How to read a Tesco receipt

A Tesco receipt has the same three problems as every UK till receipt: product names abbreviated to roughly twenty characters, VAT-marked lines, and promotions applied below the items rather than on them. The Clubcard layer sits on top of all three.

Clubcard Prices are the important part

With Clubcard Prices, a scanned card changes what you are charged per item. The receipt shows the price paid and, usually, the saving against the standard price. Without the card the same basket costs more, and nothing about the shelf edge tells you afterwards which it was.

That gap between shelf price and what you were charged is the reason a receipt is worth reading at all. A card statement records one total for the shop. Only the receipt records which lines were discounted and by how much, which is what reading a receipt properly is for.

The codes

Every UK receipt prints a key at the foot explaining its own letter or symbol codes, and it is the only reliable guide to that receipt. The codes are not standardised between retailers and they change.

Broadly, most food is zero-rated for VAT in the UK and the marked lines are the exceptions: confectionery, crisps and savoury snacks, soft drinks, ice cream, and everything that is not food. It is tempting to read those marks as a shortcut to the ultra-processed lines. They correlate and they are not the same thing.

The tiers say nothing about processing

Tesco Everyday Value and Tesco Finest are price and specification tiers. Neither is a statement about how a product was manufactured, and the classification cuts straight across them: a premium ready meal and a value one are usually both group 4, while the value tinned tomatoes and the premium tinned tomatoes are both group 3.

Where the tiers do differ is in ingredient lists generally being shorter at the premium end, which sometimes moves a product and often does not. It is worth checking rather than assuming in either direction, and ready meals is the category where the assumption fails most reliably.

Online orders and substitutions

A delivered shop produces an invoice rather than a till receipt, and the difference matters. Substituted items are recorded as what you actually received, not what you ordered, and unavailable items simply are not there. If a week looks unexpectedly different from the one before it, a substitution is the first thing to check.

Delivery and service charges appear as lines too, and they are not food. Anything measuring a share of FOOD spend has to exclude them or the denominator is wrong, which is why non-food is reported separately rather than folded in.