Asda continues to outpace the competition and has delivered the cheapest shopping basket for the fifth week in a row, this time at £51.13. Asda was quite active with offers this week.The company had promotions on nine of the 33 items in this week's shopping basket.

Tesco finally managed to pull back into second place this week, just pipping Sainsbury's in a tight race. Tesco's basket price of £51.63 was just 1% more expensive than Asda's, while Sainsbury's was 1.1% higher at £51.69 this week.

Tesco, which also had nine promotions on items in our current shopping basket, was close to Asda's price point on the majority of items. The gap was mainly due to Asda's lower price for own label Brie.

The gap between Tesco and Sainsbury's was a razor-thin 6p for the entire basket of goods. The rivals matched each other's prices on more than 80% of the items in this week's basket. However, Tesco's own label Brussels pâté was 35p cheaper than Sainsbury's.

Morrisons stayed in fourth place, the fourth week it has held at that position. Its basket of goods cost £54.02, £2.89 more than Asda. One of the notable price changes at Morrisons was an increase in the price of own label breaded cod from £7.01 to £7.33. However, our mystery shopper noted that the company highlighted special offers and price cuts on eight of the items in her shopping basket.

Waitrose was fifth this week at £58.75, while Somerfield brought up the rear again at £60.33.

There were two price changes on the fruit and vegetable items in our shopping basket. Tesco put up the price of white grapefruit up by 3p to £0.32, while Sainsbury's increased its price 10p to £0.39.

In The Grocer 33 last week, a systems error listed the prices for Green Giant Niblets Sweetcorn 198g x 3 but attributed them to own label self-raising flour. The figures should be taken as for sweetcorn and consequently the totals and derivative analysis for 9 September are correct.

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