Price Pulse · August 2026

Ireland went back to buying brands. Our shelf data says that switch costs about double.

Grocery inflation slowed to 4.16% and branded sales jumped 10.6%. We measured what that trade-up actually costs at the shelf: across 198 like-for-like comparisons, own label is 49% cheaper per kilo or litre. Meanwhile July's real shelf prices went nowhere at all.

Every figure in this edition comes from prices we recorded on the retailers' own websites, every day, from 1 July to 1 August 2026: 1,566,788 price observations on 53,855 products 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 (same brand, same pack size) in at least three of the four chains, with own-label equivalents excluded. Every named product below was re-checked against the retailer's live customer page before we published.

Three grocery inflation numbers landed in one fortnight

If you followed the news in the last two weeks you were handed three different answers to the same question. On 27 July, Worldpanel by Numerator put Irish grocery price inflation at 4.16% in the 12 weeks to 12 July, the slowest rate since February 2025, with take-home grocery sales up 6.3%. Three days later the CSO's flash estimate for July had food prices up 0.3% in the month and 0.8% over the year, inside an overall inflation rate of 3.1%. And our own shelf tracking says that across a matched basket of 45,297 products, prices on 1 August were 0.22% lower than on 1 July.

None of those three is wrong. They answer different questions. Worldpanel measures a year-on-year change built from what shoppers actually put in the trolley, so it carries twelve months of increases, most of which happened before the summer. The CSO measures a national basket at the till. We measure the price tag on the same individual product on two dates, which is the narrowest question of the three and the one that tells you what changed this month. On that measure, July did almost nothing: 83.1% of products did not change price at all, and if you look only at food lines that carried no promotion at either end of the window, 95.7% held exactly the same price.

Store by store the pattern repeats June's: Aldi's matched basket fell 0.60%, Dunnes' 0.52%, Tesco's 0.22%, while SuperValu's rose 0.29%, the only riser. Food on its own fell 0.27%.

So why is spending up 6.3% when prices are flat?

Because the trolley changed, not the tag. The most interesting line in the Worldpanel release is the split: branded goods grew 10.6% in value, adding 173 million euro, and now take 49% of grocery spend, while own label grew 3.4% and added 58 million. As inflation eased, Irish shoppers moved back towards brands.

That is a rational thing to do with a bit of breathing room. It is also, on our numbers, expensive. We took every shelf category on each retailer's own site, held the unit basis constant (euro per kilo against euro per kilo, euro per litre against euro per litre) and compared the typical own-label line with the typical branded line sitting in the same category. Across 198 such comparisons, own label costs a median 49% less per kilo or litre. It was cheaper in 182 of the 198. The gap barely varies by chain: 49% at Tesco, 51% at SuperValu, 48% at Dunnes.

Switching one branded line to the own-label beside it is worth more than any of the store-versus-store gaps in this report, several times over.

Two honest limits on that number. It compares what is typical in a category rather than two identical recipes, so it captures the average trade-up rather than a promise about any single swap: branded ranges include premium tiers that own label mostly does not stock, and that is part of why the gap is wide. And a lower unit price is not automatically a better buy, since quality, ingredients and pack sizes differ. The point stands anyway. When Worldpanel reports branded value growing three times faster than own label, the mix shift alone can lift what a household spends by more than any price rise did this month.

The August basket: Dunnes still cheapest, and the Clubcard has caught up

Now the branded trolley itself. Take every branded product that Dunnes, SuperValu and Tesco all sold this week in the same pack size: 2,412 items, and add up each chain's shelf prices. Dunnes comes out cheapest at 11,085 euro. SuperValu is 2.0% dearer. Tesco is 13.4% dearer. That is close to last month's reading of 14.1%, on a cohort our matcher rebuilds nightly.

Count Tesco's Clubcard prices instead and the gap does not just narrow, it closes. Tesco's basket falls from 12,567 euro to 11,076 euro, which is 9 euro below Dunnes across all 2,412 products. On an 11,000 euro basket that is 0.08%, a dead heat rather than a win, and it is a genuine change from July, when the same comparison left Tesco 1.3% behind. What it buys Tesco is parity for cardholders, not a title.

