Pitched as "a supermarket owned by all New Zealanders, for all New Zealanders" for shoppers facing high grocery prices, the Green Party's Affordable Kai policy would make the two big grocery groups sell stores into a new publicly owned chain called KiwiMart.

📋 Greens: Affordable food for all of us (KiwiMart), September 2026 →

What it does

• Requires Woolworths and Foodstuffs to sell at least 120 stores, plus distribution centre capacity, into public ownership to form KiwiMart, a chain with a mandate to put affordability first.
• Has the Commerce Commission choose which stores are sold, based on local market share, and set fair compensation, Interest.co.nz reported. The party likens KiwiMart's role to Kiwibank's in banking.
• Costs about $2.8 billion on the party's figures: $1.3 billion to buy 120 stores and two distribution centres, based on Parliamentary Library modelling, and $1.5 billion to capitalise the chain.
• Bans excessive supermarket pricing through a member's bill, with the ban extended to other sectors such as energy and fuel, and gives the Commerce Commission more funding, bigger penalties and a mandatory pricing accuracy code.
• Sits inside a wider food package: a National Food Strategy with a legal right to adequate food, a $150 million a year Fair Food Fund, a doubled cap on food grants, and restoring and permanently funding Ka Ora, Ka Ako school lunches for 150,000 more children.

The debate

• Co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the country is "not short of supermarkets" but short of competition, and that buying existing stores is the key to breaking up the duopoly.
• National's finance spokesperson Nicola Willis called it a "Soviet-style" state supermarket and said taxpayers would carry the risk if the numbers did not stack up.
• An analysis by The Spinoff rated KiwiMart perhaps the shakiest of the parties' supermarket plans, warning the state could be left with the least profitable stores and stay small without large taxpayer subsidies.