Grocery prices today: rice, oil, tomato paste, sugar, and tea

Weight first, then price

The commonest grocery pricing mistake is comparing two numbers at two different weights. Tomato paste sells in an 800g tin, a 700g jar and a 15kg can; cooking oil in an 810g tub, 1.5 litres, 3 litres and a can; rice in 10kg and 5kg sacks. A raw list files all of it under "tomato paste" or "oil". The right approach is to fix the pack size you actually want first, then work out the price per kilo or per litre — not the price per pack.

What moves prices in this category

• Brand: for an identical good like paste or oil, the spread between brands is real and runs to tens of percent.
• Season and crop year: paste, saffron, dates and rice depend on the harvest, and "1405 crop" is part of the product name.
• Home-made or industrial: home-style and factory tomato paste are two different goods at two prices.
• Bulk: carton and can rates are almost always below the single-unit rate.

For a shop's or a commercial kitchen's shopping list, pricing dozens of lines is cheapest from a file — the bulk price inquiry guide shows how.

Read the cheapest number together with its date

Food prices in Iran move in steps: one official announcement or exchange-rate shift resets the whole shelf within days. So a price you saw last month is worthless for planning a purchase, and the cheapest number in a list is just an old number if it is old. Today's price vs a stale price explains it with examples.