Consigli per la spesa

This chapter is for the person whose first German supermarket trip went badly. Grocery shopping here runs on a set of rules that nobody explains to you, because everyone born here absorbed them at the age of six: the cashier scans faster than you can pack, you bag your own shopping after you have paid, the bottle in your hand has money locked inside it, and on Sunday the doors do not open at all. None of this is difficult once you know it. All of it is embarrassing the first time. What follows is the practical shape of the weekly shop – where to buy, when the shops are actually open, what Pfand is and how to get your money back, how to pay, what the label is really telling you, and how to spend meaningfully less without eating worse.

The Checkout Is the Part Nobody Warns You About

Start here, because this is the moment that goes wrong. A German cashier sits down, scans your items at genuine speed, and pushes them along the belt into a small collection area. They do not pack your bags. Nobody packs your bags. There is no bagger, and no one is coming to help. The cashier will tell you the total, and they expect you to be paying while your shopping is still piling up. The order is the opposite of what shoppers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland or Canada expect: you pay first, then you pack.

So do it the way locals do. As you unload the trolley onto the belt, put things down in the order you want them packed – heavy and rigid first, bread and eggs and soft fruit last. Many people also use the Warentrenner, the little plastic bar you place behind your last item to separate your shopping from the next customer’s. Then, once you have paid, sweep everything back into your trolley or basket, unpacked, and wheel it away from the till to the Packtisch, the packing counter along the wall. Pack there, calmly, out of everyone’s way. This is normal and expected. Standing at the till packing carefully while a queue builds behind you is the thing that draws the sighs.

Bring a bag. German shops do not hand out free bags, and since 2022 lightweight plastic carrier bags have been banned outright, so the choice at the till is a paper bag or a sturdy reusable one for somewhere between fifty cents and a couple of euros. Buying one is not a failure, and every shop sells them at the till. But the folding fabric bag, the Jutebeutel or the plastic crate in the boot of the car is what most households actually run on. If you are cycling or walking, a rucksack is the honest answer.

One more thing about the trolley: it is almost certainly locked to the one in front of it and wants a coin. Most take a one-euro or fifty-cent coin, which you get back when you chain the trolley up again. It is a deposit, not a charge. A plastic Einkaufschip, a shopping token on a keyring, does the same job and lives on most people’s keys precisely because the coin is never in your pocket when you need it.

Where People Actually Do Their Grocery Shopping

The landscape divides more sharply than in most countries, and knowing which kind of shop you are standing in explains its prices and its gaps. The Discounter – Aldi, Lidl, Penny, Netto – carries a deliberately narrow range, mostly own-brand, stacked on pallets in the box it was shipped in. That is not neglect, it is the business model: fewer lines, less handling, lower prices. The quality of the staples is genuinely good and Germans of every income shop there without embarrassment. What you will not find is the third variety of an ingredient. There is one soy sauce, and it is fine.

The Vollsortimenter – Rewe, Edeka, Kaufland, Real’s successors – is the full-range supermarket: several brands per product, a service counter for Wurst and Käse, a proper fresh section, and prices maybe ten to twenty percent above the Discounter on comparable goods. Edeka and Rewe are both cooperative-ish structures with a lot of owner-run stores, which is why two branches of the same chain in the same city can differ noticeably in range, quality and price. If your local Rewe is disappointing, the one two districts over may not be.

Then the Bioladen, the organic shop – Alnatura, Denn’s Biomarkt, and a long tail of independents. Everything is certified organic, the range leans heavily towards wholefoods, and you pay for it. These are worth knowing for specific things rather than the whole shop: bulk grains and pulses, good bread, and the vegetarian and vegan range, which is broader and better than the supermarkets’. Whether the price premium buys what it claims is an argument this guide takes up in opzioni di shopping ecocompatibili rather than here.

