Method · $10 Dinner

How we pick and cost the $10 Dinner of the Week.

One recipe a week that feeds a household of four for under ten dollars at the cheaper of the two supermarkets we read.

How the recipe is chosen

The pick is editorial, not algorithmic — one recipe a week, chosen by hand from the recipes our engine can fully cost. To qualify it must feed a household of four for ten dollars or less at the cheaper of PAK’nSAVE and Woolworths on the week we publish, carry a photo, state sensible servings, and suit a general palate. We don’t pick novelty value recipes that hit a number nobody would cook.

How the cost is computed

Each ingredient is matched to the cheapest pack of the right product at each supermarket — a pack only counts when an AI classifier has confirmed it matches the ingredient and it isn’t one we’ve excluded as a known wrong match. We cost the quantity the recipe actually uses, not the whole pack, using each pack’s per-kg / per-litre / per-each price. The two store totals are computed separately, each from its own shelf, and both are shown on the page. The headline number is the cheaper of the two totals; per-serve is that total divided by the recipe’s stated servings.

Frequency

Prices behind the dinner refresh with our twice-weekly catalogue reads (Monday and Friday), and the page re-reads the live engine cost on every visit — so the number you see is the current one, not a frozen snapshot. The recipe itself rotates weekly with each issue. Both per-store cost claims are written to our append-only audit log at render time, with the producing query, so the number on the page is always reproducible.

Exclusions and limits

• Pantry negligibles — salt, pepper, water, a splash of oil — cost zero in the total, the same convention home cost-per-meal counts use.
• A recipe doesn’t qualify if any significant ingredient can’t be priced from the current catalogue at both supermarkets. An honest gap beats a guessed number.
• The two store totals are per-store facts. When one supermarket is cheaper on this recipe, we name the gap for this recipe only — we don’t add gaps up into a combined basket, because that basket doesn’t exist in that form.
• The $10 line assumes you buy what the recipe needs at the cheapest matching pack. Real trolleys round up to whole packs; the leftover is yours for the next meal, but the till receipt for one cook will read higher.