Where these prices come from

Aldi is the baseline

Every price starts as an Aldi shelf price on a specific date, not a national average and not a live feed. There is no public price API for Aldi, so the alternative to reading them by hand was guessing, and a guessed price presented as a real one is worse than no price at all.

That also means these are prices on one day. Food prices move. Treat them as good enough to compare two meals against each other, and not good enough to predict your receipt.

The other shops

Switching supermarket does not re-read 7 shops. It scales the Aldi basket. Where a shop runs an Aldi price match, we use how much of a typical student basket that match actually covers; where it does not, we position it from its value range. The shopping list says which shops were measured and which were positioned, on the shop itself, because the difference matters when you are deciding where to walk to.

What “price not checked” means

It means nobody has found that exact product in a listing yet, so the number is a stand-in positioned against things that were read. Wherever one of these feeds into a price, the price is flagged. There are 2 of them:

• Vegetable stock cubes, shown at £0.69 for 120g (12 cubes). The listing has not surfaced online, though the equivalent product in another flavour has, at this price and pack size.
• Gram flour, shown at £1.09 for 500g. Aldi does not stock this at all, so there is no shelf price to find. Recipes needing it are kept out of generated plans.

Two numbers on a recipe

A recipe page shows what your portions cost and what buying every pack from scratch costs, because they answer different questions and showing only one of them misleads. The portion cost is the share of each pack that meal uses. The pack cost is what you hand over at the till with an empty cupboard. The gap between them is the rest of the bag, which you still have.