We’ve all been there: standing in the checkout line, staring at your sad basket of instant noodles, cheap bread, and maybe some reduced to clear mince. When you’re down to your final $25 for the week and faced with the choice between a box or fresh veggies to get you through the weekend, most students opt to drown their sorrows.
Critic Te Ārohi’s 2025 Census found that nearly 79% of students ranked the cost of living among their top three concerns – an unsurprising figure given that almost half of New Zealanders nationwide report the same strain. A key component of the cost of living is the grocery basket – so it’s unfortunate New Zealand sports some of the highest grocery prices in the world. For students, these prices are particularly brutal, making even the basics feel out of reach. Between StudyLink payments and a part-time job, barely the rent and power bills are covered – let alone a healthy diet.
It doesn’t make much sense to the average Joe. New Zealand produces a shit tonne of food, but it still feels like meat is a luxury item. The fuck? The answer as to why your grocery shop breaks the bank is less about individual choice (buying a block of cheese shouldn’t make your chest ache with guilt) and more about structural failure (the economy needs Government intervention to make things better). Aotearoa has a supermarket market dominated by two main players – known as a duopoly – and a legal system that is currently unable to fix the issue.
No Dumb Questions: What Do Students Know About The Duopoly?
For most students in Aotearoa, groceries are less about nutrition or enjoyment and more about survival. Students that Critic spoke to reckoned their weekly food budgets typically fell between $50 and $110 – numbers which may sound manageable until you realise how little that covers. These days, a block of cheese can reach upwards of $16. Eggs are coming in at around $10 a dozen. Cucumbers are like $6 despite mostly consisting of water. When surveying students on why groceries are so expensive in New Zealand, there were some pretty obvious answers: “inflation,” “capitalism,” and “the government.” Others offered more personal takes: a sense that “everything is just harder now,” or that it’s something to do with“Covid” and that “increased production costs had driven prices up.”
Instead of baking chocolate chip cookies, fifth-year Law student Reagan* has applied those brains of his to create “recession cakes and muffins” made from oil, milk, and sugar. His friend Yasmin* is well-acquainted with Reagan’s creations: “The other day I ate a real muffin, and I was blown away by the fact that it didn’t taste slightly of oil [...] I’ve been duped into thinking that every dessert should taste faintly of oil.” Euanm, a third-year Anthropology student, has stopped buying bread altogether, occasionally making it from scratch, and Reagan has cut out alcohol completely. “I’ve stopped drinking – alcohol is so expensive,” he says. Claire agrees: “$30 a week savings really makes a difference.”
Financial pressure even hangs over student’s social lives. Claire admitted to dreading a BYO she had that night, with the group estimating that once drinks, corkage, and food are accounted for, a single night can cost upwards of $50 – “which is how much Wax Mustang was charging for a ticket in Wanaka.” It creates a sort of student-buyer's remorse, leaving students feeling “angry, guilty, and frustrated”. Sophie*, a fourth-year Law student, told Critic that she often feels “haunted” by “bad spending decisions”. Nowadays, she simply accepts that she won’t “get joy out of food”. But if students are regularly feeling “angry, guilty, and frustrated” due to celebrating a mate’s birthday or buying a block of butter, you have to ask: what’s going on?
Some (law) students Critic spoke to noted that Aotearoa’s small population and relative isolation makes us a less lucrative market for multinational companies. “We have a low population, so there’s less people and less buying power [...] It doesn’t make a good lucrative market for multinational companies to come in.” Others linked high domestic prices to export dynamics: “I think because we are such an export-dependent country [...] a lot of our prices are built on this idea of global demand [...] because we export, we can charge more here.” Competition (or lack thereof) was also a recurring theme. “Obviously we have low competition in the [grocery] sector.” A few students also pointed to “not enough government regulation” as a factor. Other students happily admitted, “Actually, I haven’t really thought about it.”
