The Chain That Doesn't Publish Prices Just Became a "Large Retailer". We Have 79 Branches Nobody Can Compare

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-07-25 · 6 min read

79 of 88 — Of the 2,293 stores in Superclear's price index, 88 carry no price score at all — and 79 of them belong to a single chain: Nizat Haduvdevan (data as of July 25, 2026)

On July 23, 2026, Israel's Competition Authority published an update to its list of large retailers and suppliers. The new name on it: Nizat Haduvdevan, the natural-foods and organic-products chain. According to TheMarker, the chain crossed an annual sales-turnover bar of roughly NIS 295 million, and it is the first natural-foods chain to enter the list in a decade — no small feat in a sector widely described as squeezed.

That's the headline. But for us, running a price index that scrapes every grocery chain in Israel, there's a completely different story here — and it's one we can show in the data, because it has been bothering us for months.

What actually happens when you join the list

The 2014 Food Sector Competition Promotion Law defines a "large retailer" as an operator with at least three stores whose annual sales exceed NIS 250 million — a figure indexed annually, standing at roughly NIS 294.3 million for 2026 per the statutory text (Wikisource). Cross the bar and you join the list, and the list carries a package of duties: limits on how suppliers may dictate shelf arrangement, geographic expansion restrictions, rules governing supplier–retailer relations, and annual reporting to the Authority. When Wolt Market joined the list in May 2025, Globes and Calcalist laid out that same package — both of those pieces predate this article's news window by a long way, and are cited here as background on how the list works, not as news.

But the duty that concerns us sits in the price-transparency chapter. The 2014 price-transparency regulations (Nevo) require a large retailer to publish three XML files: a stores file, a products-and-prices file, and a promotions file — for each branch separately. The files must go up daily no later than the store's opening hour, must be updated within one hour of a change at the checkout, and must be retained for three months. The site must let any visitor pull any file on an ongoing basis, free of charge, for private or commercial use, at a minimum 99.5% availability.

In other words: the law doesn't ask a chain to "be transparent" in the abstract. It asks it to publish a machine-readable file that anyone — a shopper, a reporter, a comparison app — can download and analyse.

The one chain that didn't

Of the 34 grocery chains we scrape, Nizat Haduvdevan is the only one that publishes no official transparency feed. Every other chain uploads its XML files, and we download them. For Nizat Haduvdevan we had to build an entirely bespoke scraper — one that walks nizat.com itself and assembles a transparency-shaped structure out of whatever the site exposes. Even today, the chain's branch directory page lists addresses, phone numbers and opening hours — and links to no price file, in any format.

And it shows in the numbers. Superclear's price index, as of July 25, 2026, ranks 33 chains — from Yellow at the expensive end (31% above the national median) to Osher Ad at the cheap end (20% below). Nizat Haduvdevan simply isn't there. No rank, no index, no position.

At the individual-store level the picture is sharper still. Our index holds 2,293 stores, of which 2,205 receive a price score. That leaves 88 stores with no score — and 79 of them, nine out of every ten, belong to Nizat Haduvdevan. That is the entire chain: all 79 of its branches that appear on our map, without exception, are points you cannot compare. By store count in our own data it is the ninth-largest chain we track — larger than Mahsanei Hashuk or Victory — and all of it is invisible to the index.

Why even the data we did collect isn't enough

Here we have to be fair to ourselves as well. Even after building the bespoke scraper, Nizat Haduvdevan's branches still score nothing — and the reason is methodological, not malicious. Our index rates a store only if it stocks at least 50 products out of the roughly 500 most widely stocked items in the country; below that, the comparison is meaningless. No Nizat Haduvdevan branch clears that bar. Which is exactly what you'd expect of a natural-foods chain: an assortment that barely intersects the standard national shopping basket.

That's worth absorbing before anyone expects deliverance. Publishing the files is a precondition for comparison, not the comparison itself. Even once Nizat Haduvdevan starts publishing XML as the law requires, a comparison between its jar of raw tahini and the shelf at Rami Levy won't materialise on its own — it will require the products to genuinely be the same products.

What needs saying plainly

Nizat Haduvdevan broke no law. Until last week it simply wasn't a large retailer, so the price-publication duty didn't apply to it at all. The fact that it published no files is a direct consequence of the threshold the law itself set — not of evasion. The transparency regulations, for that matter, set no explicit grace period for a chain that has just joined the list, so the expected date of a first publication doesn't follow directly from the regulatory text.

What this case does expose is how the threshold works. The law draws a red line at roughly NIS 295 million in turnover, and everything beneath it — dozens of regional, neighbourhood and specialist chains — stays outside transparency entirely, by design. Nizat Haduvdevan sat on that side of the line for years while already operating some 80 branches from Kiryat Shmona down to Eilat. The threshold measures money, not presence.

The law, passed by the Knesset in 2014 in the wake of the 2011 protests, is enforced by the Competition Authority and the Consumer Protection and Fair Trade Authority, and is backed by criminal and financial sanctions (Wikipedia). But a sanction only works on someone the law applies to.

The bottom line for shoppers

If you shop at Nizat Haduvdevan — and plenty of people do; per TheMarker it's the first natural-foods chain to cross the large-retailer threshold in a decade — it's worth knowing that no price-comparison service in Israel, ours included, can actually tell you whether you paid more or less than at another branch of the same chain, let alone against a different chain. That isn't accidental and it isn't sinister; it's what happens when there is no file.

The July 23 update should change that. It'll be worth checking back in a few months to see whether the files actually went live — and that's a check anyone can run, because making them open to everyone is precisely what the law demands.

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