Lidl named cheapest UK supermarket in annual Which? study

The supermarket beats Aldi by just 34p

(Getty Images)

Lidl has been named the UK’s cheapest supermarket in an annual study conducted by Which?.

The consumer watchdog conducted the research by tracking 45 own-brand products across eight major supermarkets over the course of 100 days or more.

By collating this data, Which? says it was able to calculate the average price of each item and the total average cost of all of the items. It is the latter that formed the basis of its ranking.

Lidl emerged the cheapest supermarket, with the total average cost of all 45 items coming in at £42.67.

In second place, at just 34p more, was Aldi, with the average cost of all items tracked coming in at £43.01.

Asda ranked third place by just an additional £5, with its total coming in at £48.71, while Tesco was fourth at £53.30.

At the most expensive end of the scale were Waitrose and Ocado, with their total costs coming in at £68.69 and £66.83, respectively.

Which? identified some major price differences between supermarkets for the same items.

For example, the consumer watchdog found that Waitrose's own-label cooked and peeled prawns were priced at £4.60 on average, while you could purchase the equivalent for £1.99 at Lidl.

Additionally, eggs were found to be much more expensive, with six own-label free-range eggs at Waitrose priced at £2.47 on average, when, at Lidl, the equivalent was just £1.27.

A statement from Which? on Lidl’s win reads: "Regular readers of our ‘Cheapest supermarket of the month’ stories might be surprised to see that Lidl has been named the cheapest of 2020, given that, of the eight months in 2020 that Aldi and Lidl were included in our analysis, Aldi was cheapest six times and Lidl twice. 

“It all boils down to the items we’ve been able to get prices for. We look at a huge range of food and household essentials but, for our whole-year analysis, we only included things that we could get at least 100 days’ worth of data for at all eight stores.”

In 2020, the Which? survey named Aldi as the cheapest supermarket in the UK; Lidl came in second place.