Price Pulse · July 2026

The cheapest supermarket in Ireland right now: Dunnes wins the basket, the Clubcard saves Tesco

We put the same 2,505 identical branded products through the tills of Dunnes, SuperValu and Tesco. One of them is 14.1% dearer at shelf prices, and one loyalty card makes almost all of that difference disappear.

Every figure in this edition comes from prices we recorded on the retailers' own websites, every day, from 9 June to 9 July 2026: 1.51 million price observations across Aldi, Tesco, SuperValu and Dunnes. For the store-versus-store comparisons we use the strictest basis we have: only branded products matched as identical in at least three of the four chains, with own-label equivalents excluded. Same brand, same product, same pack size. Here is what the month actually did.

The cheapest supermarket in Ireland, on identical products

Take every branded product that Dunnes, SuperValu and Tesco all sold this week, in the same pack size: 2,505 items, from a 90g Milkybar to a 70cl whiskey. Add up each chain's shelf prices for that identical trolley and the ranking is clear. Dunnes comes out cheapest at 11,379 euro. SuperValu is 2.8% dearer. Tesco is 14.1% dearer. Item by item, Dunnes has the lowest (or joint-lowest) shelf price on 46% of these products, SuperValu on 38% and Tesco on 15%.

Where is Aldi? Mostly selling its own labels. Only around 120 of these identical branded products appear at Aldi, too few for a fair basket ranking, so we leave it out of this table rather than mislead. On its own 30-day index Aldi cut prices more than anyone (more on that below).

The Clubcard is doing enormous work

Count each chain's best everyday price instead, which for Tesco means the Clubcard price where one exists, and the picture changes dramatically. Tesco's basket falls from 12,985 euro to 11,529 euro, and its premium over Dunnes collapses from 14.1% to 1.3%. That leapfrogs SuperValu, whose Real Rewards pricing moves its own basket far less. On this loyalty-aware basis the win shares tighten to Dunnes 37%, Tesco 32%, SuperValu 31%.

Tesco is running two price lists: one of the dearest shelf-price stores in the country for walk-ins, and near-parity with Dunnes for cardholders.

Two-tier loyalty pricing is not unique to Ireland, and it is not a trick: when the UK's competition authority reviewed supermarket loyalty pricing in 2024 it found the member prices were overwhelmingly genuine savings rather than inflated non-member prices. The practical point stands either way. The price you pay at Tesco depends on whether you carry the card, and the gap between those two Tescos is bigger than the gap between any two rival chains in our data.

And that is before Dunnes plays its own loyalty card. Our comparison counts Tesco's Clubcard because it is a per-item price we can read off the shelf. Dunnes' famous Shop & Save vouchers (10 euro off a 50 euro spend, plus a 5-euro-off-25 version) work on the whole bill instead, so they never show up in per-product data. By Dunnes' own description, a shop worth 50 euro costs 40 euro when a voucher is redeemed, and a 100 euro shop costs 80: a straight 20% off those blocks of spend, deeper than the typical Clubcard cut, on top of shelf prices that already win the basket. The vouchers are earned as you shop, in-store or online on the same VALUEclub number, apply to groceries only, and carry Dunnes' standard exclusions; digital vouchers are applied automatically at the online checkout, while paper ones work in-store. In other words, the near-parity above is the least flattering way to read Dunnes' position: for a shopper redeeming vouchers, the gap opens again.

For shoppers the practical read is simple. Without a Clubcard, Tesco's shelf prices carried a double-digit premium on identical branded goods this month. With one, the big three are within about three percent of each other, and for voucher-redeeming Dunnes shoppers Dunnes pulls ahead again. The winner comes down to what is in your specific trolley. You can check your own products across all four chains for free.

Same product, same week, very different prices

Averages hide the fun ones. These are identical branded products, same pack size, priced in the same week. Every row was checked by hand against the retailers' listings.

Two honest notes on that table. First, a shelf-price gap is often a promotion on the cheap side rather than a markup on the dear side, and promotions end. Second, the mirror image exists too: Tesco had the cheapest price on roughly one in seven of the identical products we compared, so no chain is dearest on everything.

Meanwhile, the market itself barely moved

Underneath the store-versus-store contest, this was a remarkably calm month. Across a matched basket of 46,499 products, prices on 9 July were 0.21% lower than on 9 June. Strip out non-food aisles and food itself edged up just 0.18%. 83% of products did not change price at all. Of the ones that did, 85% of the risers and 88% of the fallers were promotions starting or ending rather than list-price changes: the promo cycle turning over, not inflation. The official statistics agree with the shelf tags: the CSO's June 2026 consumer price index recorded food prices falling 0.3% month on month, with annual food inflation at its lowest since 2021.

Store by store: Aldi's matched basket fell 0.74%, Tesco's 0.49%, Dunnes' 0.11%, while SuperValu's rose 0.51%, the only riser. One category deserves a flag: the "Baby +4.2%" spike that shows up in our category table is mostly June promotions expiring, not new list prices. Huggies Pull-Ups at Dunnes went from 5.00 euro on promotion to their 9.49 euro list price, and dozens of lines did the same. Genuine list-price rises were rare and concentrated in beef and fish: Birds Eye's 8 Original Beef Burgers jumped 32% at two chains in the same week, the classic signature of a supplier cost increase being passed through rather than anything either retailer decided alone. The official numbers point the same way: CSO data for June 2026 has fresh beef up 4.3% and fresh fish up 3.8% year on year, the two clear outliers in an otherwise calm food index.

How closely do the chains shadow each other?

One pattern in the data is striking enough to share, described exactly as we observed it. Among our 2,505 identical branded products, 40% of store-to-store price pairs are identical to the cent. And when two chains reprice the same product within three days of each other, 61% of the time they land on exactly the same price. The clearest example this month: Tesco repriced the Schwartz herbs and spices range on 5 July, and Dunnes repriced 66 of the same lines within days.

To be clear about what that does and does not mean: matching a competitor's public price is ordinary retail behaviour, supplier recommended prices pull chains to the same figure, and alcohol prices have a legal floor under minimum unit pricing. We make no claim about how these patterns arise. Ireland's competition watchdog, the CCPC, reviewed grocery pricing in 2023 and found no indications of market failure or excessive pricing, while making no finding either way on coordination; some economists argue widespread price matching can soften competition even when it is entirely lawful. Nor is the pattern new: a Consumer Association of Ireland survey back in 2016 found more than half of a branded shopping basket carried identical price tags at Dunnes, Tesco and SuperValu. What our data adds is the scale and the speed, measured daily. And the practical takeaway is the same either way: for a large slice of branded goods you will pay the same to the cent wherever you go, which is exactly why the products that DO diverge (see the table above) are worth knowing about.

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