birds Eye fish fingers were up 27% and 26% respectively. These were among 10 products that jumped by more than 20% compared to January 2022.
Three products fell in price versus last year, with the Innocent juice down 8%, the Nature Valley bars down 7% and the Fentimans lemonade 2% cheaper than a year ago, the latter up 10% month on month. These price cuts kept inflation on this basket down against the current run-rate, which reached another all-time high of 16.7% in the four weeks to 22 January, new figures from Kantar this week revealed. The figure was up from 14.4% in December.
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