It might seem a bit of a jump, but the answer as to why Reagan and Yasmin have resorted to Depression-era baking and ditching the drinks is, at least in part, due to the duopoly. Probably also due to rogue student ingenuity. Many of the students Critic talked to staunchly rejected the idea that individual hacks could fix the underlying cost of living crisis – and they’re right. The grocery market is structurally screwed.
Why Is Food So Expensive In Aotearoa?: A Crash Course on Competition
New Zealand’s grocery market is dominated by just two players – Foodstuffs (New World, Pak’nSave, Four Square) and Woolworths (Countdown). Technically, it’s three players – Foodstuffs has a North and South ‘branch’, but for the consumer it pretty much looks the same. Together, Foodstuffs and Woolworths operate as a duopoly that make up 82% of our grocery sector: two market players that hold significant market power. This is important because it can impact market competition, a concept used to describe the way market players compete with each other for consumers, using factors such as price and quality.
When students were asked if they knew what a duopoly was, responses were mixed. Some nailed it: “It’s two companies controlling everything” or “two main companies that owned everything.” Some went full Monopoly mode: “I know a monopoly is one person controlling everything, so I guess a duopoly must be two people controlling everything?” The law nerds interviewed made reference to these structural forces: “There is an illusion of competition […] Four Square and Woolworths are owned by the same company,” “they’re not incentivised to compete with each other.” Others had no idea: “Not sure aye.”
Let’s break down the duopoly. Chances are, you’ve heard of the game Monopoly. If for some reason you’ve just crawled out of the womb (good luck) or left the place under the rock you call home, players win at Monopoly by becoming monopolists and getting all of the good properties on the board. It’s fun being a monopolist because you get heaps of money. However, it’s not very fun for anyone else – the monopolist can charge however much they like because they have lots of bargaining and market power. There is no competition for consumers to benefit from, as they must instead pay the price the monopolist sets.
Thankfully, a close eye is kept on many monopolies in New Zealand. For example, Transpower owns and operates the national electricity grid – they are a monopolist. Imagine how bad it would be if Transpower decided to misuse their market power by charging ridiculous prices, which would be a massive burden on consumers who are now faced with extremely expensive power. As such, the Commerce Commission and Electricity Authority make sure Transpower is transparent about how they charge consumers and what they are allowed to earn on investments.
Similar to the monopolist, a duopolist (where there are two dominant market players) can also maintain high prices and limit competition. This is because two market players rarely vigorously compete with each other. Think of it this way: if you and your mate are both 50/50 owners of the Monopoly board, you can both earn a fair amount of money if you just leave each other alone and both charge high prices. Sure, you’re not earning as much as you could as if you were a monopolist, but monopolists tend to get regulated and attract more public scrutiny. Duopolies are the place to be!
Competition law is meant to prevent duopolies and monopolies (more broadly known as ‘market concentration’) from harming consumers. According to Ed Willis, a competition law expert and lecturer here at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, competition law can generally be defined as “boundaries” that are set in place to ensure that free market exchanges benefit consumers. It allows businesses to discover, and consumers to decide, where the best price quality trade is for any good or service – “as long as the market is working properly”. To achieve this end, competition law broadly prohibits three key things. Firstly, the misuse of market power: certain conduct for businesses that yield large market power is off limits. Secondly, if you don’t have market power we don’t really want people to get it, so competition law prohibits increasing market power through buying up competitors. Thirdly, collusion is a no-no (like price-fixing cartels). However, in practice, these mechanisms are not currently strong enough to constrain New Zealand’s supermarket duopoly.
Why Competition Law Is Unable To Fix The Supermarket Duopoly
Ed’s key stipulations for how competition law effectively functions were “as long as the market is working properly”. However, in a nutshell, the grocery market is not working properly – and this is why consumers suffer. “Competition law gets [interested in the grocery sector] because supermarkets have market power,” Ed explains, referencing their duopolist status. As a result, Ed says that supermarkets wield market power in two directions: over consumers and over suppliers. Bear with us through the jargon – understanding how supermarkets constrain consumer and supplier choice directly illustrates why we’re struggling to keep costs down.