The genuinely useful secret is the Türkischer Markt, the Asia Markt, the Russian and Polish and Middle Eastern shops. In most German cities the Turkish greengrocer is simply the cheapest and best fresh produce available, often by a wide margin, sold in quantities that assume you cook. They are also, frequently, the only source of things a German supermarket does not stock at all: proper coriander in bunches rather than a pot, whole spices, fresh herbs, halal meat, pulses by the kilo, decent feta, and the specific noodle or chilli or masala your cooking needs. The Asia Markt does the same for East and South East Asian ingredients. If you have been mourning the ingredients of home in a Rewe aisle, this is where they are, and international cuisine in Germany goes further into finding them.

Finally the Wochenmarkt, the weekly market, held on set days on a square in almost every town and district. It is where the seasonal produce, the cheese, the fish and the regional oddities are, sold by people who will tell you how to cook them. It is not automatically cheap – some stalls are expensive and know their customers are not price-sensitive – but the produce turns over fast and quality is high. Go late, in the last half hour, and prices soften noticeably as stallholders would rather sell than repack.

Sunday Is Closed, and That Shapes Your Whole Week

Germany closes on Sunday. Supermarkets, Discounter, bakeries after their short morning window, almost everything. This is not a quirk of individual shops but law, and it is worth understanding its current shape because the internet is full of stale descriptions. Shop opening hours used to be governed by one federal statute, the Ladenschlussgesetz of 1956. Since the Föderalismusreform of 2006 the competence has belonged to the sixteen Länder, and each has written its own law. Bavaria was the last holdout, applying the old federal statute until it finally enacted the Bayerisches Ladenschlussgesetz, in force since 1 August 2025. As of 2026, then, every state runs its own rules and the 1956 federal law no longer sets the pattern anywhere.

What that means in practice is that hours are a state question and you must check your own. Bavaria is the strictest: shops may open 6:00 to 20:00 on weekdays, bakeries from 5:30, and Sundays and public holidays are closed all day, with narrow carve-outs – newspapers for up to five hours, bakeries three, fresh milk two, flowers two. At the other end, several states permit shops to open around the clock Monday to Saturday, which is why a Berlin supermarket may run to midnight while a Munich one is dark at 20:01. Sunday, however, is closed essentially everywhere. Every state also allows a handful of verkaufsoffene Sonntage, open Sundays tied to a local market or festival – Bavaria permits four a year, five hours between 10:00 and 18:00, and the big religious holidays are excluded. These are advertised locally and are an event, not a routine.

Now the consequences, which are the actual point. Saturday afternoon is chaos, because an entire country is buying two days of food at once, and Saturday around 16:00 to 18:00 in a city supermarket is the worst shopping experience Germany offers. Shop Saturday morning early, or better, spread the week. Second, a public holiday counts as a Sunday for these purposes, and Germany has a lot of them, several of them regional. The trap is the Thursday holiday: shops close Thursday, everyone shops Wednesday evening, and if you have not noticed the holiday you arrive Thursday to a locked door. Look up your state’s holidays once and put them in your calendar. It is a fifteen-minute job that will save you a hungry weekend.

Then the exceptions, which is where you go when you have miscalculated. Shops at a Bahnhof, a main railway station, and at airports may open outside normal hours, including Sundays, because they serve travel needs. So may a Tankstelle, a petrol station. This is why the supermarket in a large Hauptbahnhof is open on Sunday and full of people who are plainly not catching a train. Understand what you are buying, though: the legal permission is scoped to Reisebedarf, travel supplies, which is why these shops are small, the range is thin, and prices are noticeably higher. A petrol station at 22:00 on a Sunday will sell you milk, bread and chocolate at a real premium. It is a rescue, not a shop. The other rescue is the Späti, the late-night corner shop, an institution in Berlin and a few other cities, whose legal position is often precarious and whose prices reflect the hour.

Pfand: The Deposit You Have Already Paid

Pfand is a deposit on a drinks container. You pay it at the till on top of the price, and you get it back when you return the empty. It is not a tax and not a green levy on your conscience: it is your money, held. Germans treat it as money, which is why you will see bottles left neatly beside a bin rather than in it, so that someone collecting them can take them. The whole system is worth a few hundred euros a year to a household that uses it and nothing to a household that throws bottles away.

