News

The big supermarkets battle for what’s on your plate but it can save you more

Jul 25, 2016

While many have gone with a meatless lifestyle, a new survey conducted by supermarket giant Aldi has shown that the dish of choice at the dinner table is still meat.

Australian homes are spending $378 million a week on meat to cook at home with the average household having four and a half meat meals each week. With the average spend per week on meat is around $46 it’s in this marketing arena that the big stores are going to battle.

An Aldi spokesperson told The Sydney Morning Herald that Australians are “looking for better value [and] wanting to squeeze more meat into their weekly grocery budget without having to compromise on quality.”

Chicken topped the list as the most sought after form of meat with 47-percent of the people surveyed saying it’s their favourite. Lamb and Beef trade the second place with such regularity that it’s hard to find a clear winner while Pork rounded out the list.

Aldi has taken the early lead in the meat wars which was started by Woolies. Woolies went against market advice and cut the price of its lamb legs to $10 a kilo. The meat price war was always going to have its causality, and it’s once again the small Aussie butcher that is taking the beating.

Peter Ilic, the owner of The Meat Store in Sydney, told The Sydney Morning Herald “We always go back to what we are doing in our own stores, rather than trying to compete with businesses so much bigger than ours,”. He concluded by saying “We are a small family business. We serve 3000 customers a week in our [two] stores. Their margins are much bigger than ours, but we still manage to sell at a price that matches theirs, quality for quality.”

The winner in this latest battle of the supermarkets will be the one that offers the best quality for the right price as the study shows that Australians will pay reasonably more for a better cut of meat.