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Russell Yapp
Russell Yapp

Posted on Originally published at data.yappman.com

Where to get UK supermarket price data: free and paid, compared

What each source measures, how fresh it is, and whether you can download and reuse it, as stated on each publisher's page. Checked on 19 October 2026.

If you need UK grocery prices for research, a story or a product, the options split into official statistics, research datasets, trackers with no download on their pages, and commercial data. They differ in what they measure (price change or price levels, shelf prices or prices paid), how fresh they are, and whether you can download and reuse them.

Official statistics: ONS

The Office for National Statistics publishes the consumer prices index, including the annual rate for food and non-alcoholic beverages (series D7G8), monthly, with CSV and XLS downloads. Its Shopping prices comparison tool gives average prices for more than 650 items from the CPI basket, from January 2020, with a "download all data" button in the tool; ONS describes those averages as official statistics in development. Both are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Best for: the official measure of food inflation, monthly. Not for: individual supermarkets or individual products.

Research datasets

University of Warwick, "Price dynamics in food retailing in Great Britain". Weekly prices for 370 products from 1 October 2009 to 31 March 2012, with the data collection method recorded as manual collection from weekly website entries, and the supermarkets anonymised. The UK Data Service record lists it for registered users only (safeguarded data) under the UK Data Service End User Licence; the Warwick repository record describes it as open access under a Creative Commons licence. Check the terms of the copy you use.

LSE (Richard Davies, Josh Hellings and Finn McEvoy). A February 2024 seminar listing describes 19 million online grocery prices collected daily since July 2023 from retailers covering over 70% of UK grocery spending, and a later page by the same authors (Richard Davies, Josh Hellings and Finn McEvoy) describes 25 million prices from seven supermarkets, July 2023 to April 2024. We found no public release of the underlying prices.

Kaggle, “Time Series UK Supermarket Data”. Web-scraped prices from Aldi, Asda, Morrisons, Tesco and Sainsbury's from 9 January 2024, licensed Apache 2.0. Its creator says the scraper is not perfectly reliable, that the data is only available for days on which it was run, that Morrisons data quality was variable until 27 January 2024, and that products show "the lowest price (Nectar, Clubcard etc)" with multi-buy discounts excluded.

Trackers with no download on their pages

Which? supermarket food and drink inflation tracker. Annual inflation at eight supermarkets (Aldi, Asda, Lidl, Morrisons, Ocado, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose) across 20 categories. Which? says it covers between 23,000 and 28,000 products a month, weighted by supermarket market share and the sales volume of each category, including discounts but not multibuys or loyalty-card offers, and says it moved to once every three months from December 2023. The page offers no data download.

Trolley.co.uk Grocery Price Index. Trolley says its index connects the activity of 850,000+ UK shoppers with its grocery price database, monitoring 47,711 products that are typically purchased at least once a month, and runs from May 2020. The page offers no download or API; it points data enquiries to a contact form.

Our data: Yappman Data

UK Online Shelf-Price Index (free, CC BY 4.0). A weekly index of posted online shelf prices at Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Aldi: the same products matched week on week by the retailer's own product id, a geometric mean (Jevons) of their price ratios with equal weight to each product within a retailer-class cell, equal weight to each retailer and no spending weights, by retailer and by 16 product classes, with matched counts on every row. The weekly snapshots behind it (kept private; only the aggregates are published) hold about 73,000 UK rows a week from the four retailers, one row per product per retailer; that is a snapshot size, not a fixed figure. The index was first published on 5 October 2026, when the base week and the first changing week were published together, and is intended weekly, normally on Monday, when a complete week is available. Published weeks are not revised, and a missing week restarts the index at 100 with a notice: week 41 was skipped (see the notice). The whole series downloads as one CSV or JSON file. It measures asking prices online, not prices paid, and it is not a CPI. See the method and the data dictionary.

AU Online Shelf-Price Index (free, CC BY 4.0). The same approach for Coles, Woolworths and Aldi Australia, first published on 15 October 2026, normally weekly on Monday (method).

Product-level data. The rows behind the index come from our UK Supermarket Price Scraper on the Apify Store, and are also available as an annual licence; see pricing. A free monthly snapshot of the daily 212-item basket is on Kaggle (a sample, not the full series).

Comparison

Source Measures Period Frequency Download Licence
ONS CPI food (D7G8) Official price change Ongoing Monthly CSV, XLS OGL v3.0
ONS Shopping prices tool Average prices, 650+ items From Jan 2020 Monthly In the tool OGL v3.0
Warwick Weekly prices, 370 products, anonymised stores Oct 2009 to Mar 2012 Weekly UK Data Service, after registration Check the copy (see above)
LSE (Davies et al.) Online prices, 19m to 25m (per LSE and the authors) From Jul 2023 Daily (per LSE listing) None found None found
Kaggle time series Scraped prices, 5 retailers From Jan 2024 Daily, most days (per its creator) Kaggle Apache 2.0
Which? tracker Weighted inflation, 8 supermarkets Ongoing Every three months (per Which?) None found on its page Not stated
Trolley index Index from its own database From May 2020 Not stated None found on its page Not stated
Yappman UK Shelf-Price Index Matched-product shelf-price change, 4 retailers Data from late Sep 2026; first published 5 Oct 2026 Intended weekly CSV, JSON CC BY 4.0

Which to use

  • The official rate of food inflation: ONS.

  • Supermarket by supermarket, week by week, in a file you can reuse and cite: the Yappman Data index, with its method page to check what it does and does not measure.

  • Historical research on 2009 to 2012: the Warwick data.

  • A weighted headline on supermarket inflation: the Which? tracker (to read; no download on its page).

The third-party facts on this page are taken from each publisher's own page, as read on 19 October 2026; pages change, so check them before relying on a figure. Yappman Data is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of the organisations or companies named on this page, including the supermarkets.

Original guide, kept up to date: https://data.yappman.com/guides/uk-supermarket-price-data/

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