// Asda this week launched a new price match on products sold at Home Bargains
// The price match covers more than 100 products including brands such as Sure, Surf and Huggies
Asda has fired a new price salvo that takes aim at Home Bargains with its newly-launched price match scheme.
The retailer launched the price match in stores this week, as spotted by Retail Gazette reader Stephen Howsam, and it covers more than 100 Home Bargains products on items such as Sure deodorant, Surf washing powder and Huggies nappies.
The move illustrates the threat that discounter Home Bargains poses to the Big Four grocers. Home Bargains sells everything from toys to homewares and garden but has been increasingly making in-roads into grocery.
The discount chain grew strongly over the pandemic, with sales jumping 19.7% to £3.34 billion in its year to June 2021 and profits surging 51% to almost £400 million.
Home Bargains, which has more than 550 shops, plans to open 60 stores a year and is eyeing between 800 and 1,000 stores.
READ MORE: Morrisons cuts prices of 500 items to help with soaring inflation
The Home Bargains price match comes on top of Asda’s new ‘Dropped and Locked’ campaign that launched last week as the retailer vies to win customers grappling with the cost-of-living crisis.
Dropped and Locked lowers prices on more than a hundred popular products until the end of the year.
It is understood that Asda plans to expand both the Home Bargains price match and Dropped and Locked to more products over the year.
Asda is also set to introduce a new value range, ‘Just Essentials’, this month that will replace its Smart Price label and offer 300 low price essential products.
The pricing push comes as Asda’s Pulse of the Nation survey found that 9 in 10 consumers are concerned about inflationary pressures to their budgets and 87% are worried that grocery prices will increase this year.
Asda’s latest Income Tracker also recorded its biggest ever drop in disposable income in March with the nation’s lowest income families having 74% less to spend in March compared to last year.
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