Your grocery basket is up more than 40% in four years. The store won't refund the difference

Your food basket is up more than 40% in four years. Not one expensive product, the whole shelf.

Eurostat tracks the price of food and non-alcoholic beverages in Poland with a single index. Between 2020 and 2024 it rose 41.5%. In its household budget survey, the Polish statistics office reports that the average person now spends 475.68 zł a month on food and drink, a quarter of the entire household budget. For a similar shop four years earlier, the same basket cost around 336 zł. The difference, about 140 zł a month per person, isn't a bigger appetite, just higher prices.

No one will refund that difference. Prices rise everywhere, and the store isn't there to give money back. But there's one place where the bill gets far worse than it has to: where you stop counting.

The store takes the most where no one does the maths

The shelf price is for the package, not the weight. Only converting to a kilogram or a calorie shows where the money goes.

Take oatmeal. A Lubella sachet with banana and strawberry costs 2.99 zł for 100 grams, that's 29.90 zł per kilogram. A kilo of plain rolled oats is 4.99 zł. The same oatmeal in a sachet is six times dearer by weight. Three quarters of it is the same oats, plus skimmed milk powder, sugar and 3% dried strawberry. You pay that six-times-higher price per kilogram mostly for the sachet and the portioning. A sachet a day instead of a scoop of loose oats is 2.49 zł more a day, around 909 zł a year.

It isn't one product. We've been collecting these numbers for weeks:

• 8 grams of dried basil in a little jar is 311 zł per kilogram, the same basil in a bulk bag a dozen-odd złoty per kilogram.
• Tic tac pellets are 166 zł per kilogram of flavored sugar.
• The cheapest calories in the store, flour, sugar and oil, are also the emptiest, and the same calories wrapped in a candy bar cost tens of times more.
• The same product in a small package costs more per kilogram than in a big one. Every time.

This isn't bad luck or one-off slips. It's a pattern. Small packages and spices by the sachet carry the highest prices per kilogram. If you look only at the package price, you pay that markup without seeing it.

How to reclaim part of the difference

You can't undo inflation, but the bill also depends on you. Three moves, each works on its own:

• Swapping small packages for bigger ones, or for a cheaper equivalent of the same food: around 476 zł a year across three products. That's almost the same figure as the monthly food spend above, except one is monthly and this one is yearly.
• Swapping the oatmeal sachet for loose oats: around 909 zł a year, the same gap we counted at the shelf.
• A week of breakfasts planned around prices: 2.20 zł a day instead of a bakery pastry.

These are independent levers, don't add them into one number. Each shows the same thing: the gap between the package price and the price by weight, and between an empty calorie and a nourishing one, can be captured if someone counts it.

Whose side we're on

We count exactly what the store doesn't count for you. Snugmeal plans a week of meals around your budget and real prices from Polish stores, with a single shopping list and a total that matches at the till. Not so you stop shopping where you shop, but so you leave with a full basket and a smaller bill.

It launches this autumn. Leave your address in the form just below this post, and at launch you'll get a one-time 20% discount code for your first subscription.

Data: Eurostat, harmonised index of consumer prices for food and non-alcoholic beverages in Poland, annual average, 2020 to 2024. Statistics Poland (GUS), Household Budget Survey 2024, spending per person. Oatmeal-sachet, rolled-oats, basil and pellet prices checked on zakupy.biedronka.pl in July 2026, the rest from earlier posts on this blog. Our own calculations.