Why Our Grocery Basket Costs So Much — and What You Can Do About It

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-07-09 · 4 min read

31% — How much cheaper the same everyday basket is at Osher Ad than at Shufersal — as of July 2026, per Superclear's own data

We all know the moment: you walk out of the supermarket with two bags, look at the receipt, and can't quite figure out how it crossed 200 shekels again. It's not your imagination, and it's definitely not you being wasteful. Food in Israel is simply expensive — and behind that price sit a few very concrete reasons. Here's the full story, and at the end, what you can actually do about it right now.

It's not just in your head

Israel is one of the most expensive countries in the developed world. According to a report in TheMarker on OECD data, price levels here are so high they'd fit a country where "everyone earned a high-tech salary" — which, of course, most of us don't.

And the trend keeps getting worse. Calcalist calculated that in 2004 Israel was about 22% cheaper than the OECD average, and by 2022 it was about 38% more expensive. In under twenty years we crossed from the cheap side of the map to the expensive side — while wages didn't run at the same pace.

Three walls that push up the price of our basket

So why does this happen? Broadly, it comes down to three walls.

Wall one — concentration. This may be the single most important factor. A State Comptroller report, as Calcalist covered, found that in twenty food categories just three suppliers control 85% of sales. When there's almost no competition, there's no real pressure to lower prices either. The same report reveals a telling companion figure: the share of "private label" — a chain's own cheaper products — stands at only 6.9% in Israel, versus more than 36% in Europe.

Wall two — imports. Many products are simply hard and expensive to bring in: tariffs, uniquely Israeli standards, and exclusive importers who hold sway over entire brands. Kashrut adds to the bill too — a TheMarker analysis estimated that kashrut requirements add roughly ₪4 billion a year to the cost of food.

Wall three — geographic isolation. We're a small country with closed borders and a physical distance from the big trading partners. The OECD names this as a central cause too, and explicitly recommends cutting tariffs on dairy, fruit and vegetables.

The moment we all took to the streets

If one moment captures the whole story, it's the summer of 2011. After price controls on cottage cheese were lifted in 2008, the price jumped by about 50%. Itzik Alrov opened a Facebook boycott group, and within weeks more than 100,000 people had joined. In October, Tnuva folded and cut the price by about 15% (Walla). This was the "cottage cheese protest" — the spark of that summer's great social-justice movement.

Cottage cheese won. The big question is how much, beyond cottage cheese, actually changed.

The answer, per Globes, is sobering: retailers did "grow cautious about raising prices over the decade," but housing prices soared, and most of the Trajtenberg Committee's recommendations ultimately stayed… recommendations.

And it's happening again

Over the past two years the wave has come back in full force. According to TheMarker, Tnuva's products rose on average by about 15% since early 2023, and Shufersal led the chains with a roughly 16% increase. In April 2025, within a matter of hours, three giants — Strauss, Unilever and the Coca-Cola group — announced price hikes almost in unison.

And the public? It took to the streets again, this time through the keyboard. Lucille Bleikerman led a campaign called "Two Weeks Without the Supermarket," with a line that became a slogan: "Enough — we won't pay any price" (Ynet).

There's good news too

Not everything is gloomy. In 2024 the Knesset approved a reform called "What's Good for Europe is Good for Israel": instead of insisting on uniquely Israeli standards, imported products can rely on European ones. The move is meant to lower the price of about 90% of consumer goods and save an average household roughly ₪6,000 a year (Calcalist).

That's significant — but it's worth remembering: the reform mainly tackles the import wall. Concentration, the deeper and harder wall, it does not break.

Meanwhile — the power that's already in your hands

Until the structure of the market changes, one thing depends only on you: where you shop. And here the gap is enormous.

At Superclear we checked the actual prices across the country, and found that the cheapest chain in Israel is Osher Ad — about 20% below the national median. Even among the big, familiar chains the gap is dramatic: an identical basket of everyday products costs about 31% more at Shufersal than at Osher Ad. Over a month's shopping, that's hundreds of shekels — thousands a year — just because of the name on the sign. And that's before we even mention the truly expensive chains, where the gap versus the cheapest climbs to about 48%.

You don't have to overhaul all your habits. But it's worth knowing exactly how much more you're paying — and where, right next to you, you could pay less.

Sources