Why milk and cottage cheese cost the same at every chain
Published by SaveSmart3 min read
The state sets a maximum price on some basic foods, so there is almost nothing to save on them. In the basket we checked – entirely free-market and branded goods – not one product had a gap below 47%.
About the data in this article
Every price and gap in this article was measured on 17/08/2026, on a basket of 50 products, across 9 chains, from one representative store per chain, using the price files chains publish as required by the Price Transparency Law. This is a single day's measurement – not a live price, not an average, and not a promise that you will save the same amount.
What price control actually is
The short answer: on some basic foods the state sets a maximum price. A chain may sell below it, but not above it – which is why the shelf price is nearly identical at every chain.
Control applies to a defined list of products, set by price-control orders that are updated from time to time. Milk, cottage cheese and white cheese are among them. The exact list and the exact prices are in the orders themselves and not with us – if you need to know for certain what is controlled today, that is where to look.
And when a controlled price is updated, it is updated for everyone more or less at once. That is the opposite of a free-market product, where each chain decides for itself when to change a price and by how much.
What looks controlled but is not
Control applies to a specific product in a specific pack, not to a whole category. Flavoured cottage cheese, a different pack size, or a brand's product that the order does not cover – all of those are free market. Even sitting on the same shelf, right next to the controlled item, their price can differ from chain to chain.
Why the gap is close to zero in practice
When there is a price ceiling on something everyone buys, a chain has no room to manoeuvre: it sits at the ceiling, or a few agorot below it to look cheap. The result is a typical gap of up to about 2% between chains – a few shekels on a full basket, not tens.
We did not measure this ourselves
The basket of 50 products we checked contained no price-controlled items at all – 0 of them – for the simple reason that the controlled dairy lines did not appear in the catalogues of every chain we compared. So 2% describes the regulatory mechanism, not a measurement of ours. We only present our own measurement for what we actually checked.
That distinction matters more than it looks. Writing a number that sounds authoritative is easy; saying out loud that it was not measured here is harder. We would rather you knew which figure in the article is a measurement and which is an explanation.
Where the saving actually is
The basket we measured is entirely free-market and branded goods – and there the picture is completely different. Of the 30 products we checked item by item, not one had a gap below 47% between the cheapest and the dearest chain.
| Product type | Products | Smallest gap | Largest gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free market | 22 | 47% | 65.5% |
| Branded | 8 | 47.3% | 63.5% |
| Price-controlled | 0 | Not included in this check | Not included in this check |
The practical conclusion: the saving is not in milk. It is in snacks, drinks, cleaning products, breakfast cereals and branded goods – everything no order sets a price for, and that each chain therefore prices as it likes.
The widest gap in the check
פיטנס בר גרנולה שוקולד 5*38גרם
- Cheapest in this check
- 7.90 ₪Osher Ad
- Dearest in this check
- 22.90 ₪Super Yuda
You can see the same thing in the table above: both branded and free-market products start at a high double-digit gap. A basket made of those will show a real difference between chains. A basket of milk, bread and cottage cheese will show almost nothing, and that is not a flaw in the comparison – it is the correct answer.
What to do with this
- Do not compare chains on milk and cottage cheese. They will not separate a cheap chain from an expensive one.
- If your basket is mostly controlled staples, the gap you see will be small. That is the correct result, not a glitch.
- When you compare, give weight to the products you buy in quantity that are not controlled. That is where the difference is.
- If it matters to you, check the controlled list in the current order – it changes from time to time, and we are not the authority on it.
And to close, the part that repeats in every article here: the figures we measured were measured on 17/08/2026. They are not live prices and they are not a promise. They are one measurement, published so that it can be checked.