What does a kilogram of tomatoes cost today at Woolworths, at Coles, and at Aldi? This page answers that question for 48 common vegetables, fruits and herbs, in Australian dollars, so you can see at a glance which shop is cheapest and which crops are expensive enough that growing your own starts to pay. Prices are checked every morning from the three chains’ own listings and normalised to a price per kilogram wherever the produce is sold by weight.
Vegetable prices per kilogram
Price per kilogram in AUD. The bold figure is the cheapest shop in that row. A dash in this table means that shop sells the item by the piece instead of by weight; that price sits in the per piece table below. The small text under a price is the pack it was calculated from, and a date under a vegetable name is the day that row was last checked.
Sold by the piece, not by weight
These prices are per piece, per bunch or per pack, at the price you actually pay for one. The Price column averages the shops that sell the item the usual way, named in the Sold as column, and every shop cell shows its own unit, because a whole cabbage and a half cabbage are not the same purchase. A vegetable sold both ways appears here as well as in the per kilogram table.
How to read this page
A dash is an honest gap. It means the shop was not listing the tracked product at the row’s last check, or does not sell it online at all. Aldi, for example, lists no fresh beetroot in its online range, so that Aldi cell is always a dash. A dash in the per kilogram table can also mean the shop sells that item by the piece; look for it in the second table.
Every row carries its check date. The most bought items are re-checked daily and the rest every two or three days on a fixed rotation, so a price can be up to three days old. The date under the vegetable name tells you exactly when that row was last checked, and no older price is ever presented as today’s.
One standard product per vegetable. Each cell tracks a single, ordinary product chosen by hand: loose produce where the shop sells it loose, the standard bag or punnet where it does not, and the regular non-organic line wherever one exists. Two Coles exceptions are labelled in the table, because Coles only lists organic fresh garlic and ginger, and its avocado and sweet potato here come from its imperfect grade range, which is real produce at a lower cosmetic standard.
The average is per kilogram only. It averages the shops that sell by weight. A per piece price never leaks into it, and the label under the average tells you how many shops it is based on.
Trends need history. The movement column compares today’s average with the average a month ago once a full month of collections exists, and with a week ago until then. The chips above the table filter the rows to the biggest prices and the current risers and fallers.
The small line is the story so far. Beside each average, the trend line sketches the average price across every day collected. On a new row it is just a dash; after a few days it becomes a short line, and after a month it shows the season starting to move.
Grow it or buy it?
The per kilogram table is a gardening tool as much as a shopping one. Crops that hold a high price all year, such as mushrooms, capsicum, ginger and garlic, repay the space they take in a garden bed many times over, because a healthy plant produces them for months at little more than the cost of water and compost. Crops that sit at the bottom of the table, such as potatoes, carrots, onions and cabbage, are cheap because broadacre farms grow them so efficiently; grow those for flavour, freshness and variety, not for savings.
A practical rule from these numbers: if a crop you eat every week sits above about $10 per kilogram and grows in your zone, it belongs on your planting list. Check your zone with the Australia Planting Zone Finder in the sidebar, then match the crop to your season.
Where the prices come from
Woolworths and Coles do not publish a public price feed, so their prices are read through a third-party product data service that indexes their online stores, on the rotating schedule described above. Aldi prices are read directly from the public fruit and vegetable listings on aldi.com.au every day, including the per kilogram comparison price Aldi prints on its own product tiles. One standard product per vegetable per shop was selected by hand before collection started, and the same product is tracked at every check, which is what makes the comparison fair.
The two tables are drawn on our own server at collection time and embedded into this page as finished tables, so the prices you see are exactly the prices collected that morning.
Prices are the national online list prices in Australian dollars. They are a comparison guide: the shelf price in your local store can differ, and specials can move a product for a few days at a time.
Questions
How often are these prices updated?
The tables refresh every morning, Australian Eastern time. The most bought items and every Aldi price are checked daily; the rest are re-checked every two or three days on a fixed rotation, and the date under a vegetable’s name shows when that row was last checked. No price on this page is ever more than three days old, and if a collection run ever fails, the page keeps showing the last good tables instead of going blank.
Are the prices in Australian dollars?
Yes. Every price on this page is in Australian dollars (AUD), exactly as Woolworths, Coles and Aldi list it. Per kilogram figures are worked out from the listed pack price and pack size, except at Aldi, which prints its own per kilogram comparison price.
Why is one shop’s price missing for a vegetable?
A dash means that shop was not listing the tracked product at the row’s last check. Ranges rotate, products get delisted, and sometimes a check fails. We never fill a gap with a guess, so a dash is honest, and the price usually returns at the next check.
Why do some vegetables sit in a second table?
Some produce is sold by the piece, the bunch or the pack, not by weight: a whole cauliflower, a head of iceberg lettuce, a bunch of basil. Forcing those into a per kilogram figure would invent a weight nobody charges by, so they get their own table at the price you actually pay for one. A vegetable sold both ways, like cabbage, appears in both tables.
Why are Coles garlic and ginger so expensive?
Because Coles only lists organic fresh garlic and organic fresh ginger in its online range. Both are labelled organic in the table so you can judge them fairly. Woolworths and Aldi sell standard lines: Woolworths prices its ginger by weight and its garlic in a small pack, and Aldi sells both loose by weight.
Do prices vary between states or individual stores?
These are the national online list prices. Shelf prices in a particular store can differ, and Aldi produce lines rotate by season and region. Treat the table as a like-for-like comparison guide, not a promise of the exact price at your local shop.