The confusing part is that there are two systems with different rates. Einweg means single-use: the bottle is crushed and recycled. Every pfandpflichtige Einweg container carries a flat 0.25 EUR, set by §31 of the Verpackungsgesetz, the packaging law, as a statutory minimum including VAT. It does not scale with size. A 0.5 litre can and a 1.5 litre bottle both carry twenty-five cents. Mehrweg means reusable: the bottle is washed and refilled, up to fifty times for glass. Mehrweg deposits are not set by law at all – the filler chooses – so they vary, but in practice you will meet 0.08 EUR on a standard beer bottle and 0.15 EUR on most other Mehrweg bottles, glass or plastic. Crates have their own deposit on top of the bottles inside them, commonly around 1.50 EUR, again filler-set rather than statutory. So a full crate of beer can hold three euros or more of your money, which is why the empty crate goes back.

Which containers are exempt is where nearly everyone goes wrong, including people who have lived here for years. The statutory deposit covers Einweg drinks containers from 0.1 to 3 litres. §31(4) VerpackG then lists exemptions – beverage cartons, pouches, wine, milk, dietetic infant drinks – but those exemptions collapse the moment the drink is in a plastic bottle or a can. That single rule is the key to the whole thing, and it produces the following. A Getränkekarton, the cardboard carton, carries no deposit, so milk and juice in a carton are Pfand-free. Milk in a plastic bottle does carry 0.25 EUR, and has since 1 January 2024, along with yoghurt drinks and kefir in plastic bottles. Juice in a plastic bottle or a can carries the deposit, and has since 1 January 2022. Wine and Sekt in a single-use glass bottle carry no deposit, because they are alcohol-taxed – but put the same wine in a can and it carries twenty-five cents. Spirits in cans generally carry it too.

The workable shortcut, then: if it is a plastic bottle or a can, assume 0.25 EUR and you will almost never be wrong. If it is a carton or a pouch, assume nothing. If it is glass, it depends on what is inside – water, beer and soft drinks yes, wine and spirits no. And when you are unsure, look at the label: Einweg containers must carry the DPG logo and the words “Einwegpfand 0,25 Euro”, while Mehrweg bottles say Mehrweg, Mehrwegflasche, Leihflasche or Pfandflasche. Mehrweg has no legally mandated uniform marking, which is precisely why the wording wanders.

Returning them is mechanical. Find the Rückgabeautomat, the reverse vending machine, usually in the supermarket foyer. Feed bottles in one at a time, label outwards, cap off or on depending on the machine’s sign, and do not crush them first – the machine reads the barcode and a crushed bottle gets rejected. Crates go in a separate slot or to the service desk. When you are done, press the green button. The machine prints a Bon, a receipt with your total. That Bon is not cash. You take it to the till and it comes off your shopping, or the cashier pays it out if you ask and are buying nothing. This surprises people who expect coins to fall out. A forgotten Bon in a coat pocket is money you have thrown away, so hand it over.

Where you may return matters when the machine rejects you. A shop that sells Einweg containers of a given material must take back Einweg containers of that material, whoever sold them – so a large supermarket takes your bottle even if it came from a different chain. But shops with under 200 m² of sales area only have to take back the brands and materials they actually stock, which is why the tiny corner shop refuses your bottle and is within its rights. Mehrweg is looser still and runs on practice rather than a universal duty: return standard bottles to a shop that sells that type. When in doubt, take everything to a big supermarket and the problem disappears. What all this deposit machinery is actually for, and whether it delivers, belongs to opzioni di shopping ecocompatibili, which takes up the packaging and waste argument; this chapter stops at getting your money back.

Paying at the Till: Girocard, Credit Cards and Cash

Card acceptance in Germany has improved enormously and is no longer the horror story it was a decade ago. Every supermarket chain, every Discounter and every petrol station takes cards, contactless included, and you can do a full weekly shop without touching a note. But the old warning has not fully expired, and the reason is a distinction that does not exist in most countries.

