Average Australian Grocery Basket by Region

This shows the average price of the various different grocery baskets used on the GroceryWatch web-site, broken down by region. The list is sorted by the average price of the baskets at Woolworths (highest down to lowest).

Really interesting graph! What is a grocery basket? Does it contain certain items?

GroceryChoice (not GroceryWatch as I wrote about...getting mixed up with FuelWatch!) is a new Australian Government initiative to help consumers find cheaper prices. The specific products in the baskets are not identified to prevent stores gaming the system. The main baskets comprise selections of the following: Meat & Seafood, Fruit & Vegetables, Dairy, Breads & Cereals, Drinks & Other Snacks, General Groceries. Details are available here: http://www.grocerychoice.go...

I should add that in the chart above, the price shown is the average across all the baskets. I also created a chart showing the average price around the country of each basket: http://www.swivel.com/graph...

That's really interesting. I read that they have a similar program going on in Italy, where consumers can text message to find the cheapest food prices.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/...

The Italian approach sounds interesting. Here the Government has specifically avoided providing information on individual products (their argument is that big chains could "game" the system). As a consumer the Italian approach seems much more useful, but retailers must hate it!

I could definitely see that. :)

Great! That would be very useful for all. As we suffer the financial crisis, some market owners take advantage of the opportunity to raise their prices. Saving money is important. The best thing to do to start saving money is to not go on a grocery spree for all the finer foods at the supermarket. You want to stick to more frugal fare if you're on a budget and don't want to wreck your finances. If the goal is to not waste money, you really don't want to have to look into an online cash advance because you couldn't lay off of the fancy French cheese. You don't want to wreak havoc on the family budget with a fine food glut, if your goal is to be saving money.