The Student Move-In Shop: Stock a WG Kitchen

A first WG kitchen shop is the shared foundation everyone cooks from: cooking oil, salt and a small spice rack, dry staples like pasta and rice, a few sauces, plus cleaning basics and fridge staples. Buy this once as a flat, split the bill, and each flatmate adds their own breakfast and snacks on top.

Stocked from scratch at discounter prices, that shared base comes to roughly CHF 100–115 — under CHF 120 for a kitchen four people will cook in for months. Split four ways, it is about CHF 28 each, less than a single takeaway in the first hungry week.

What a WG kitchen needs on day one

Moving into a Wohngemeinschaft — a WG — usually means a kitchen with cupboards but nothing in them, or a chaotic half-shelf left by the last tenant. The trap is two-fold: either nobody buys the boring basics and you discover on the first night that there is no salt, or four flatmates each buy their own oil, flour and dish soap and the cupboard drowns in duplicates.

The fix is a single shared starter shop. Think of the things you reach for in small amounts every time you cook — a fat to fry in, salt and pepper, a bouillon cube, a splash of vinegar — plus the dry staples that turn into dinner and the cleaning kit that keeps the kitchen usable. Our list of Swiss pantry essentials is the backbone; a WG simply buys it once, together. If you are also furnishing the room itself, the same buy-once logic applies to equipping a first apartment kitchen with pans, a knife and a chopping board.

Shared or personal — the split that keeps the peace

Most WG friction over food is not about money, it is about fairness. The cleanest way to avoid it is to decide, on day one, which cupboard is communal and which shelf is yours. Shared items are the ones everyone uses in tiny amounts and nobody wants to buy alone: oil, salt, spices, stock cubes, cleaning supplies, foil and cling film. Personal items are the ones tied to taste or eaten solo: your muesli, your protein yoghurt, your snacks, your beer.

Some things sit in the middle. Milk, eggs, butter and bread work as shared staples if the flat genuinely cooks and eats together, and as personal items if everyone keeps different hours. Pick one model per item and label the shelves — masking tape and a marker settle more arguments than any house meeting.

The first-shop list, category by category

Here is a concrete starter shop for a four-person WG, priced at discounter level. The shared column is what the flat buys together on move-in day; the personal column is what each flatmate picks up for themselves in week one. Quantities assume a kitchen that starts completely empty.

The eight shared rows add up to about CHF 101 — the whole communal kitchen for under CHF 120, or roughly CHF 25 a head in a four-person flat. The two personal rows are what each person layers on top for their own breakfasts and lunches.

Where should students shop for the starter kit

For a from-scratch shop, the discounters win clearly. In K-Tipp's 2024 comparison of a 30-item basket, Lidl came out cheapest at CHF 162.05, ahead of Aldi (CHF 166.59), Coop (CHF 167.82) and Migros (CHF 170.37). Across a broader 100-item basket, Aldi and Lidl run about 12% below Migros and up to 25% below Coop — real money when you are buying twenty items in one trip.

A practical plan: do the bulk of the starter shop at Lidl or Aldi, then fill the gaps — a specific brand, or fresh items your local discounter lacks — at Migros or Coop. Denner, part of the Migros group, is worth a look for discounted brand-name staples like coffee and pasta. A large WG that cooks together can price catering-size oil, rice and pasta at Aligro, the cash-and-carry wholesaler, where bulk formats push the price per kilo down further. Our Swiss student grocery survival guide goes deeper on stretching a term-time budget across the semester.

How to divide the cost fairly

The shared shop only stays fair if the money side is simple. Three systems work in practice: a physical kitty everyone tops up monthly, a shared digital pot settled by Twint between flatmates, or a rotating "who pays this time" list with the receipt photographed in the group chat. Whichever you choose, agree it on day one, before the first bottle of shared oil runs dry and someone feels they are quietly subsidising the flat.

Your move-in shop in five steps

Turn all of the above into a single afternoon:

1. Walk the kitchen first. Note what the last tenant left and what equipment already exists before you buy a thing — you rarely start from zero.
2. Split the list into shared and personal. Agree the two columns as a flat. Ten minutes with the table above settles it once.
3. Do the bulk shop at a discounter. Lidl or Aldi for the shared base — one trolley, one receipt, one bill to divide.
4. Set the money system. Kitty, Twint pot or rotation: decide before you unpack, not after the first disagreement.
5. Add personal items separately. Each flatmate buys their own breakfast, snacks and preferences on their own card.

What it costs over a semester — and what planning saves

The average Swiss household spends around CHF 636 a month on food and non-alcoholic drinks, according to the Federal Statistical Office. A student in a shared flat sits well below that figure — but only if the kitchen runs on a plan rather than on daily convenience shopping and takeaways, which is where a term-time budget quietly leaks away.

The CHF 100–115 starter shop is a one-off. After it, a WG that plans meals around what is on Aktion, cooks in batches and shares the basics can keep each flatmate's groceries to roughly CHF 200–260 a month — comfortably less than living off the Mensa and the kebab shop. The biggest lever is not buying cheaply once; it is buying to a plan every week, so the cupboard you stocked on move-in day keeps earning its keep.

That weekly planning is exactly what Eini is built for: our algorithm tracks current prices across Coop, Migros, Lidl, Aldi, Denner and Aligro, turns a meal plan into a shopping list the flat can split, and flags where the WG's staples are cheapest this week. Eini is free to download, with an optional premium tier at CHF 1.00/week.