In the ‘consumer direction’, individual supermarket stores essentially operate as local monopolies. Long story short, supermarkets know that consumers will only do so much to save a buck. While I could drive to South Dunedin to visit Pak’n’Save, the Mad Butcher, and then hit Veggies Boys on the way home to get a pretty cheap shop, I won’t. I’ll probably just hit my local New World. According to Ed, supermarkets leverage this by tending to only compete with other stores within a five-kilometre radius, as this is about the radius consumers will travel for their weekly shop. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but supermarkets aren’t often in super close proximity – they all tend to abide by that approximate five-kilometer ‘rule’.
Additionally, over the past two decades, supermarkets have strategically purchased large plots of land and imposed restrictive covenants on that land before onselling to prevent competitors from building nearby. These covenants are now outlawed, but it’s potentially too little and too late. The result is that for many consumers, their local supermarket is their ‘only’ option, giving that store pricing power without fear of losing customers. Supermarkets basically have a captive consumer group that they can act as a local monopolist in.
Supermarkets also dominate their suppliers. Most of New Zealand’s grocery suppliers are small, family-owned businesses. They have extremely limited options for selling their products and must negotiate with Foodstuffs North, Foodstuffs South, and Woolworths to survive. If suppliers don’t like the prices those supermarkets give them, then they’ll have fun going out of business. This power imbalance allows supermarkets to demand wholesale prices while selling to consumers at a significant markup, pocketing the difference. Ed notes that this dual monopoly – over consumers and suppliers – is a major reason why food prices remain high.
Alice Taylor: From Flat Dinners To Food Politics
Alice Taylor, former scarfie and Critic food columnist turned professional food creator, doesn’t need a law degree or economic jargon to explain the dire cost of living crisis. Alice just has to walk into New World. “The vibes are awful. Everyone’s pissed off.”
Some of the students Critic spoke to regarding the duopoly reiterated what Alice had sensed while on her weekly shop. Reagan described the student population as “a society of people yearning to be set free of high prices.” Marcus* said he often stares longingly at fresh vegetables he can’t afford. Sophie* admits she lingers in front of the butter section “just looking sad.” Even Pak’nSAVE, usually seen as the cheapest option, is out of reach for those without cars. However, alongside the hardship is a unique sense of solidarity. Every student knows what we’re talking about: “Everyone else is going through it too.”
Alice’s Instagram page (@alicetayloreats) has amassed over 300,000 followers. Her success is something she feels is, in part, a reflection of that collective frustration many of us feel at the supermarket. “Pages like mine have grown astronomically because that’s what the climate is wanting,” Alice explains. Alice’s content blends everything from cheap eating hacks to conversations with politicians about why your block of cheese costs $16. Christopher Luxon, Chlöe Swarbrick, Nicola Willis, and Chris Hipkins have all sat in Alice’s kitchen, discussing the current crisis and showing that cheap recipes and structural critique are part of the same conversation. The popularity of her videos – baking with substitutions, stretching cans of beans into dinners, leaning back into Depression-era recipes – signals how desperate people are for small ways to push back against high prices.
Before Alice had donned a MasterChef apron and had MPs sliding into her DMs, she was just another broke student trying to stretch her StudyLink payment into food that resembled a meal. In 2019, she was flatting for the first time, blowing her budget on restaurant dinners before quickly realising she had to learn to cook. “Being a student shaped the way I cook now,” she tells me. “You have to do it out of necessity – that’s where the creativity comes from.”
Alice came to Otago to study law (peer pressure, fuck Arana) before switching to politics and history. She launched @alicetayloreats in her second year, gaining around 1,000 followers. Given this was during 2019 in Dunedin, this was pretty much minor celebrity status. She wanted a food column, having always wanted to be a food writer, so she pitched herself to Critic. While she had little experience, she could promise on-time deadlines and no pay required – the kind of sweet nothings that still work on Critic editors today.
