The CHOICE food and household product experts really have been busy this year.
Scrubbing, tasting, washing, stacking, measuring and scoring: they put in the hard work so you know which products are worth spending your cash on in the supermarket.
Here’s their pick of the best tasting, best performing and best value products that really stood out from the rest.
A note about pricing: The prices listed here are what we paid at the time of testing. Grocery prices fluctuate frequently, so double-check prices before you buy to make sure you’re getting the best deal.
Laundry and cleaning
Dishwasher detergent
These Ultimate Plus tablets from Finish really lived up to their name in our testing.
One dishwasher detergent brand reached the finishing line well ahead of the competition, with two of its products tying for first place.
Finish delivered impressive results with a number of its products, with five of the 12 products recommended by our experts coming from this brand.
They’re among the most expensive of all the recommended detergents in our review, but if you just want the best clean, they’re the way to go.
If you’re shopping on a budget, there are three supermarket-brand products that still deliver great results but for a fraction of the price.
Sard won by a whisker, but it’s six times the price of Aldi’s spray.
Stain removers
With a squeaky-clean score of 76%, Sard Super Power Stain Remover Toughest Stains topped our test, delivering great performance on hard-to-remove stains like cooking oil, chocolate ice cream, grass, mud and sweat.
It’s not cheap, though, at $8 a bottle (or $1.90 per 100mL).
But the Sard spray was neck and neck with a far cheaper product: Aldi Di-San Pro Ultra Degreaser with Enzymes, which scored just one percentage point lower but costs less than a sixth of the price.
In fact, aside from Sard, all the best products in our test are supermarket own brands, which is good news for shoppers: you can bust stains without busting your budget:
If you want to get your whites whiter but stay in the black, Aldi Di-San Pro Oxy Laundry Soaker & In Wash Booster is the cheapest stain remover powder that’s recommended by our experts. It’s just 35 cents per 100g; the Vanish product is five times more expensive at $1.90 per 100g.
Omo topped our tests, winning the top three spots.
Omo filled every single spot on the podium in our laundry detergent testing for front loaders, taking out first, second and third place. It also came in second place for top loaders.
Unfortunately top performance will cost you top dollar: Omo products cost up to $1.44 per wash.
However, the top-scoring Omo product is actually the cheapest of all the products recommended by our experts, costing 83 cents per wash.
If you want to lighten your laundry load but keep your pockets heavy, the next best bet is Active Expert Laundry Powder, which is an IGA own-brand product.
It scored 74% when used in a front loader, not quite high enough for our experts to recommend, but still a great result. And it’s only 16 cents per wash – five times cheaper than the top-scoring Omo product.
Cheaper products that score well but not quite well enough to be recommended are named as our Best Buys. They’ll give you a great wash for less than 30 cents per load.
For front loaders, two Aldi products are the ones to buy: the supermarket brand sells both the top-scoring detergent for top loaders, plus a Best Buy.
For many Australian families, it’s not Christmas without a ham. And since it takes centre stage on the Christmas table, it’s important to get it right: if you serve up a dry, tasteless ham you might find yourself off the Christmas card list.
Coles’ Christmas ham took out first place, but is the second-cheapest ham in our taste test.
While you could spend hundreds of dollars on a fancy ham, there are plenty of supermarket hams that deliver reasonably-priced Christmas cheer while still leaving room in the budget for all the trimmings.
Here are the best ways to ham it up supermarket-style this festive season:
Sweet tooths, have we got a scoop for you: you can treat yourself with top-tasting ice cream without paying top-shelf prices.
Three of the four vanilla ice creams rated best by our expert taste testers are supermarket own-brands that cost less than half the price of some premium brands.
These are joined by a product from local dairy company Norco, which is more expensive but still cheaper than big-name ice cream brands such as Connoisseur and Haagen-Dazs.
Here are the sweet scoops that’ll make your tastebuds and your wallet happy:
2025 was a tough year for CHOICE taste test experts: not only did they have to suffer through an ice cream taste test, they also endured a milk chocolate taste test, working their way through 19 different products including vegan and no-sugar options.
Tony’s Chocolonely was rated the top choc block.
The top chocs come from some well-known names and some lesser known brands – plus one supermarket-brand choc. Here are the best blocks on the block:
Sun protection in Australia is a non-negotiable: we have the highest rates of melanoma in the world, and two in three Australians will be diagnosed with some form of skin cancer during their lifetime.
But when CHOICE lab-tested 20 popular sunscreens earlier in 2025, the results were shocking: 16 of the 20 products failed to meet their SPF claims, and the worst returned an SPF figure of just four.
Of the four products that returned SPF results matching their claims, two can be picked up alongside your groceries, while the others you’ll need to buy from a chemist or from Mecca Cosmetica:
Alice Richard is a Content creator and marketer. Alice writes on a range of topics, from health insurance to heaters and BBQs to bargain-hunting, always with the aim to help consumers find the best products to buy, and which to avoid.
Alice can take vast amounts of data from CHOICE product tests and turn it into content that is easily digestible and fun for readers.
Alice has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland. LinkedIn
Alice Richard is a Content creator and marketer. Alice writes on a range of topics, from health insurance to heaters and BBQs to bargain-hunting, always with the aim to help consumers find the best products to buy, and which to avoid.
Alice can take vast amounts of data from CHOICE product tests and turn it into content that is easily digestible and fun for readers.
Alice has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland. LinkedIn
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