Foodstuffs announces 4-month price, 10% average price roll back on 110-plus everyday items
In a move that Foodstuffs estimates will save customers over half a million dollars each week, the two New Zealand owned cooperatives, which operate the New World, PAK’nSAVE, and Four Square brands, have announced that from Monday 16 May they will roll back the prices on more than 110 of the most shopped grocery items to what they averaged over 25 January to 25 April last year.
Foodstuffs NZ Managing Director, Chris Quin says that the co-ops considered the challenge of rising food prices and where it was hitting shoppers hardest, using data insight teams to identify everyday products. “Our customers buy more than 1.3 million of these products each week, so we then looked at the 13-week average price of these items across 25 January to 25 April last year and are dropping the prices back to those levels from Monday 16 May until 14 August 2022.”
The basket includes frozen and fresh fruit and veges, meat and dairy products like butter and cheese, tea, coffee, sugar, flour, and personal care items like nappies and soap.
“This is not a marketing stunt. It’s a real saving for our customers”, says Foodstuffs NZ Managing Director, Chris Quin.
From 9 May, Countdown froze the price of more than 500 essential products as the country moves into winter.
Spencer Sonn, Countdown’s Managing Director, says the move aims to buck the current inflationary environment where the company is receiving millions of dollars of cost increase requests every month from suppliers who are facing higher fuel, raw material and freight costs.
“As we head into the chillier months, the cost of living is undeniably top of everyone’s minds,” says Spencer Sonn. “We want to help Kiwis’ money go further despite the pressures everyone is facing with increasing costs, and that’s why we’ve pledged that the price of these 500-plus essentials won’t change,” he says.
In the last ten months, Countdown has received close to 1,000 cost increase requests from its suppliers, more than double the same period the year before. The average increase requested is just over 9 per cent as a result of suppliers’ own costs of raw products, fuel, fertiliser, grains and import costs also increasing.
“There are so many factors impacting food prices at the moment and every week we’re working with suppliers to help offset cost increases as much as possible so that our customers aren’t impacted. But the reality is that we are all impacted by the current environment,” says Spencer Sonn. “On these Great Price Winter Freeze products, we’ve pledged that they can’t be touched by inflation this winter and we hope this helps with planning in these uncertain times,” says Spencer Sonn.
The full Great Price Winter Freeze range can be found here.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
