Price Pulse · Weekly

The basket barely moved. The heatwave still made your ice cream and cola dearer.

We tracked every shelf price across Tesco, Dunnes, SuperValu and Aldi as the temperature climbed. Underlying Irish grocery prices are flat. But the things you reach for in the sun tell a very different story.

The industry panels reported this month that Irish grocery price inflation is cooling, easing to about 4.7% a year from 5.5% a month earlier, alongside a summer surge in sales of soft drinks and ice cream. Those panels measure what shoppers put in their baskets. We measure something different, and just as useful: what the price on the shelf actually did, product by product, every single day across the four big Irish supermarkets. Here is the same month, read from the price tag.

What Irish grocery price inflation looked like in June

Compare like-for-like shelf prices from the end of May to the end of June, across roughly 45,000 products, and the median change is exactly zero. In plain terms, for the typical item, the price you paid at the end of June was the price you paid five weeks earlier. That is the cooling story, seen from the price tag rather than the till receipt.

Averages hide the interesting part, though. Tesco and Aldi held their shelf prices essentially flat. Dunnes drifted up the most, by a little over 2%, with SuperValu up around 1%. Two very different pricing postures, playing out at the same time. This is the shelf price, before loyalty schemes and promotions, so it is not the full story of what every shopper paid.

"The basket is flat" hides a hot summer underneath: the things you actually buy when the sun comes out are the things that moved.

But the heatwave left fingerprints

Look under the surface and the warm weather is written all over the data. The two categories the panels singled out for surging sales, soft drinks and ice cream, are exactly the two where our shelf prices rose most: soft drinks up 1.7% and ice cream up 1.1%, roughly twice the rate of the overall basket. That is demand-led pricing in plain sight.

The mirror image is just as telling. Water and suncare were cut, the classic move to win footfall when the sun is out. And beer prices barely moved even as beer sales reportedly fell, which points to shoppers switching to soft drinks and ready-to-drink, not to any change in price. When demand spikes on a hot day, the price tag is often the first thing to feel it.

Grocery prices in Ireland: cooling, but watch the mid-month step

The path through the month was not a steady climb. Prices were flat for the first fortnight, stepped up around the middle of June, then flattened again for the final two weeks. A jump that sharp usually means promotions rolling off rather than true inflation. But it could also be the first hint of cost pressure working through the supply chain. The honest answer is that we will know in another fortnight, and watching daily is exactly how we will catch it. In the meantime, you can compare grocery prices across Aldi, Tesco, SuperValu and Dunnes for yourself, free, and see which shop is cheapest today.

Why "flat" is the real headline

It is tempting to lead with the dramatic category numbers. But the genuinely valuable signal, for anyone tracking the cost of living or running a brand's pricing, is the calm one underneath: underlying Irish grocery prices were essentially flat this month. The movement you feel is concentrated in the handful of categories the weather drove, not a broad structural rise.

That distinction is invisible if you check a price once. It only appears when you watch the entire catalogue, every day, and remember what last week cost. The cheapest shop is rarely the one with the lowest sticker. It is the one with the best price per litre and per kilo, and that changes daily. That is what BasketWatch tracks, across Aldi, Tesco, SuperValu and Dunnes, so you do not have to.