Kepie Watch / Method
Method
How we measure.
Real prices. Captured weekly. Published openly.
1. What we capture
Once a week — Friday morning, New Zealand time — we read the public online catalogues of PAK’nSAVE and Woolworths. New World comes later in the year. For every staple we track, we record the price, pack size, brand, and whether the product is NZ-made. The capture is a snapshot: a row per SKU, stamped with the moment we read it.
2. How we pick the cheapest
Each supermarket carries dozens of SKUs for a single staple — branded, house-brand, organic, free-range, different pack sizes. We sort the valid pool by price-per-100g (or per-100ml or per-each, whichever applies) and publish the cheapest. That keeps a 1kg block of butter and a 500g block on the same scale.
3. What “valid” means
A tub of buttery spread is not butter. A bag of bread mix is not a loaf. Our catalogue marks each SKU as valid or excluded based on whether it actually matches the staple — the classifier is conservative and we keep an exclusion list for known false matches we’ve seen with our own eyes. Excluded SKUs never reach the published number.
“We measure. We report. That’s it.”
Kepie Watch · Issue 001
4. Frequency and history depth
Kepie Watch goes out once a week, every Sunday morning. The price you see is the most recent Friday snapshot. Older snapshots feed the chart on each staple page. The corpus runs about five weeks deep so far — year-on-year framing is months away.
Per-claim method pages
Each numbered claim in the publication links back to a short method page that spells out the sampling, the threshold, and the exclusions for that specific beat:
- The 9-staple basket
- The Movers — week-on-week deltas
- Honesty Box — corrections and retractions
- Staple “why this week” sentences
- Te Reo Māori staple labels
Some of these method pages are being written this week alongside the publication itself — links may resolve later this issue.
5. Limitations
We track online prices. In-store specials and clearance markdowns may differ on the day. Mid-week promotions that come and go between Fridays won’t show up here. Regional pricing exists at some PAK’nSAVE locations — we use the price published nationally. And we take one snapshot per Friday, not a continuous feed.
6. What we don’t do
We accept no sponsorship from the supermarkets we measure. We don’t take retailer input on what to publish. We don’t estimate prices when the catalogue is silent — if the SKU isn’t there, we say so. The promise is short: real prices, captured weekly, published openly.