We priced the same 471 products at Asda and Ocado. The gap was £141.
Not a sample, not an estimate — every like-for-like product we currently track at both shops, totalled. Asda came out 6.3% cheaper, but the gap is not spread evenly, and two thirds of the basket was on offer somewhere.
Supermarket price comparisons usually come with an asterisk. Someone picks a trolley of thirty items, prices it at two shops, and reports the difference — which tells you about those thirty items and very little else. Change the trolley and you change the answer.
We can do something narrower and more useful, because we already price around 140,000 supermarket products every night. Instead of choosing a basket, we can take every product we currently track at both Asda and Ocado, matched on brand, name and pack size, and total it. No selection is made, so there is no selection to argue with.
On prices checked between 10 and 21 July 2026, that came to 471 products.
The headline number
| Asda | Ocado | |
|---|---|---|
| Basket of 471 identical products | £2,235.56 | £2,376.97 |
| Cheaper on | 259 products | 137 products |
| Identical price on | 75 products | 75 products |
Asda's total is £141.41 lower — 6.3%.
That is the whole finding, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not mean. It does not mean an Asda shop is 6.3% cheaper than an Ocado shop. It means these 471 products are, and they are the products the two shops happen to have in common in our data, which skews towards branded lines that both stock and away from own-label ranges that can only be compared loosely.
What it does establish is direction, and the direction is consistent: Asda was cheaper on 259 of the 396 products where the two shops disagreed at all.
Where the gap actually sits
Averages hide the interesting part. Broken down by category, the 6.3% is not one gap — it is several gaps of very different sizes, and two categories where Ocado was ahead.
| Category | Products | Asda | Ocado | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Food Cupboard | 139 | £406.24 | £421.42 | £15.18 |
| Pet Care | 93 | £653.13 | £718.60 | £65.47 |
| Household | 83 | £434.91 | £461.65 | £26.74 |
| Drinks | 35 | £365.35 | £383.50 | £18.15 |
| Bakery | 33 | £60.48 | £64.65 | £4.17 |
| Snacks & Confectionery | 24 | £67.19 | £63.55 | −£3.64 |
| Health & Beauty | 20 | £74.25 | £91.75 | £17.50 |
| Dairy & Eggs | 16 | £39.08 | £41.90 | £2.82 |
Nearly half the total difference — £65.47 of £141.41 — comes from pet care alone, on 93 products. Asda was cheaper on 53 of them; Ocado on 18.
Health & Beauty is the sharpest gap in percentage terms: 20 products, £74.25 against £91.75, 23.6% apart. Some of those are not close. OGX Bond Protein Repair Shampoo, 385ml, was £4.98 at Asda and £10.00 at Ocado — the same bottle, twice the price. Vaseline Intensive Care Advanced Repair body lotion, 400ml: £3.75 against £5.60.
And Snacks & Confectionery ran the other way, with Ocado £3.64 cheaper across 24 products. It is a small category in this comparison, but it is a real reversal rather than a rounding error, and it is why "shop X is cheaper" is a claim that needs a denominator attached.
The caveat that matters most
320 of the 471 products were on promotion at one shop or the other. That is 68% of the basket, and it is high enough that this comparison is partly measuring who happened to be running offers in mid-July rather than who prices lower as a habit.
We would rather say that plainly than bury it. Promotional pricing is not fake — you genuinely pay the promotional price — but it moves. A gap built substantially on offers can close, or invert, when those offers end. That is exactly why we re-price everything nightly instead of publishing a comparison once and treating it as a fact about the retailers.
What to take from it
Three things hold up regardless of the promotional caveat:
- The direction is consistent across most categories, not driven by one or two outliers.
- The categories where the gap is worth acting on are pet care, health and beauty, and household — the non-food, bulky, infrequently-repriced things people tend not to check.
- On the products where both shops charged the same, there were 75 of them, and no amount of shopping around helps.
The practical version of this is not "switch to Asda". It is that the non-food half of the trolley is where cross-shop differences quietly accumulate, and it is the half most people never compare.
You can check any of this yourself — every product above is in the comparison tool, priced at all the shops that stock it.