That initial pitch turned into her iconic Fuck, I Can’t Cook series, a rogue ode to student cooking where she shared weekly recipes. “People loved it,” she recalls, “I’d go to flat parties and see my recipes stuck up on walls.” Much of the Fuck, I Can’t Cook series is still up on the Critic website today, so definitely check it out.
From there, Alice auditioned for MasterChef. One of the first things the judges commented on in response to her audition meal was her use of “normal ingredients” in cooking. Seems she’s always been down to Earth like that. Alice made it as a finalist and then trained as a chef, sweating through fine-dining shifts before pivoting back to the kind of cooking she loved. But leaving MasterChef came with its own pressure about the visuals of food content on Instagram: “I was constantly confronted with recipes and visuals: how a person looks, what kitchen they are cooking in [...] I was often leaving the app feeling worse about myself and my situation.”
Alice eventually reached a breaking point. “Either I’m going to post realistic food, or I’m not going to post anything at all,” she said. The decision became the very foundation and ethos of her page. “I wanted to create a page where people could get value in that they learned something, but also that they feel better about themselves after they go on it.” Alice has built her current career around empowering regular Kiwis to cook realistic, affordable, and unpretentious food. Part of this is showing her mistakes. “As a rule, I always include the fuckups that I make in the recipes.”
When asked to comment on her tips for students struggling to eat healthily in this cost-of-living crisis, Alice stressed the importance of shopping seasonally – of really trying to understand what is in season, and therefore cheap, and basing meals around this. She also stresses the importance of keeping an open-mind when going shopping. Keep the staples: pasta, tinned whatever, but then remain flexible with the fruit and vegetable options. Frozen produce is both economical and nutritious, and choosing the right store makes a difference. Stop paying $6 a capsicum when you can get a kilogram of it frozen for the same price. She reminisces and speaks highly of well-priced Veggie Boys, which Critic reassured her was still very much a staple for Otago students.
As it stands, students are doing the best they can with the economic circumstances they are facing. Alice is quick to acknowledge that the economy was vastly different when she was in her first couple of years at Otago. “I would imagine the financial pressures on you are much worse than they were on us,” she says.
Politics On The Plate
Alice’s background in politics has shaped the way that she thinks about food “enormously”. After completing a Master of Politics at Otago, she nearly pursued a PhD on the politics of food – a proposal she admits went nowhere, but one that captured her frustration. Her studies focused on Taiwanese, Chinese, and U.S. foreign policy and security, disciplines that forced her to think critically across ideological divides. “I am fascinated by politics and talking to people and politicians with different views to me [...] I just want to understand why they think the way they do.” That openness, she says, has sharpened her approach to food politics: analysing issues with curiosity, resisting easy binaries, and reflecting a range of perspectives back to her audience.
Based on her Instagram interviews with various politicians, Alice has found one point of consensus across Aotearoa’s political spectrum. Every politician she’s spoken to has admitted to the severity of the current supermarket situation, and most pointed to more competition as the fix. Alice felt that these conversations were necessary to the kind of content she was posting. For her, it felt weird saying to her audience, “Hey guys, here’s how you save money”, without addressing the elephant in the room. “This cost-of-living crisis is out of our control. It’s not about buying the right cut of meat. It’s about the economy improving. It should not be this expensive for people to feed themselves.”
Alice stresses that she doesn’t want Kiwis to just accept that food is expensive here, the same way we have been told to accept being a low-wage economy. Her platform allows thousands of students, young families, and everyday Kiwis to comment directly on political soundbites – a kind of digital accountability forum. “Politicians read those comments, and I felt like I brought people and their voices closer to politicians.” She wants to reflect back what the politicians are thinking to her followers so that they can engage in some kind of dialogue about the cost of living crisis.
Systematic Obstacles: Can Competition Fix This?
