Asda staves off competition from Amazon & Ocado in price comparison

Asda was the cheapest supermarket for the second week in a row, batting away additional competition from online specialists Amazon and Ocado.

At £75.23, Asda was exclusively cheapest for 10 items, including the blackberries and Sharwood’s poppadoms.

The nearest competition came from Tesco. With seven price cuts and no increases, Tesco’s basket total of £75.78 was 3.1% lower than it would have been last month. This narrowed the gap to just 55p behind Asda.

With a £77.15 basket, Amazon was third. It was exclusively cheapest for four products, thanks to deep price cuts on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies Squares and the Dolmio sauce.

Asda was 3.4% cheaper than Sainsbury’s (£77.87), which showed the largest deflation this week. The same basket cost 4.8% less than it would have done a month ago, with price reductions on seven lines. It was exclusively cheapest for the parmigiano reggiano and, thanks to a Nectar promotion, the Dove antiperspirant.

Morrisons’ basket showed the highest inflation. At £82.23 its basket was 7.5% more expensive year on year and 2.4% month on month. Asda was 8.5% cheaper. The story is quite different when multibuy promotions, including for Morrisons More card users, are factored in. With a total of 10 multibuys this week, Morrisons basket would be £74.61 on a pro-rated basis, jumping from fifth to first place.

Asda was 9% cheaper than Ocado (£82.67) and 12.9% cheaper than Waitrose (£86.41), neither of which had any exclusively cheapest items.

Across the seven retailers, prices were up 1.8% year on year and down 0.8% on last month. The biggest annual faller was Dolmio pasta bake sauce (down 10% year on year) and the biggest rise was on the Mr Kipling Country Slices (up 52% on last year).