GROCERY PRICES  

The cheapest grocery store in the northeast is...

January 31, 2026▪️Analysis by The Market Report

It's no secret that food is expensive. Grocery prices are high and getting higher, but even despite that, there are still some easy ways to save on your weekly grocery bill. One simple one: choosing the right store to shop at. The Market Report has compared prices of 50 items at 30 stores across the northeastern US in an effort to find the lowest-priced (and highest-priced) groceries.

These prices were surveyed in January 2025, August-September 2025, and now, January 2026.

Using a standard basket of common groceries like apples, flour, milk, eggs, ground beef, paper towels, and others, I've totaled up the full order at a selection of supermarkets in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. Here's the full results -- plus see more details at the end. A new winner is crowned this time!

  Jump to:  

• The Averages

• The Winners

• The Takeaways

• The List

• The Details

The Averages...................................................

The Winners...................................................

The Takeaways...................................................

The List...................................................

The Details...................................................

• Are grocery prices higher than they were in January 2025 or August/September 2025? Yes, but not by a lot. The average this time is about 3% higher than the average last January, and around 2.5% higher than the summer. That means the average this year is about $9 higher than this time in 2025, and $8 higher than the summer.

• What about items with really big price differences? You can view the entire list below, and if you see an item with a very big price difference compared to January, that's probably about item availability, not the actual cost. For instance, the shrimp at Adams was about $40 in January 2025 and was down to just $14 in August 2025. That's not because the item is actually that much cheaper, it's that they now carry a two-pound bag of the relevant shrimp for $14 rather than one-pound bags of the shrimp for $20 apiece, which they did in January.

• Which stores had the most and least substitutions? Whole Foods had the most substitutions, since they don't carry national-brand items like Lay's, Coca-Cola, or Purina, included on this comparison. ALDI and Price Rite similarly had a large number of substitutions because they're more likely to carry a generic version rather than the name-brand one. LIDL had fewer substitutions this time than in the past. Most stores only had one or two substitutions, if any.

• Why isn't Market Basket (or Trader Joe's, or CTown, or insert-your-favorite-grocer-here) on this list? These stores don't have in-store prices posted online. All of these prices were observed online and confirmed, in some cases, with in-store spot-checks.

• Were any stores surveyed in the past skipped this time? Yes, two stores were removed from the list: Amazon Fresh and Key Food, both because online prices didn't match in-store prices. The location of a SuperFresh surveyed was changed because of online price availability.

• Are these prices correct for all locations of these chains? No -- many chains have different prices at different locations, so this only gives an approximate snapshot given a selected location. These locations have been selected for a geographic spread across several states.

• When were these prices observed? January 2025 (1/15 and 1/16), August-September 2025 (8/26, 8/27, 8/31, and 9/1), and January 2026 (1/19 and 1/20).