What does a week of dinners cost for three? Real shelf prices, 2026

We took five dinners and priced every one of them at five shops. Same recipes, same quantities, same day. The cheapest basket comes to €47.23. The priciest comes to €64.25. That is €17.02 of difference, or 36 percent, for a single week.

The headline number is not the interesting part. What matters is where the gap opens up, and where it does not. Because it is not where you would guess.

the short answer

Five dinners, three people, so fifteen servings. Every ingredient is tied to a specific, named shop product and its listed price. Nothing is estimated.

Five dinners for three, at shelf prices from 9 July 2026. Converted from forint at 400 HUF to the euro.
Shop	The whole week	Per person	One dinner, one person
Aldi	€47.23	€15.74	€3.15
Lidl	€49.37	€16.46	€3.29
SPAR	€50.24	€16.75	€3.35
Tesco	€52.47	€17.49	€3.50
Kifli	€64.25	€21.42	€4.28

Across the four physical chains the spread is €5.24, or 11 percent. Cook exactly these five dinners every week for a year, shopping at Aldi rather than Tesco, and the difference is €272. Same food, same quantities.

Kifli sits in its own category, 36 percent above the cheapest chain. That is not a scandal, it is what delivery costs. It is worth knowing how much.

where there is no difference at all

Here is the part that surprised us too. For some ingredients the four chains charge exactly the same. Not similar. Identical, to the forint.

Carrots are 489 Ft a kilo (about €1.22) at Aldi, Lidl, SPAR and Tesco alike.
A 450 g bag of frozen peas is 339 Ft (about €0.85) at all four.

And these are not the same product. Four separate barcodes, four own-brand lines: "Sárgarépa 1kg" at Aldi, "S-Budget sárgarépa 1 kg" at SPAR, "TS sárgarépa 1 kg" at Tesco. Different products, identical price tags.

On basic vegetables and frozen staples the chains price their own labels against each other to the last forint. There is nothing to save on those lines by walking into a different shop, and nothing to optimise.

where there is

The weekly plan uses twenty-nine distinct ingredients. Eight of them have a shelf price at all four chains, so those eight can be compared cleanly, with no guesswork. This is what the week's quantity of each one costs:

The cost of the weekly quantity, for the items every one of the four chains prices. Line items are rounded; the total is computed from unrounded figures.
Ingredient	Quantity	Aldi	Lidl	SPAR	Tesco
Cucumber	300 g	€0.64	€0.54	€1.28	€0.64
Red pepper	6	€1.69	€1.29	€1.78	€1.66
Greek yogurt	180 g	€0.21	€0.41	€0.21	€0.39
Lemon	3	€1.08	€1.08	€1.08	€0.98
Onion	6	€0.38	€0.39	€0.41	€0.39
Spaghetti	270 g	€0.44	€0.42	€0.42	€0.44
Frozen peas	180 g	€0.34	€0.34	€0.34	€0.34
Carrot	3	€0.29	€0.29	€0.29	€0.29
Total		€5.07	€4.76	€5.82	€5.12

A cucumber costs €1.28 at SPAR and €0.54 at Lidl. Same vegetable, two and a half times the price. On Greek yogurt, SPAR and Aldi charge half of what Lidl does, so the ranking flips from line to line. No shop is cheapest at everything.

Those eight items are the whole pattern in miniature. Where a product is basic and directly comparable, the chains price against each other. Where it is fresh produce, own sourcing or a branded line, the gap opens, sometimes to double.

dinner by dinner

The same breakdown per dinner, costed for one person:

Cost of one serving, by shop. Line items are rounded; the total is computed from unrounded figures.
Dinner	Aldi	Lidl	SPAR	Tesco	Kifli
Greek Chicken Gyros Bowl	€2.02	€2.50	€2.75	€2.70	€3.00
Air-Fryer Lemon Garlic Chicken	€2.96	€2.94	€3.16	€3.15	€3.30
Spanish Chicken Paella	€3.27	€3.09	€3.25	€3.33	€5.03
Classic Spaghetti Bolognese	€3.45	€3.68	€3.54	€4.16	€4.45
Slow-Cooker Hungarian Goulash	€4.04	€4.25	€4.04	€4.14	€5.63
The whole week, per person	€15.74	€16.46	€16.75	€17.49	€21.42

A gyros bowl is €2.02 a serving at Aldi. That is roughly where the "cooking at home is expensive" argument runs out. The goulash is the priciest dinner at four shops out of five; at Tesco the bolognese edges past it by two cents. Both are built on beef, and beef is what moves your week, not the paprika.

For the paella, Kifli asks €5.03 a serving against Lidl's €3.09. That is the widest single gap in the table, and two lines account for most of it: the red pepper (€1.22 instead of €0.22) and the paella rice (€0.72 instead of €0.12).

how we worked it out

the method, so you can check it

Source: the public price data published by the Hungarian competition authority's Árfigyelő service, snapshot of 9 July 2026. Kifli's prices come from its own catalogue.
Recipes: the five dinners live in the NomNom app, unmodified. Twenty-nine distinct ingredients.
Quantities: every recipe at three servings, exactly as the app costs it. Ingredient amounts are per serving, so the weekly figure is the price of fifteen servings.
Estimates: none. All twenty-nine ingredients resolve to a real, named product. Not one price is invented or averaged.

what the numbers do not tell you

The public data only prices some of the twenty-nine ingredients at each chain: sixteen at Aldi, fifteen at Lidl and SPAR, fourteen at Tesco. For the rest we fall back to Kifli's catalogue price, the same figure for every shop.

Which means the real difference between the shops is larger than this table shows, because roughly half the ingredients carry an identical price everywhere. The ranking holds; the gap is understated. Better that we say so than that you find out.

And the obvious caveat, stated anyway: these are one day's list prices. Promotions, loyalty discounts and store-level variation are not in them. Tomorrow the numbers move.

the point

It is not that you should switch to Aldi. It is that the cost of your week can be known before you leave the house. Not a range, not a feeling, not "about thirty thousand forints". Fifteen servings, twenty-nine ingredients, one number.

That is what NomNom does every day. It pulls the shelf prices, ties them to the recipes, and tells you what your week costs and which shop to walk into, before you go.

what does a week of dinners cost for three?