Braai Price War: Checkers vs Pick n Pay vs Woolworths vs Spar

Checkers offers the chepest braai in South Africa, an online price comparison from BusinessTech shows.

Braaiing is a uniquely South African festivity, with every braai master having their own preferred mixture of meats and veg to cook over the flame.

With the differences in taste, we decided to use the products used in Bloomberg’s Shisa Nyama Index, which, in turn, uses the prices of 14 ingredients from the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity’s Household Affordability Index.

However, the PMBEJD and Bloomberg use several large quantities, such as 30 kg of maize meal, so we have made certain adjustments to the portions served to be more realistic.

Other ingredients/products were also quite vague, so we took a common product, which we knew would be available at all the retailers, such as rump steak for beef.

When looking at the retailers, Checkers narrowly beats Spar to offer the cheapest braai when comparing online prices, with a braai coming out to R661.96

Spar was less than R5 away, while Pick n Pay came a distant third, with a braai costing R757.86.

Woolworths was the most expensive with a braai costing nearly R200 more than one from Checkers.

The resutls can be found below:

To keep in mind

With several retailers offering the same products from different brands, we went for the cheapest option available.

Although we aimed to ensure accuracy in terms of quantities measured, we took the prices for single items where applicable.

For instance, while Spar offers Green Peppers in 600g packets, Pick n Pay has an 800g option. We see these as comparable as customers buy complete products.

Spar also has separate franchises, so prices in one store are not always applicable in another store. We thus used the Spar2U prices for our office’s local Spar in Centurion.

Moreover, this is only a price comparison, and not a quaility comparison, as everyone’s tastes are different.

Although Woolworth’s R199.99 rump could arguably be of a different quality compared to Spar’s R144.99 rump, these items are still compared on a cost basis.

Read: South Africa’s economy grew slower than Zimbabwe – but Ramaphosa celebrated it