And it is still the least flattering way to read Dunnes' position, because Dunnes' Shop & Save vouchers (10 euro off a 50 euro spend, plus a 5-euro-off-25 version) discount the whole bill rather than any single product, so they cannot appear in per-product data at all. By Dunnes' own description a 50 euro shop costs 40 euro when a voucher is redeemed and a 100 euro shop costs 80. They are earned as you shop on a VALUEclub card, apply to groceries only and carry Dunnes' standard exclusions, with digital vouchers applied automatically at the online checkout. For a shopper who redeems them, Dunnes pulls clear again.

Where is Aldi? Mostly selling its own labels, which is exactly the point of the section above. Only 10 of these identical branded products appear at Aldi as well, far too few for a basket ranking, so we leave it out rather than mislead.

Where the Clubcard price actually lands

Tesco showed a Clubcard price on 858 of the 2,412 products, about a third of the branded cohort, and on 25% of its 20,599 priced lines overall, with a median cut of 25%. The interesting part is not the size of the discount but the destination. On those 858 products we compared Tesco's Clubcard price with the cheaper of the Dunnes and SuperValu price for the same item. It was exactly equal 43% of the time, below it 38% of the time, and above it only 19%. Tesco's ordinary shelf price, by contrast, sat above the cheaper rival on 60% of the cohort and below it on 2%.

Read the chart carefully, because the biggest bar is the one nobody markets: on roughly half of these branded products all three chains charge exactly the same, to the cent. Across the cohort, 42% of store-to-store price pairs are identical, up from 40% a month ago. 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. Nor is the pattern new: a Consumer Association of Ireland survey in 2016 found more than half of a branded 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 consequence: the products that do diverge are the only ones where choosing a store matters.

Promotions are doing much of that work. On 1 August, 44.6% of Dunnes' priced lines carried a visible promotion, against 39.3% at Tesco, 29.8% at SuperValu and 11.7% at Aldi. Dunnes is on promotion in 59% of the products where it holds the cheapest price, SuperValu in 47%, Tesco in 40%. A cheapest-price crown built on promotions is a real saving on the day and a fragile one over a month.

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 re-checked against the retailer's live product page on 1 August before publication.

Three honest notes on that table. First, a gap this size is usually a promotion on the cheap side rather than a markup on the dear side, and promotions end: the Dunnes tuna is at half price, the SuperValu Club Orange is a Real Rewards price. Second, look at the Clubcard column. On two of these five rows Tesco's member price lands exactly on the cheapest rival price in the country, which is the 43% pattern above showing up in a single trolley. Third, King Crisps and the Roma penne have no Clubcard price at all, so on those the Tesco shelf figure is what everyone pays.

The list prices that did move

Underneath a flat month, a small number of everyday prices genuinely reset. Restricting to food lines that were off promotion at both ends of the window (11,833 of them), only 2.6% rose and 1.7% fell. The risers are worth naming because they look like cost pass-through rather than store-level decisions. Loughnane's Chicken Sausages 350g went from 3.49 euro to 4.49 euro at Tesco on 9 July and at SuperValu on 15 July, the same product landing on the same new price at two chains six days apart, which is the classic signature of a supplier increase working through. Keogh's Crinkle Cut Cheese & Onion 6-pack moved from 3.99 to 5.00 euro at SuperValu on 2 July, and the G's Gourmet Preserves 350g range went from 2.00 to 2.99 euro across six flavours on the same day. All three were verified against the live shelf on 1 August.

By department, the month's movement was mostly outside the food aisles. Beauty and personal care rose 4.24% and toiletries 2.64%, while summer ranges fell 1.45% as the season marked down, wine, beer and spirits fell around 1.4%, and baby fell 4.39% as July promotions landed. Food cupboard, the biggest department we track, rose 0.30%. For a shopper, that is the shape of the month: the grocery bill held still and the non-food end of the shop did the moving. You can check your own products across all four chains for free.

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