Supermarket Sweep: Valencia versus UK

It’s common to hear immigrants to Valencia (our editor has banned the word expats!) discussing supermarket prices, either claiming life is cheaper here or, occasionally, that it is more expensive. Eugene Costello put it to the test as scientifically as possible…

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…. Oh, all right, London, a couple of years back before I moved to Valencia, my sister-in-law shared her dad’s theory with me. Namely, whenever you are introduced to a bunch of people at a social event who had hitherto not known each other, talk would invariably turn to which supermarket they preferred, and why.

Now, my ex-wife favours Waitrose so my daughter was always slightly suspicious of my insistence on favouring Lidl (why pay more, right?) or occasionally Aldi, which I tried to convince her was the bastard child of Lidl and Waitrose, to little avail.

Such was her disdain for “off-brand products” that one time she was staying with me and asked suspiciously what was Batt’s ketchup? I convinced her it was a premium product, better than Heinz, produced by a small artisanal supplier in the Yorkshire Dales to a small production scale and was very, very expensive indeed. 

All was going swimmingly until she looked at the label and saw “Produced for Lidl gmbh” under the ingredients. Such is the pervasive power of branding and advertising, I thought with a sigh…

Last week, I enjoyed a weekend in the country staying with my good friends Chris and Becky in Alturi near Turis and Montserrat. On Sunday, Chris brought up this perennial debate, saying he had friends who swore blind their food bills were cheaper in the UK. 

So we hit upon the old tabloid newspaper challenge of devising a typical weekly shopping basket and totalling up what it would cost on four supermarket websites, Mercadona and Consum for Valencia and Tesco and Sainsbury’s for the UK. By God, we know how to have fun.

We chose typical products that a couple or small family might select, listed here. All prices are correct as of Sunday 10 October. Believe it or not, I have not yet totalled up the sums so I will be as surprised as anyone by the total. 

A word on methodology. We tried scrupulously to be fair, favouring own-brand products where they exist, for instance. It was not always easy, since some have idiosyncratic sizes, such as 900mls instead of 1 litre, for instance, but we did our best. The full list of price comparisons can be found at the end.

There were one or two surprises, such as the fact that bananas, which typically come from the Canary Isles, were cheap across all four, 0.18€ in Mercadona and 0.20€ in Consum, compared to £0.13 in both UK supermarkets. But oranges, which often come from the Comunidad, were almost twice the price here than in the UK.

But first, the products…

• Sliced family loaf of bread
• Butter
• Family pizza. Fresh 4 cheese
• Cheddar cheese, 300g
• Baked beans
• Milk, fresh, 1 litre
• Cooked ham 2 x 225g
• Cheese portions, 24, 375
• Instant coffee, 200g
• Tinned chopped tomatoes 400g
• Oven chips, 750g
• Tinned tuna 3 x 60g
• Eggs, 12 L
• Chicken breast, 500g
• Sausages, 445g
• Minced beef, 500g
• Three peppers 600g
• Bananas, each                
• Oranges, each
• Potatoes 5kg washed
• Rice 1 kg
• Flour 1kg
• Pasta, 500g
• Red wine, 75cl, Crianza Rioja
• Greek yoghurt 1kg
• White wine sauvignon blanc rueda or similar
• Orange concentrate juice 1l
• Bottle of premium vodka
• 330ml cans of Amstel or similar
• Dishwasher tablets 30 tabs
• Laundry gel 3l
• Bleach 2l
• Fairy liquid 900ml
• Deodorant spray 200ml
• Shower gel 1l
• Bin bags 40 bags, 30l
• Shampoo anticaspa 400ml        
• Toothpaste baking soda 100ml
• Toilet roll 12 rolls
• Bag of dog food 18kg
• 1 litre of ice cream
• 3 x onions (1kg)

And the results (give me five while I tot them up!)

So that would appear to be that, then… Mercadona is nearly half the price of Tesco.

Let that be an end to the discussion…

• UK prices converted to euros using xe.com’s live exchange rates at time of writing