We Priced a School Lunchbox at Coles, Woolies & Aldi
We priced 11 typical school-lunchbox items across Coles, Woolworths and Aldi — the staples that show up in the average kid's bag through a school week.
Today's totals
The basket, item by item
For each item we picked the cheapest reasonable match per store — store-brand where available, otherwise the cheapest national brand. Cheapest store for each row is highlighted.
🍞White sandwich bread 700g× 2
🧀Tasty cheese slices 250g
🐖Sliced ham 200g
🐟Tuna in springwater 95g× 4
🫒Hommus dip 200g
🍎Pink Lady apples (5 ≈ 1 kg)× 5
🍌Cavendish bananas (5 ≈ 1 kg)× 5
🥕Carrots 1 kg
🍫Muesli bars 6 pack× 2
🍇Sultanas mini boxes 6 pack
Where each store wins
Muesli bars, juice poppers, sultanas, hommus, carrots. Aldi's store-brand pricing dominates packaged dry goods.
Their store-brand white bread is $2.80 vs $4.00 at Coles. Their processed cheese slices are $3.80 vs $5.40 at Coles. Both beat Aldi too.
Coles' Tetra 6-pack is $6.50. Wool's are $3.30, Aldi's are $3.00. That single item explains most of Coles' premium over the others.
How much has this lunchbox really gone up?
The basket is up 0.1% over 26 months — about 0.0% annualised, which is below the official AU food inflation rate over the same period (~4-5% per year).
The bigger story: Woolworths has held this exact basket essentially flat for the last six months. Whether that's deliberate (cost-of-living signalling) or coincidence (specials cancelling hikes), it's a real shift from the steady jumps we saw mid-2024 to mid-2025.
What this means for your weekly shop
- 1The 'Aldi is always cheapest' rule is overstated
For a lunchbox basket, Woolworths is within $0.22 on the same items, and beats Aldi outright on bread and processed cheese.
- 2Juice poppers are the secret tax at Coles
If you're a Coles shopper, just buy them somewhere else. That one swap saves $3-4 a week, $150-200 a year.
- 3Cherry-picking actually works
Saving $6.65 a week across two stores adds up to ~$332 a year for one kid's lunchbox. For two kids it's nearly double.
- 4Prices have plateaued at the major supermarkets
At least for this basket, and at least for the last 6 months. Whether that holds is the question. The next budget Wednesday will tell.
Build your own basket
We do the boring work — scraping every product price at Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Harris Farm twice a week — so you can spend two minutes building your own list and finding the cheapest place to shop it.
Build a list →Methodology: prices captured from each store's online catalogue on April 30 2026. We picked the cheapest reasonable match per item per store (store-brand if available, otherwise the cheapest comparable national brand). Coles, Woolworths and Aldi compared; Harris Farm excluded because it doesn't stock all items and is regional NSW/QLD/ACT only.