Grocery stores in Poland

This post treats about most common grocery storesin Poland. Below you may find a bullet list of subject discussed. Just for your reference – all numbers in here will be taken on the base of statistics and pricing from 3rd quarter of 2020.

• What are the most common grocery stores?
• What is the price of regular daily shopping? – result of my test.
• When can I do the shopping?

Most common grocery stores

I would like to start with listing out all bigger brands available on polish market, where polish people are doing shopping on aily base.

Biedronka – most popular market with over 3000 stores in Poland – almost each single polish person visits it on weekly base 😉 It offers all kind of a products required for daily needs – bread, vegetables, fruit, sweets, household chemicals, drinks, alcohol, meat products, frozen foods, dairy products and even textiles or thematic products depending on the season. Biedronka is the most affordable market listed in here – pricing is good and in many cases you may find in there so called: “wielosztuki” (direct translation: “multi-pieces”). It allows to save from 10% up to 35% price of specific product, if you will buy more than 2 or 3. In order to use it you need to have a loyalty card. What concerns me for the most in case of Biedronka, are crowds of a people in there and not the highest quality of offered “fresh” products.

Lidl – second most popular on our list with around 720 stores. German giant contains the same cross-section of available products and in addition offers so called: “Technical department” with budget tools for garage and householding which is more advanced then in case of Biedronka, as we talk about quality. Lidl is slightly more expensive, but from my point of view – Lidl buildings are most customer friendly, bigger and seems to be less crowded. Lidl prepares for the customers so called: “dedicated week”. It is a week, when you will find in there the most popular products from specific region. For example, this brand offers Lidl Plus app, which allows us to preview and use available sales as well as register all of our shopping receipts in one place. Lidl has definitely less shops then Biedronka, what makes it a little bit more difficult to reach.

Kaufland – over 210 stores. I would have compare this market to bigger and better equipped version of Biedronka. Pricing in here is on the same level, but Kaufland offers possibility to buy fresh meat per weight from the lady behind the counter – language may a barrier here, but as long as you can point out meat which you want, plus say in polish proper number, it shouldn’t be a great challenge 😉 Kaufland has no loyalty card or dedicated application, but this brand is a partner of PayBack system which allows you to gather points from multiple different shops (as for example: Allegro, BP, Orange, Link4 and a lot more). We will come back to Payback system in another article.

Żabka – this brand has the biggest amount of small grocery stores (convenience stores) in Poland. We talk about 6000 places all over the Poland. This is a lot. Żabka is so popular, because of the fact, that they are considered as small post office – which officially cooperates with national post office (Poczta Polska) and DHL. This allows them to be open on Sunday, as the rest of competition has to be closed by the law. Really smart, right 😉? They have a dedicated app, called: Żappka, which allows you to collect points for shopping and exchange them for products from their catalog. As we talk about the price – Żabka is the most expensive one, as we talk about shopping on daily base.

Auchan – 74 hypermarkets in Poland. Auchan allows you to buy almost every type of product which you want – since it is hypermarket, you can find there 100x types of yellow cheese, sport shoes, weights for gym, Scotch whiskey, 50x types of soap, washing machine, TV’s, clothes, office articles and many more. They also have really wide range of pricing, since their own brand of “Auchan products” is one of the cheapest in the whole country. They are also slightly more expensive as we talk about regular “price to quality” products.

Auchan has also the best availability to buy non-local products. So if you are looking on daily base for paella rice, stroopwafels, Beluga or specific Italian pasta, this might be your one of the best chances to get it in Poland. From my point of view, the biggest issues seems to be related with scale of whole shop. Each single Auchan is huge (it is a hypermarket at the end 😊 ). If you want to do daily shopping there, you will use definitely much more time for choosing proper type of product, finding it and getting in to the right alley with proper category, than in case of 3 other markets which I mentioned above.

Last but not Least 😉 We also have a bunch of less popular markets and mini markets as for example: Tesco, Netto, Intermarche, Carrefour, Dino or Lewiatan. Some of these are pretty close from disappearing from polish market and the others are just starting the adventure and grow in amount of shops pretty quick.

Test result – Grocery stores in Poland

Below you may find a result of the test where I bought few regular products with specification as similar as possible, in order to compare the prices.

7 regular products listed below:

• Poultry sausage 100g (Polędwica or szynka drobiowa)
• Cottage cheese 250g (Twaróg)
• Bread around 500g (Chleb)
• 1x tomato – middle size (Pomidor)
• 1x cucumber – middle size (Ogórek)
• 1L milk (Mleko)
• 1x canned beer – Tyskie (Piwo w puszce)

In case of vegetables it was really difficult to find and choose 3x exactly the same tomatoes and cucumbers. This is the reason why, I am using price per kilo instead of real weight – this impacts total amount (Suma) from purchase bill and total from my table.

Products	Biedronka	Lidl	Żabka
Poultry sausage 100g	3.49 zł	4.99 zł	4.50 zł
Cottage cheese 250g	2.79 zł	2.79 zł	4.80 zł
Bread 500g	1.99 zł	1.79 zł	2.20 zł
Tomato – price per kilo	6.99 zł	6.99 zł	5.99 zł
Cucumber – price per kilo	6.99 zł	6.99 zł	6.99 zł
1L milk	2.19 zł	2.15 zł	3.10 zł
1x canned beer – Tyskie	2.99 zł	2.99 zł	3.90 zł
Total	27.43 zł	28.69 zł	31.48 zł

Taking into the consideration, that Biedronka is the cheapest one, we might notice that Lidl is barely 5% more expensive as we talk about standard “daily choice” products. At the same time, I paid almost 15% more for the same grocery shopping in Żabka. Especially dairy products are definitely much more expensive then in other regular markets which are not open 7 days a week. What is the conclusion here? Small convenience stores open through the whole week or gas stations are charging you much more for the same products which you could have buy in regular shops in a regular price. This is why try to treat all 7 days a week or 24/7 shops (for example gas stations) as an emergency in case of unexpected lack of items necessary for life 🙂

I mentioned here gas stations on purpose, since huge majority of them also has a shops open 24/7, since gas station it self is open anyway 24/7. But be careful here – pricing in there will be much higher then in Biedronka or Lidl.

If you would like to buy fresh meat from lady behind the counter instead of the one packed in to plastic boxes, then Kaufland, Lewiatan and Dino will give you such possibility in 95% of all from their shops. In addition, price for a fresh meat like this will be better then the one packed in to the plastic boxes.

Summary

My idea here, was not to point out every single name and brand, but give you overview about most common ones, with good accessibility almost everywhere across Poland in each single smaller and bigger city (except Auchan, which is a hypermarket). Once again – at the end of the post, I would like to ask for opinion about mentioned article – any feedback would be very welcome.

Would you like to read more publications about “Everyday life” on my blog? Click here to see more. Would you like to read article about Eco and Bio alternatives for shopping? Use this link.