The German debit card is the Girocard, a domestic scheme, and it is what your German bank sends you when you open a current account. It is not a Visa or a Mastercard, even though it often carries a co-badged Visa or Maestro-successor function for use abroad. Many German shops accept Girocard and only Girocard, because the fees are lower, and will refuse a foreign credit card without apology. So the failure mode is specific: not “cards are not taken” but “your card is not taken”. If you are living here, a German account and its Girocard removes almost all of this friction, and the practical shape of getting one is covered elsewhere in this guide. A foreign Visa will work in a Rewe and may well not work in a bakery.

Cash remains genuinely necessary in a defined set of places, and this is not nostalgia. The Wochenmarkt is largely cash: some stalls take cards now, many do not, and the fish man will not. The Bäckerei is often cash or Girocard only, and some set a Mindestbetrag, a minimum spend, below which they want cash for a card payment – a practice of contested legality that persists anyway. The Türkischer and Asia Märkte are frequently cash. Small independents, kiosks, market cafés, the Späti: cash. A sign reading “Nur Bargeld” means cash only and it means it. Carry twenty to fifty euros in notes and coins, and keep a one-euro coin for the trolley. Cash is also, for many Germans, a privacy preference rather than a limitation, and it is not going away because a foreigner finds it inconvenient.

Seven Percent or Nineteen: How VAT Lands on Your Groceries

Germany charges Umsatzsteuer, value-added tax, at a standard 19% and a reduced 7%. Most food is 7%, under §12(2) Nr. 1 UStG and its Anlage 2, on the principle that staples should not be taxed like luxuries. You never do this arithmetic yourself, because German price law requires the shelf price to be the Gesamtpreis, the total including VAT. The reason to understand it anyway is that it explains prices that otherwise make no sense, and it moved in January 2026.

The line between 7% and 19% is famously arbitrary, and the current examples are worth having because they are still live. Cow’s milk is 7%. Oat, soy and almond drinks are 19%, because the Bundesfinanzhof, the Federal Fiscal Court, holds that “milk” in VAT law means exclusively the secretion of one or more animals, so plant drinks fall outside the tariff positions the statute lists. Yes, that is still the position in 2026. The absurdity runs deeper: soy as a legume is 7%, soy yoghurt is 7%, and soy drink is 19%. The same bean, taxed two ways, depending on how far you have blended it. Drinking water from the tap is treated differently from bottled mineral water. Mixed gift baskets get apportioned. None of this rewards logic, and if you are vegan or lactose-intolerant you are paying the standard rate on a staple, which is exactly why the reduced-rate list is politically contested every few years.

The genuine change is in restaurants, and it makes older guides wrong. Until the end of 2025, eating a Bratwurst standing at the counter was 19% and taking the identical Bratwurst away was 7%, a distinction that generated years of litigation about whether a bench counted as seating. That distinction is gone for food. The Steueränderungsgesetz 2025, passed by the Bundestag on 4 December 2025 and approved by the Bundesrat on 19 December 2025, reduced Speisen – prepared food – to 7% across the catering sector from 1 January 2026, with no expiry date. Restaurants, cafés, canteens, food trucks, delivery, school and hospital catering: 7%, whether you eat in, take away or have it delivered. Drinks stay at 19%, with narrow exceptions for milk and milk-mix drinks of at least 75% milk, which covers a Cappuccino or Latte Macchiato, and for tap water sold to take away. So the modern rule is food 7%, drinks 19%, and where you stand no longer matters. Whether any of that reached menu prices is a separate question, and mostly the answer was no.

The Date on the Package Is Two Different Things

This is the label distinction that matters most, it is legally real, and getting it backwards costs you money and occasionally your health. German food carries one of two dates, and they mean opposite kinds of thing.