For all the talk of “more competition”, the current economic playing field is tilted pretty heavily in favour of the current duopoly. As Ed Willis explains, the duopoly is propped up not only by sheer size but by these tactics that make it nearly impossible for new players to break through.
The supermarkets are not necessarily acting out of malice; they are simply behaving rationally within a duopolistic structure that rewards soft competition. “Two big supermarkets is not enough to exert competitive pressure on one another,” Ed says. “It’s much easier for them to compete very softly with each other than act competitively.” While this might sound a bit like collusion, it’s done passively – “they’ve just worked out that if [they] don’t compete aggressively, it’s kind of good for [them].”
Rather than battling aggressively for customers, the two giants appear to have reached a quiet understanding: restraint benefits them both. Genuine price wars would eat into their profits, so instead, they maintain high base prices, punctuated by periodic ‘specials’ designed to create the illusion of competition. For consumers, that means little real choice. You cannot walk into a supermarket and negotiate your bill. You pay what is on the shelf. As Ed puts it, “It’s easy being a monopolist. You set the price high, and people still buy because they have no alternative.”
Attempts by other players to enter the market have largely failed. The Warehouse, for example, experimented with selling groceries cheaply to attract customers, planning to make a profit from other products in-store. However, the entrenched supply chains, nationwide distribution networks, and deep margins of the duopoly meant that the Warehouse could not sustain competition. Even international giants like Costco face formidable barriers: entering New Zealand would require replicating the duopoly’s complex infrastructure (think warehouses, supplier agreements, refrigerated trucks) or relying on government subsidies, neither of which is guaranteed.
The Commerce Commission, competition law’s key regulator, has recognised these issues. Its 2022 market study into retail grocery highlighted a “serious lack of competition” and recommended aggressive interventions, including wholesale access schemes or introducing a third player to disrupt the duopoly. Yet government action has been limited, often constrained by political risk and the economic clout of the existing supermarkets.
So what could change? Politicians float ideas like forcing the duopoly to structurally separate, or setting up a ‘Kiwishop’ (think Kiwibank but for groceries). Ed emphasises that, while competition law theoretically prohibits misuse of market power, simply charging high prices is not illegal. Structural solutions – like Kiwishop, third-player entry, or splitting the duopoly – lie beyond the reach of competition law and remain politically contentious. The Grocery Commissioner, appointed in 2023, is meant to monitor unfair practices and push supermarkets into fairer dealings with suppliers. Ed is sceptical about whether these measures have “teeth” or not. Regulation always sounds good in principle, but if it is not enforced vigorously, the incentives for supermarkets to behave differently are weak.
What Nicola Willis’ Recent Proposal Would Mean For The Duopoly
If you’re particularly onto it, you may have noticed Nicole Willis hooting and hollering in the media about her big plans to fix the duopoly. Let’s quickly break down what these suggestions could mean for the supermarket sector.
Earlier in March this year, the Government basically put out the feelers and asked for investors and potential grocery market competitors to explain what was stopping them from giving Woolworths and Foodstuffs a run for their money. From the responses received, the Government got some “key themes” to work with. Long story short, consenting timeframes, limited access to suitable sites for new supermarket development (thanks, restrictive covenants), and accessing wholesale, competitively priced suppliers is difficult. These are known in competition law terms as barriers to entry.
From this, the Government has proposed creating a fast-track approvals process under the Fast Track Act for supermarkets, as it currently takes about 18 months and $1 million to get resource consent. Expenny. But think about supermarkets: they kind of all look the same. Aisles, butchery, fresh produce… You know the drill. It’s a pretty intensive process to get consent considering the buildings are more or less the same.
