Groceries in Spain vs Groceries in Budapest - Is Spain really more expensive?

The groceries in Budapest

Some time ago, I had a chat with someone in the comment section about grocery prices which I saw on price tags in her images, I compared them to those in Budapest as I was still living there and I found it shocking how much these differ from each other. She mentioned she'd love to see a comparison post about the prices in Spain compared to Budapest and of course, when going for groceries, I instantly felt the need to check the prices and compare them. At first, I even kept swapping them for Hungarian forints in my head to feel if the price was justified.

I was totally prepared to pay a lot more

In my head, I really felt a euro country should be more expensive than Budapest. Even though I knew very well that Budapest also has a lot of shitty quality meat, fruit, and veggies in several stores as if they send over the worst stuff to those areas. Once we had a car, we could finally go to the bigger supermarkets outside of the city center and visit the hypermarkets, the quality there is much better! But prices weren't that cheap either. I knew exactly what to buy where and what we brought home from the hypermarkets vs a market around the corner, but sometimes it was just mission impossible to find any decent fruit or veggies as if they totally had the items vanished for that week. Or I could order them online and pay a premium price for them hoping for the best upon delivery.

I set our budget for the first weeks in Spain much higher than in Budapest

I didn't want to be surprised and go through the budget in a week and be broke as I didn't foresee the higher prices. Taking into account that we had a few days of traveling, meaning we'd eat in a hotel twice which usually means top dollar prices. Thankfully, this was not the case in our hotel after we arrived in Malaga.

So let's talk prices!

We have spent more than usual during our travel days, which I absolutely didn't mind, I didn't even bother when we had to pay for a taxi because, on this trip, I deliberately choose convenience over budget. Not that I booked top dollar hotels or apartments, not at all, but I decided the transport from A to B should go smooth, and if that meant a taxi, so be it. Upon arrival at our first accommodation, we walked to the local DIA supermarket as this one is pretty big, and the shortest walk, the local Lidl was more like 20 mins walking and we were not up to that after these travel days, the humidity als got to us, lol. We had just a small bag of groceries and had to pay 30 euros.

The next day we decided to mix things up

Below you can see the groceries we bought at the Lidl after our walk, as well as a few extra things we picked up at the DIA on our way back. This time the total amount paid was 41 euros and I can tell you there were a lot more veggies and fruit to be found in this round of groceries. Granted, we also took hom some snacks from Lidl as we were a bit clueless if we'd prep a meal or just eat out. Let's call this visit an exploration visit, lol.

Grocery list:

• razor blades
• parsley
• cookies
• mushrooms
• bacon 2 pack
• 3 pack cooking cream
• toiletpaper 8x
• mustard
• garlic powder
• cooked ham for on a sandwich
• 3x paprika
• 2x iced coffee
• dried sausage
• ruccola
• feta
• brie
• spaghetti
• 2x cucumbers
• 500 grams of strawberries
• 500 grams of white grapes
• cherry tomatoes
• 3x ham cheese croissants
• 500 ml olive oil

I did the maths

And I'm 100% sure that I could not have bought all of this in Budapest for this price. Whenever buying toiletpaper, razor blades, olive oil and feta, but maybe even more so fruit like strawberries and grapes, the grocery bill always went up to more than 16000 huf (which was the price in Euros the day we bought this). I usually refrained from buying strawberries and grapes unless they were on offer simply because the price was high usually as well as the quality low. Here I was amazed by the high-quality strawberries for just €1,27!

The only meal I could cook from this without buying extra ingredients was a spaghetti carbonara with a greek salad, which by the way, was great! For the rest, this was mainly to test the waters and find out if the Lidl here is offering the same items as they were in Hungary. The answer is no, a big part is the same, but there are a lot of extra in the bakery department, which I already forgot until visiting. And on top of that, we saw a HUGE improvement in good vegetables and fruit and on top of that the prices were nothing compared to Budapest.

Conclusion

I don't know yet exactly what to buy where yet, as we only did groceries at these two supermarkets so far, but I do know that most of Dia's assortment is overall a bit more expensive than Lidl, but sometimes not worth the 20 mins walk to get it at Lidl. We yet have to walk everywhere so we're weighing off what we prefer.

I'm very curious in a few days when picking up a rental van and visiting a few hypermarkets during the weekend if we still think Lidl is overall the best option. We may feel totally different once we go there. I can imagine that in this town, things are more expensive overall.

While getting used to paying in euros for a week now, I'm quite sure that overall, when buying a lot of vegetables and fruit, we are paying less than in Budapest and also have much higher quality food than there. I absolutely loved buying 4 avocados for just €1.45 and them not being rotten even though they look black already. In Budapest, this meant they were mostly rotten and often not even good for consumption anymore. As avocados are one of the few healthy things our daughter likes, I don't mind buying these in bulk, lol. Especially not for these prices!

Let's see over the next week how things evolve when we are used to doing groceries as well as probably know where we should go for certain items.