As the CEO of PocketSmith, I’ve spent years helping people understand where their money goes. One of the most important household expenses remains almost completely opaque: groceries.
Every week, Australians generate one of the most detailed records of household life imaginable. It’s called a grocery receipt.
It records what we eat, what we pay, how our habits change, and how prices move over time. Supermarkets use that information extensively to understand customers, optimise promotions and improve profitability. Yet the people who generate the data can barely use it themselves.
On July 1st, the Consumer Data Right turned six. It arrived in 2020 with a quietly radical idea: the data a business collects about you is yours, and you should be able to take it with you.
Banking went first. Energy followed. Non-bank lending is being switched on this year. Each step has made the same promise — that your own information can work for you, not just for the company holding it.
There is one everyday place that promise hasn’t reached: the supermarket checkout.
Every loyalty card swipe creates a remarkably rich picture of household spending. Not just where money was spent, but exactly what was purchased, in what quantity, at what price, and under what promotion. Yet while supermarkets can analyse this information in extraordinary detail, consumers are typically left with little more than a points balance and a running total.
This detail stays on their side of the counter. The result is an information imbalance that matters more than ever during a cost-of-living crisis.
Imagine if that data could work differently, and for you.
Imagine opening an app and seeing that your grocery costs have risen 14% over the past year, driven primarily by dairy and fresh produce. Or discovering that switching just six staple items to another supermarket would save your household $400 a year. Or identifying products that have quietly shrunk while their shelf price remained unchanged.
That’s useful. But it’s only the beginning.
The real prize comes when people pool that data.
With thousands of anonymised grocery baskets voluntarily shared, entirely new forms of transparency become possible. An application could compare the milk, mince and coffee on your receipt against prices being paid elsewhere, creating a live picture of grocery costs across suburbs, cities and regions. Individual shoppers cannot build that view themselves. Collectively, they can.
For the first time, consumers would possess a source of grocery-price intelligence that exists independently of the supermarkets themselves.
That prospect should interest policymakers as much as shoppers.
Data flows in two directions. Kept exclusively within the retailer, it deepens information asymmetries. Returned to consumers, it helps close them.
Australia’s last comprehensive national nutrition survey was conducted between 2011 and 2013. Today, we rely heavily on periodic surveys and aggregated statistics to understand how households are responding to economic conditions.
Voluntarily shared grocery data could provide a near real-time picture of food affordability, dietary change and cost-of-living pressure. It could reveal when households begin substituting fresh produce and protein for cheaper staples. It could help identify emerging food-security concerns, measure the impact of policy interventions, and provide a more immediate signal of grocery inflation than traditional reporting mechanisms.
Importantly, none of this requires governments to collect new information. The data already exists. We just need to give consumers the right to share that data.
Designate supermarkets under the Consumer Data Right for one narrow purpose: give consumers access to their own itemised grocery histories in a portable, machine-readable format.
This would not require price controls, structural separation, or the dismantling of loyalty programs. It would simply extend to supermarkets the same principle that already applies to banks: read-only access, granted by consent, limited in duration, and revocable at any time.
The goal is not to create new data. It’s to make existing data usable.
A paper receipt, or a PDF buried inside an email, may technically belong to the customer. In practice, it is almost impossible to analyse, aggregate or compare. The real barrier is portability.
Loyalty programs themselves remain entirely compatible with this vision. Supermarkets should continue rewarding customers for participation, and customers will continue valuing those rewards. The Consumer Data Right does not undermine that exchange. It simply ensures that participation also gives consumers meaningful access to information about their own lives.
Australians deserve the same visibility into their shopping habits that retailers already have.
The ACCC’s 2025 supermarkets inquiry found Coles and Woolworths to be among the most profitable grocery businesses in the world, with margins that have widened over five years. The inquiry recommended the majors publish prices and open APIs so comparison tools can plug in — a CDR-shaped idea — but it stopped short of the obvious next move.
There’s a telling coincidence in the calendar. The CDR’s birthday falls on the very day the government’s own answer to grocery prices took effect: from 1 July, Australia became the first country in the world to ban supermarket price-gouging, aimed squarely at Coles and Woolworths.
Yet as the Sydney Morning Herald reported just prior, no one — not the legislation, not the ACCC — has defined what “significantly excessive” pricing means. “The answer, frustratingly, appears to be: it depends.” The regulator will judge case by case, leaning on a pricing “data dump” it gets from the supermarkets themselves, and openly expects to find few examples. A ban that hinges on the retailers’ own data, adjudicated behind closed doors, is a thin kind of transparency.
Recent warnings from consumer advocates in New Zealand highlight why this matters. The same loyalty-program data that could help households make better decisions can also be used to support increasingly sophisticated forms of pricing and targeting. Data flows in two directions. Kept exclusively within the retailer, it deepens information asymmetries. Returned to consumers, it helps close them.
Six years on, the Consumer Data Right has proven the model works. Banks shared data. Consumers gained new tools. Competition increased. The sky stayed up.
The next sector does not need to be exotic. It is the one Australians visit every week.
The Consumer Data Right was founded on a simple principle: your data should work for you. If supermarkets can use our grocery data to understand us, Australians should be able to use it to understand themselves.
Jason is the CEO and co-founder here at PocketSmith. He is fascinated by our unique relationships with our money, and is passionate about making peoples’ lives better through the technologies we craft. He’s been a sneakerhead since the 80’s, and loves gardening on sunny days while listening to Planet Money.
