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Briefs

Treasury Consultation into improving price transparency in the supermarkets industry

Treasury Consultation into improving price transparency in the supermarkets industry

29 January 2026

Background

The Australian Food and Grocery Council is preparing a response to the Treasury’s consultation on Improving price transparency in the supermarkets industry.

Feedback is sought on proposals to require supermarkets to:

  • publish prices in-store
  • publish prices online
  • enable web-scraping technologies
  • display minimum information about promotions
  • provide loyalty program information every 6 months.

Supporting documentation is available on the Treasury Consultation Hub.

What we need from you

The AFGC is seeking general feedback with an emphasis on:

Policy area 1.3 Require large supermarkets to ensure web scraping technologies can be used by third parties such as price comparison tools and researchers. 

See pp. 12-14 of the Consultation paper.

Proposal 2 Minimum information requirements for discount price promotions, supported by record-keeping. 

See pp. 14-21 (including “Everyday Low Pricing, Discount price promotions and Non-price promotions”. Reference the detail in the blue box under “Proposal 2” on p.19 and consider the policy and data questions in the green box on p.21 of the Consultation paper.

Note that there are a number of policy and data questions related to:

  • the percentage (%) discount and/or total discount ($) applied
  • the price against which the discount was calculated (i.e. the ‘reference’ price)
  • the new price of the product under the promotion
  • the new unit price of the product under the promotion
  • or multi-buy promotions, the price of the individual product if it was not purchased on a multi-buy promotion
  • the date range over which the ‘reference’ price applied

Additional feedback option

Any members wishing to provide feedback on the other policy and data areas not identified as a focus area of the AFGC are welcome to do so:

  • Policy area 1.1 Requiring all supermarkets including small and remote community stores to display prices on all products in-store (see p.8 of the Consultation paper)
  • Policy area 1.2 Require large supermarkets to publish prices on-line via their websites (see p. 10 of the Consultation paper)
  • Proposal 3 Very large supermarkets be required to provide members with periodic loyalty program information disclosure summaries

“Appendix A: List of proposals and consultation questions” on p.25 provides a summary of the full list of matters raised in pp. 1-24 of the Consultation paper.

Feedback due

Please return the document to andrew.clark@afgc.org.au by COB, Tuesday 10 February 2026.

Contact

Please contact Andrew Clark with any questions about this submission.

Andrew Clark
Director, Retail
andrew.clark@afgc.org.au