It’s weird that it would take that long for councils to essentially approve the same building copy and pasted in different spots. The Government thinks so too – so is allowing grocery developers to use the MultiProof scheme for faster building consent. MultiProof is a national approval that allows builders and companies who make the same or similar standardized building designs to streamline their consent process. Building consent is still required with MultiProof, but basically only examines site-specific features (like foundations) and needs to be completed within 10 working days instead of 20. It’s kind of like having to get a separate approval every time you print the same document on a different printer. Even though it’s the exact same file, you’re still stuck waiting for someone to check it over each time. The MultiProof scheme is like getting that file officially pre-approved, so now all you need is a quick check to make sure the paper tray is loaded properly – and you're good to go.
Removing restrictions to MultiProof is quite good for all grocery developers, not just new entrants. Therefore, it might not do anything specific to break up the clear structural issues within our grocery sector. According to an opinion piece published by The Spinoff, right-wing thinktank New Zealand Initiative (NZI) is claiming credit for the idea. NZI’s board members include executives and directors from Foodstuffs and Woolworths, and Willis herself is an ex-board member. To sum up The Spinoff’s opinion on the proposal: “The duopoly appears to be proposing solutions to the problems it created.” Local brand Night ’n Day was also doubtful the fast-track approach will work to fix the issues within our grocery sector, with general manager Matthew Lane saying that the issue is competition – not lack of buildings.
Plus, what’s the point in a speedy consenting process if our wholesale sector is still fucked. Without access to competitively priced wholesale groceries, entrants wouldn’t even have groceries to sell. According to Willis, “A cost-benefit analysis of restructuring the major grocery players is underway,” and the fast-track process forms part of some pro-competition grand scheme. While amendments to the Fast-Track Act to incorporate the streamlined grocery-development process will be done by the end of the year, Willis also proposed some other changes that would shake up competition, but are left undated. Firstly, she promises to “improve the operation of the Overseas Investment Act regime by clarifying the pathways available for grocery investments.” This would be massive to get international players such as Lidl and Aldi interested in our grocery market.
She also proposed to amend the Commerce Act (our key piece of competition law) to better combat “predatory pricing”. Predatory pricing happens when big market players misuse their market power to sustain often artificially low prices in order to stamp-out new entrants. For example, if you have 9/10 properties on the Monopoly board, you could force the last property holder out of business by undercutting them and charging low prices for players to stay at your properties. You can afford to take the temporary hit until the competitor is out – you ‘starve’ them out of the market. This is prohibited under section 36 of the Commerce Act (misuse of market power) but the Commerce Commission has only taken action under that section once since its reform in 2020. Willis intends to introduce an “objective economic test” to test whether predatory pricing has happened, but she didn’t expand on what exactly that test could be.
While it’s difficult to comment without seeing the legislative or policy detail, Ed thinks the potential of an objective test is probably a "positive thing”, given it’s a direct acknowledgement from the Government that supermarkets do have market power that can be misused “to frustrate entry or expansion.” An objective test could (if calibrated right) remove some of the debate over whether pricing is predatory or not – but this will still be “difficult to prosecute.”
“Say the objective standard is pricing below cost,” Ed suggests. The issue with this is that supermarkets and other businesses do this all the time: headline items are often reduced to below cost as a marketing tactic. “Is this no longer allowed?” Ed asks. “If evidence of an anti-competitive intention is needed, how will this be proved? Do we need a smoking gun email that probably doesn’t exist?”. Finally, how do you explain to consumers that the lower prices they enjoy are actually harming competition and need to be removed. “It would be a brave government,” Ed says.
The Grocery Sector: Where We Are Now and Looking Ahead
Aotearoa is left in a bit of an uncertain place. Without structural intervention, Ed predicts little change – something he thinks is “years away”. The worst-case scenario is less choice, because suppliers will suffer and go out of business. The grocery sector remains at a crossroads. Students should not have to choose between fresh vegetables and paying rent, yet in a market dominated by two supermarket giants, that is the current reality. Hacks and recession-era muffins certainly show resilience, but they are no substitute for wider reform. Progress needs to come through stronger competition and effective regulation. Until then, food will remain out of reach for many. Students know this is not about budgeting better, it is about power. Eating in Aotearoa should not feel like a privilege.