Lidl’s £11.11 Christmas dinner — £1.39 a head for eight people — is the cheapest festive meal on offer this year. But a follow-up published today asks what is missing from the plate, and the answer matters for anyone planning to buy it. The dinner, announced on November 5 and 6, costs £11.11 for eight people, or £1.39 each, and will be in stores from December 19 to 24 nationwide, for all shoppers — not just Lidl Plus loyalty members. The centrepiece is a Birchwood British small turkey, 3kg, at £8.85. The rest of the list is priced to the penny: potatoes, 2kg, sprouts, 500g, carrots, 1kg, and parsnips, 500g, at 9p each; sage and onion stuffing, 170g, at 45p; Yorkshire puddings, a 15-pack, at 46p; and meat gravy granules, 300g, at 99p. Skint Dad, in a follow-up published at 06:07 on Monday, November 9, asks what the £11.11 does not buy. It is not a ready-made box: shoppers buy eight items separately and cook them. There are no pigs in blankets, no cranberry sauce, no Christmas pudding, no drinks and no dessert included — and the turkey price is for a 3kg bird, so shoppers should check the pack weight. Availability is also subject to stock.
A different basket, a different price
The £11.11 figure should not be confused with a second basket comparison published this week. The Express compared eight different staples — including a turkey crown, pigs in blankets and cranberry sauce — and found Aldi cheapest at £21.87, Lidl at £22.11, Asda at £24.64, Tesco at £26.66, Sainsbury’s at £28.92 and Morrisons at £32.50. That is a different basket, built around a turkey crown at about £15.49, not Lidl’s whole-turkey meal — so the two figures are not a contradiction, and should never be presented as one. No Aldi, Tesco or Sainsbury’s response to Lidl’s £11.11 has been announced as of Monday’s search. Aldi’s own Christmas range — including a giant 60cm Yorkshire pig in blanket at £4.99 and a Billionaire’s Trifle at £4.99 — dates from October, and Tesco opened its Christmas delivery slots on November 5.
Who is cheapest overall
Lidl says the produce prices are 100% funded by Lidl itself, so producers are unaffected — a point its chief commercial officer, Richard Bourns, made in the original announcement. A Which? basket check in October 2026, of 87 items, found Aldi the cheapest at £154.34, with Lidl at £157.17 with loyalty (£157.21 without), Tesco at £181.77 with loyalty (£187.31 without) and Sainsbury’s at £182.90 with loyalty (£191.56 without). For households, the practical question is whether the cuts show up on the products they actually buy: a 9p bag of sprouts helps, but only if the rest of the trolley has not gone up by more. Shoppers planning a Christmas shop should compare basket prices rather than single-item deals — and with Lidl’s £11.11 now the number to beat, the grocers’ price war is likely to intensify in the run-up to Christmas.
