Checkers, Shoprite, Pick n Pay, and Woolworths – one retailer has the cheapest food basket

Daily Investor created a basket of popular breakfast ingredients for a South African breakfast and compared the online prices at the top food retailers – Checkers, Shoprite, Pick n Pay, and Woolworths.

South Africa’s grocery retail sector is notoriously competitive. Now, with many of the country’s consumers facing financial pressure, retailers are looking for ways to offer the lowest prices possible.

This has opened the door for discount retailers like Boxer and Best Before to enter the market. However, the country’s biggest retailers also want to undercut each other’s prices.

This is because, for many customers, this is the deciding factor when they decide where they want to buy their groceries.

Some major retailers have also started collaborating with banks like Standard Bank and FNB to attract more customers and improve their value offerings.

At the same time, online food delivery is growing among middle-class South Africans. Services like Checkers Sixty60, Pick n Pay Asap!, and Woolies Dash are becoming more popular.

The growth in online deliveries means that online prices are an essential measure of affordability among this group. As such, Daily Investor created a basket of products and tracked their prices through the websites of food retailers.

The South African breakfast basket of food products contained the products below.

• 5 kg Iwisa Super Maize Meal
• 2.5 kg Selati Pure White Sugar
• 500 g Cerebos Iodated Table Salt
• 2-litre Sunfoil Canola Oil or store-brand
• 2-litre Douglasdale full-cream milk or store-brand
• 18-pack large eggs store brand
• 1 kg Tomatoes
• 1 kg Brown Onions
• 700 g loaf of Sasko Premium Sliced White Bread or store-brand
• 700 g loaf of Sasko Premium Sliced Brown bread or store-brand
• 450 g Rhodes Superfine Apricot Jam or store-brand
• 500 g Flora 50% Regular Fat Spread
• 200 g Nescafé Classic Instant Coffee
• 40 Pack Freshpak Pure Rooibos Tagless Teabags
• Rooikrantz Thick Boerewors per kg or store-brand
• 200 g Streaky Bacon
• 750g Jungle Oats Original Instant Porridge

No specials or price deals were considered when making the price basket, only the listed online price on the retailers’ websites.

The cheapest vs most expensive retailer

The discount retailer Shoprite had the lowest basket price, reaching R933.83. This was followed by Checkers, which the same parent company, Shoprite Holdings, owns – which cost R955.33.

Pick n Pay’s basket had the second-highest price coming in at R980.83, and Woolworths’ was the most expensive at R1,025.03.

Although Woolworths’s private label offerings target higher earners, there was less than a R100 difference between its price basket and Shoprite’s.

Generally, Woolworths’ items were priced similarly to those of its competitors. However, its eggs and boerewors are where its customers will feel the higher prices.

The most expensive item in the basket was coffee, which has skyrocketed in price over the last few years. Even though South Africa’s headline inflation hit a five-year low, coffee lovers aren’t seeing any benefits.

According to Stats SA, consumer price inflation (CPI) dropped from 3.2% in February 2025 to 2.7% in March 2025, a sharper decline than analysts expected.

The last time inflation reached such low levels was in June 2020, when it fell to 2.2%. However, in March, coffee prices shot up 18.8%, only marginally lower than February’s 19% spike.

This means South African coffee lovers are not yet in for any relief, whether they get their caffeine kick from local cafes or grocery retailers.

Boerewors and cooking oil were the second and third most expensive items, respectively. Brown and white bread were the least expensive ingredients.

The graph below shows the difference between the breakfast price baskets at Shoprite, Checkers, Pick n Pay and Woolworths.