Netto: a cheap grocery store in Copenhagen

The introduction

Do you want to shop pretty cheap for groceries in this expensive city of Copenhagen? Then read this article about the grocery store Netto, which is probably the cheapest grocery store in the whole Copenhagen, if you want to know the truth.

A little bit about Netto

Netto is a discount supermarket in Denmark and it has branches in Germany and Sweden and Poland, too. It was founded in 1981 and nowadays it has 442 stores in all.

You know, they had stores in the United Kingdom too, and I know that because I have been shopping in Netto in London about 7 years ago and I remembered the sign of it. Nevertheless, it has just been a year since all the stores of Netto supermarket in the United Kingdom have been closed.

When I heard that Copenhagen was a very expensive city, I started searching places where you could buy things cheaper than in the other places. The first thing to search was for grocery stores, of course, because most of the money still goes into the food and eating in our lives. So, when I searched it on the Internet, the very first thing that I saw was this Netto supermarket and how cheap it was comparing to other supermarkets in Copenhagen. There were many Netto stores all around the city, so that it was pretty easy to get access to any of them. Most of them were closed at 8 p. m. and there were just a few ones which were open until 10 p. m. That was not very good, because we have supermarkets which mostly work 24 hours, so that we can get food or whatever we want late at nights. That’s one of the biggest changes that I had to adjust when visiting Copenhagen in this summer.

The supermarket has its own web page, of course, where you can click and see those Tilbuds (sales) that they are offering. You don't need bother going to the supermarkets to know, what they are offering for sales is just one click away. There are plenty of sales during each week or so, which is a very good idea. Moreover, if you go to the Netto supermarkets you will see their newspapers, where there are those sales things listed there.

Shopping in Netto supermarket

It was my second day in Copenhagen when I decided to buy something and went to the nearby Netto supermarket, which worked until 10 p. m.

The supermarket was pretty much organized, I mean, of course, there were some things not on their places on shelves and some of them were placed in different places, however, most of them were in order and they had them well-organised.

There were fruits and vegetables in the entrance and all of them had their prices on them. You could take some of them and have them weighed at the cashier and get its price in all. Well, there were almost always a discount on nectarines, raspberries or strawberries and I very much liked the nectarines because they had this amazing taste. They also had blueberries, but without discount they cost pretty much. I only bought blueberries once and I guess and they were really good.

They also had many vegetables and I mostly bought cucumbers there. However, they were really expensive comparing to the price that I used to pay for cucumbers in Georgia. I paid 2 Laris for just one cucumber, when I could buy 8 cucumbers in Georgia with that price.

They also had frozen fruits and I bought them once. I bought frozen raspberries and strawberries, but I must tell you that raspberries were very delicious but I can’t say that about the strawberries. They didn’t really have a taste at all.

One of the most precious thing that I found in Netto was my favourite Tiramisu dessert. I love tiramisu but I love when I make it and eat it, because that way it tastes just like I love it, and wherever I eat tiramisu, it doesn’t taste exactly how I like it. So there was this time when I was shopping in Netto (and I love going to grocery stores and just look at the things there are and see what they have on the shelves) and I was looking at some stuff when I suddenly found this tiramisu dessert in the fridge. It had these two portions of tiramisu and they were each 80 grams in some lovely plastic cups and they just cost 10 DKK, which was 5 Georgian Laris. I didn’t know any tiramisu dessert in Georgia to cost this cheap and I was very happy to see something like that in this Netto store in Copenhagen so I bought one set to taste them. I must say that they tasted really good. I mean, I like when tiramisu has this great taste of Rum or something alcoholic and it really had that and that’s why I liked it. I liked it so much, that I bought that tiramisu dessert some other times.

