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Issue 001 · Saturday, 30 May 2026

Kepie Watch / The 9-Staple Basket

The Kepie 9-Staple Basket

What a 9-staple basket costs at each supermarket this week.

Issue 001 · published Sunday 7 Jun 2026 · prices measured Friday 5 Jun 2026

Nine staples. Two supermarkets. Real prices, captured Friday, published Sunday.

at PAK'nSAVE

$189.28
WoW 4-wk

at Woolworths

$203.65
WoW 4-wk
What this basket is not. The 9-staple basket is roughly two-thirds of a household’s actual weekly grocery spend, not the whole thing. NZ media consensus and Stats NZ Selected Price Indexes (April 2026) put typical household-of-4 weekly spend at roughly $250–$330 across PAK’nSAVE and Woolworths shoppers. The 9 staples we track here cover the line items we can audit honestly week-to-week. The rest — pasta, rice, oil, sugar, flour, tea, coffee, snacks, lunchbox items, cleaning, fresh fruit beyond bananas — is real spend we’re not measuring this issue. The corpus grows every issue.
Different household size? — show the full 1–5 person table

This week, by household size

One basket, scaled five ways. Each row is the weekly cost at that supermarket for a household of that size, scaled from the HH=4 baseline using locked factors {1: 1.0×, 2: 1.7×, 3: 2.4×, 4: 3.1×, 5: 3.6×}. Same Friday capture, same per-basis math.

HouseholdPAK’nSAVEWoolworths
Household of 1
$61.06
$65.69
Household of 2
$103.80
$111.68
Household of 3
$146.54
$157.66
Household of 4
$189.28
$203.65
Household of 5
$219.81
$236.50

Week-on-week deltas are suppressed until our price history runs 12 weeks deep (R3). Currently 5 weeks. Coming back Issue 014+.

Household of 4 — 5 weeks of history, building toward 12-week confidence

Each line is the weekly basket cost at one supermarket. The chart starts the week our snapshots begin and updates every Sunday. We don’t publish week-on-week or month-on-month deltas until the corpus runs 12 weeks deep — until then, the chart shape is the honest signal.

Not enough price history yet — the chart will fill out across the next few weeks.

The trend chart begins from the first Sunday we publish — earlier weeks aren’t back-filled because we only show numbers we actually measured.

What’s in the basket

The basket is the 9staples Kepie Watch tracks weekly. The headline figure uses per-basis pricing (per-kg / per-L / per-each at each supermarket’s cheapest valid pack), multiplied by a per-person weekly quantity and scaled to HH=4. Below each staple we also surface an editorial estimate of how often a household of 4 buys that staple in a typical week — these are editorial estimates, not measured user data, published here so journalists can sense-check the per-line shop math. Full method at /watch/method/9-staple-basket.

  • Butter500g
    HH=4 weekly: ~0.5 blocks (lasts ~2 weeks)
  • Cheddar cheese500g
    HH=4 weekly: ~0.4 blocks (lasts ~2.5 weeks)
  • Eggs1 dozen
    HH=4 weekly: ~1.5 dozens
  • Bread1 loaf (~700g, rounded to kg)
    HH=4 weekly: ~2.5 loaves
  • Chicken thigh1kg
    HH=4 weekly: ~1.5 packs
  • Beef mince1kg
    HH=4 weekly: ~1.5 packs
  • Bananas1kg
    HH=4 weekly: ~1.0 kg
  • Capsicums500g (~3 capsicums)
    HH=4 weekly: ~3 capsicums
  • Broccoli400g (~1 head)
    HH=4 weekly: ~1 head

9 of 9 staples contributed to this week’s figure. See the full method →

Cite this week

Free to quote, free to embed. Please cite as “The Kepie 9-Staple Basket, week ending 31 May 2026.”

According to The Kepie 9-Staple Basket (week ending 31 May 2026), a 9-staple basket scaled for a household of 4 costs $189.28 at PAK'nSAVE or $203.65 at Woolworths — roughly two-thirds of typical weekly grocery spend.
Scaled for a household of 2, this week's 9-staple basket reads $103.80 at PAK'nSAVE and $111.68 at Woolworths.
Scaled for a single-person household this week: $61.06 at PAK'nSAVE, $65.69 at Woolworths.
The Kepie 9-Staple Basket measures a fixed basket of 9 New Zealand staples at the cheapest valid pack in each supermarket, on a per-kilo / per-litre / per-each basis — never pack price. Captured Friday, published Sunday. Method: kepie.app/watch/groceryindex/method.

Want the full method?

How we measure →For press →