Irish shoppers pay an average of 15 per cent more for their weekly groceries than their European counterparts, market research group AC Nielsen said yesterday.

But while the new analysis indicates that Ireland is the fourth most expensive market in Europe, Irish shoppers were found to be more concerned about the availability of fresh goods on the shelves than the price they pay for them.

Only Norway, Denmark and Finland were more expensive than Ireland. The least expensive was Germany, where shoppers pay 15 per cent less than the European average. The findings were based on an analysis of the price of 140 comparable items in 25,000 European supermarkets.

AC Nielsen client director Robert Buckeldee told a conference organised in Dublin by Checkout magazine that consumers received so much information about the price of goods that they were unable to differentiate between supermarkets on price. So while shoppers said their preference was for value for money, their actual habits suggested they were more interested in the availability of fresh goods, being able to find them easily on the shelves and being able to do their entire grocery shopping in the one supermarket.

AC Nielsen conducted the research last November in a series of 45-minute face-to-face interviews with a State-wide sample of 500 shoppers.

Mr Buckeldee said shoppers saw "very little difference" between Tesco and Dunnes Stores. Some 33 per cent of grocery shoppers claim to visit Tesco every week while 28 per cent visit Dunnes Stores, he said.

There was a "dead heat" between Tesco, Dunnes and German discounter Lidl in terms of the perception of the groceries with the lowest prices. Yet in contrast to Tesco and Dunnes, customers were less loyal to Lidl and Aldi, and tended to visit them once monthly instead of weekly.

The research also implied that an average of 21 per cent went to SuperValu every week while 8 per cent went to Superquinn.