The other thing that I liked about Netto was that they had this baking area and there were their cakes and sandwiches and things like that. I used to buy these sponge cakes with chocolate chips, which cost 5 DKK and they were really delicious. They were not very sweet, but the chocolate chips made them kind of sweet and they were really great to eat. They also had these chocolate and blueberry muffins for 8 DKK, and the chocolate one was very delicious. I love chocolate and that’s why I ate those chocolate muffins instead of the blueberry ones. There were also some donuts, which cost 8 DKK, and I bought them too just to taste them and I didn’t really like them. Though I’m not much of a donut lover and probably that’s probably why I didn’t really like them. There were also some chocolate balls, which looked very interesting and I finally decided to buy one of them and taste it, however, it was not good at all. I mean, it was very sweet and that’s why I didn’t like it. And it cost 8 DKK, too. They also had some small breads and pizza slices and panettone and cheesebread and things like that but I didn’t buy any of them, so I don’t know how they tasted. They cost also between 8 and 12 DKK, as I remember.

They also had some great discounts on different types of milk. Once I bought this chocolate milk, which was really delicious and it didn’t cost much. I think it was something around 9 DKK. The usual milk, which I bought some time later was 1 litre and it cost me 7 DKK and it’s like the same price as in Georgia.

There was also some big discounts on coffee and they had Merrild coffee for 30 DKKon discount. The instant coffee cost somewhere about 50 or 60 DKK, so that it was pretty expensive.

One of the good things that I found out pretty suddenly was this salad of mackerel. It was in a tomato sauce and it had a mayonnaise layer on the top. It cost only 7 DKKand I bought it just because I wanted to have something like a small container, so that I could take my lunch on the way with my backpack. Then, when I tasted this mackerel salad I was pretty surprised, because there was the fish fillet in the whole thing and there was this small layer of mayonnaise, which made everything taste pretty great. I was not expecting there to be so much fish and that was a really good thing. The salad tasted really good and I could go and buy it whenever I wanted to have a delicious fish salad for myself. I really love fish in a tomato sauce and I often buy the fish cans in Georgia, but we don’t have something like that here, so it was a really good discovery for me in Copenhagen for such price. They also had some other salads in such containers and even in larger containers, but they were just vegetables and mayonnaise or something like that and that’s why I chose the fish salad and that was a pretty good choice.

Netto had some discounts on the frozen pizzas too, and there was this one time when those pizzas cost only 10 DKK and it was a great discount, I must say.

They also had pretty large choice of ice-creams and sometimes there was a discount on Magnum ice-creams. They had this fudge-brownie ice-cream in a small can, which cost 29 DKK and it was the cheapest in the whole supermarkets, because that exact ice-cream cost more than 30 DKK in other markets or supermarkets. However, it was still expensive, because it was a really small can of ice-cream and it cost like 14 Georgian Laris and for that price, I could buy a huge box of ice-cream of a pretty delicious ice cream and not something bad.

The chocolate was pretty expensive, too, I mean, I paid 24 DKK for a 200 grams of chocolate. Most chocolate bars cost that much there. The Snickers, Twix and KitKat are really expensive too, comparing to prices in Georgia.

The staff there was okay and they all spoke English, however, there were nearly no consultants in the whole supermarket and I didn’t know who I should ask about anything there. There were times when I really needed to ask someone about the products but I couldn’t find anyone in the supermarket and I couldn’t ask anything to the cashier because there was a huge line there and I couldn’t reach him out.

Another surprising thing was that there were no plastic bags in the supermarkets. In Georgia we usually have plenty of them, all different sizes and they have those things to carry them comfortably. Here in Copenhagen supermarkets you wouldn’t find any plastic bags there and there were just small polyethylene things, which you couldn’t carry comfortably. I guess you should have your own shopping bag there to carry some stuff. It was a good thing that I had my backpack almost everywhere I went, however, sometimes I bought some things which couldn’t be fit into my backpack and I had to carry it with my bare hands all the way to my apartment.

If you are visiting Copenhagen, now you know that you should shop in Netto supermarket, because the prices are the cheapest among all the supermarket stores in Copenhagen, they have almost everything you need and the choice is not very poor, either. Moreover, there have some good discounts too every week or so. Besides, you will see the Netto stores in many places around Copenhagen, which makes it easier for the customers to go shopping there. That’s why I’m not going to tell you all the places where you might find Netto, because you will find the supermarkets very easily if you just walk around the city. One of the Netto supermarkets is just in front of the Norreport station and you can see it from the station with its black and yellow colours and its logo, which is a dog with a shopping bag in its mouth, I think. It's very easy to notice the store from far away.

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