Most of us have cut back on holidays, clothes and eating out but the one thing we can’t axe is the weekly grocery shop.

Breakfast cereal, bread, butter, teabags and all the other items we use daily are essentials, since we are too busy working or looking after a family to make our own bread, cakes and pasta, despite what TV chefs would have us believe.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have traded down by switching from more expensive brands to the supermarket’s own label and only sticking to famous names where it really doesn’t taste as good. Perhaps that’s why Sainsbury’s has just reported its own label products are flying off the shelves, especially the most expensive Taste The Difference range, which was up by 10 per cent in the past three months.

Experts say this is typical of what is happening – we like to splash out on a small number of luxurious items, though the bulk of our basket might be staples.

Sainsbury’s middle-range own label is doing okay too but interestingly, sales of its no-frills, cheapest Basic range are “flat”, according to chief exec Justin King.

Is this because, when it comes to value, we prefer to take our trolleys for a spin around Aldi instead? No longer the Cinderella of the supermarket world, German-owned Aldi has just beaten much bigger and glossier rivals Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose to scoop the Which? Best Supermarket award for the second year running.

And that’s not all. The ‘discounter’, as it’s known in the trade, recently carried off gongs for Grocer of the Year own label products in awards run by industry bible The Grocer in May. Achtung!

Those Germans know a thing or two about food and have our British companies rattled, as they’re used to operating on much slimmer profit margins, hence their prices are lower. Botley Road’s Aldi is teeming with ladies-who-lunch types, with expensively highlighted hair and designer jeans, hurling bottles of prosecco (around £4 cheaper than a similar quality one in a rival leading grocery chain), stuffed olives, charcuterie and hand-cooked kettle chips into their trolleys.

Of course, some prefer to load their haul into Waitrose or Marks & Spencer bags. Special buys, which include food and non-food, are launched twice weekly on Thursdays and Sundays and are seasonal – for example at the moment the Botley Road store is running an offer on sun creams.

If you tot up total spend for grocery shopping in the UK, Aldi is still small-fry compared to Tesco which is ten times larger and Sainsbury’s and Asda which are six times its size. But perhaps its best contribution has been to prod the other big supermarkets into offering more discounts, price-match pledges and customer service schemes in order to compete.

And since, when one of the big brands launches a price-cutting campaign the others have to follow, that is very good news for us hard-pressed shoppers.