The Mindesthaltbarkeitsdatum, the MHD, printed as “mindestens haltbar bis” – “at least keeps until” – is a best-before date. It is a manufacturer’s quality promise: unopened and correctly stored, the food will keep its smell, taste, texture and nutritional value until that day. It is not a safety date and not an expiry date. Food past its MHD is not spoiled, and crucially it is legal to sell and legal to eat. A retailer may lawfully keep selling it, which is why you will find reduced bins of just-past-date goods, and why apps built on surplus food work at all. Dried pasta, rice, tinned goods, sugar, salt, honey and vinegar are safe for many months or years past the MHD. Use your senses: look, smell, taste a little. Yoghurt that smells like yoghurt is yoghurt. Germany throws away a great deal of edible food on the strength of misreading this one line, and the Verbraucherzentrale, the consumer advice organisation, has spent years saying so.

The Verbrauchsdatum, printed as “zu verbrauchen bis” – “to be consumed by” – is the opposite and there is no judgement call. It appears on highly perishable foods that can become dangerous quickly: fresh minced meat, which in Germany is regulated tightly, raw poultry, fresh fish. It is a hard limit. After that date the food may not lawfully be sold, and it should not be eaten, and no amount of sniffing changes that, because the bacteria that make you seriously ill do not necessarily announce themselves by smell. The date is also conditional on the stated storage temperature, so a Verbrauchsdatum on Hackfleisch assumes an unbroken cold chain. If it sat in a warm car for an hour, the date on the pack is optimistic.

So: “mindestens haltbar bis” is advice, “zu verbrauchen bis” is a rule. If you learn two German phrases from this chapter, learn those. And note what this means for your consumer rights, which is where food is genuinely different from everything else you buy. The statutory liability for defects that protects you when a toaster fails is close to useless for a cucumber, because the twelve-month reversed burden of proof under §477 BGB was never designed for something that perishes in a week. In practice, food complaints are settled at the service desk on goodwill within a day or two, not litigated. Our chapter on garanzie sui prodotti e resi owns that ground and explains where §477 does the work. What matters for groceries is simpler: keep the receipt, go back quickly, and be reasonable.

What Else the Label Has to Tell You

The single most useful number on a German shelf is not the price. It is the Grundpreis, the unit price – the price per kilo, per litre, per hundred grams – printed in small type on the shelf label beside the headline price. Under §4 of the Preisangabenverordnung, the price indication regulation, traders must show it next to the total price, clearly and legibly, with narrow exceptions for very small quantities under 10 g or 10 ml, some counter-service and direct sellers, and cases where the unit price and the total are identical anyway. It is there so you can compare, and once you start reading it instead of the big number, packaging games stop working on you. The 400 g pack that looks cheaper than the 500 g pack usually is not. This is the highest-value habit in this chapter and it costs nothing.

Allergens are the other legally guaranteed information. EU rules require fourteen defined allergens – including gluten-containing cereals, milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, soy, celery, mustard, sesame, lupin, sulphites and nuts – to be declared and emphasised within the ingredients list, typically in bold or capitals, so they are findable without reading German fluently. Germany extends this to loose goods sold at a counter, where the information must be available on request. If you have an allergy, learn your allergen’s German name and look for the emphasised word: it is the one piece of a German label that is designed to be spotted rather than read.

Organic labelling is more layered than it looks. The green EU-Bio-Siegel, the leaf made of stars, is mandatory on pre-packed organic food produced in the EU and means the product meets the EU organic regulation – a real standard, but the floor. The older hexagonal German staatliches Bio-Siegel is voluntary and sits alongside it. Above the floor sit the private associations – Bioland, Demeter, Naturland – whose standards go beyond the EU minimum on feed, livestock, fertiliser and the whole-farm principle, and whose logos are consequently worth more than the leaf. If you are paying a premium for Bio, the association logo is the part telling you something the law does not already guarantee. What that premium buys environmentally is a separate question from what it guarantees legally.

Grocery Shopping on a Smaller Budget

Food is one of the few large household costs you can move quickly, and Germany gives you unusually good tools. Start with the Prospekt, the weekly offers leaflet. Every chain publishes one, it lands in the letterbox or lives in the app, and the Angebote – special offers – run Monday to Saturday. German promotional pricing is aggressive and genuinely worth planning around: meat, cheese and coffee in particular swing hard. If your letterbox carries a “Keine Werbung” sticker, no advertising, you will not get the paper version, which is a reason many people keep the apps instead.

The apps are worth the phone space. Lidl Plus, the Rewe app, Edeka’s and Penny’s all run personalised discounts, digital coupons and occasional straightforward money-off vouchers, and Payback ties several chains together. Scan the app at the till and the discounts apply. Understand the trade honestly: you are paying with your purchase history, which is the whole point of the programme. That may be a fair deal or not, but make it knowingly rather than by accident.

Too Good To Go is the one to install first. Bakeries, supermarkets and restaurants sell surplus food at the end of the day in a Überraschungstüte, a surprise bag, for roughly a third of the retail price. You reserve in the app and collect in a stated window. A bakery bag at 18:00 is a large quantity of bread and pastry for a few euros. You do not choose what is inside, which is the trade, and it is a very good one for anyone who can cook flexibly. This works precisely because of the MHD rule above: selling food at or past its best-before is lawful.

Foodsharing is the non-commercial version and it is free. Foodsharing.de coordinates volunteers who collect surplus from shops and redistribute it, and the network runs public Fairteiler – “fair-sharers” – which are shelves and fridges in community spaces where anyone may leave or take food, no registration and no means test. Find your local one on the Foodsharing map. There is no shame attached: the point is that the food is not wasted, and users span every income. It is a genuinely German solution to a German problem, and it is one of the more welcoming things in the country for someone new.

Beyond that, the ordinary discipline works better here than elsewhere because the price gaps are so wide. Buy the Eigenmarke, the own-brand, which at every chain is frequently the same factory as the branded product. Buy seasonally, because German asparagus in May and German strawberries in June are cheap and superb while the January imports are neither. Do the bulk of the shop at a Discounter and the specific things at a Vollsortimenter or a market. Go late to the Wochenmarkt. Use the Grundpreis. And check the reduced shelf – marked “reduziert” or with an orange sticker – which appears in the evening and on the last shopping day before a holiday, when everything with a short date has to move.

Cosa fare dopo

Do three things this week. Put a folding bag and a trolley chip somewhere you cannot leave without them – a coat pocket, the keyring, the bike bag. Look up your own state’s shop opening hours and its public holidays, since both are state law and neither is guessable, and put the holidays in your calendar. Then gather every empty bottle and can in your flat, take them to the nearest supermarket’s Rückgabeautomat, and hand the Bon to the cashier. That last one is money you already own.

Then change one habit: read the Grundpreis instead of the price. It takes a week to become automatic and it quietly reprices your entire shop. Alongside it, learn the two date phrases – “mindestens haltbar bis” is a quality promise you may safely ignore with your senses engaged, “zu verbrauchen bis” is a hard limit you must not – and you will stop throwing away good food and stop taking risks with bad.

For the rest, know where the boundaries of this chapter are. If something you bought is faulty or you want to take it back, start with garanzie sui prodotti e resi, and be aware of the misconception that catches almost every arrival from the United States or the United Kingdom: there is no general right to change your mind about a purchase made in a shop. The fourteen-day Widerrufsrecht, the right of withdrawal, is a distance-selling right, not a shop right. A supermarket that takes something back is being generous, not compliant. Our chapter on leggi sulla protezione dei consumatori is the anchor for that whole area and explains what you can actually enforce, and where the Verbraucherzentrale fits in when a shop says no.

None of this is legal advice, and the rules that vary by state genuinely vary – check your own Land for opening hours, and the Verbraucherzentrale for anything contested. But the substance of it is not really law. It is that a German supermarket rewards the prepared and punishes the improviser, and after a month of doing it their way, the first bad Rewe trip becomes a story rather than a dread.