Legalising Groceries

The most protected aisle in retail

The Commerce Commission says two chains dominate the market and earn outsized returns. Both claims are contestable — and there is exactly one honest way to test them.

Start with the basic principle. Should it be legal to build a supermarket? Or should a supermarket be allowed only where a council has decided, in advance, that the neighbourhood's existing shops can spare the customers?

New Zealand has, for the most part, chosen the second answer. This site maps the consequences.

The Commerce Commission's 2022 grocery market study concluded that competition between the major chains was "muted", put their share of the market at around 82 percent, and estimated returns on capital of about 12.9 percent against a cost of capital of 5.5 percent — excess returns in the order of $430 million a year. Those figures have been repeated often enough to read as facts. They are estimates, and contestable ones. The market-share number depends on where the market's edges are drawn: Chemist Warehouse competes hard across a wide slice of the supermarket range, as do butchers, greengrocers, specialist food retailers and the meal-kit companies, and none of them count in the denominator. The excess-returns number is only as strong as its cost-of-capital assumptions — reasonable disputes about asset betas and the treatment of leases move it a long way. Eric Crampton and the New Zealand Initiative have been sceptical of both numbers since the study landed.

But the Commission's headline claims do not have to be settled on paper, because they carry a testable implication. If grocery retailing really earns returns that far above the cost of capital, entrants should be pressing to get in, and every rule that blocks them is costing consumers money. If the excess returns are an artefact of the assumptions, then easing entry barriers costs nothing — nobody will bother coming. There is a subtler payoff, an old point from Harold Demsetz and William Baumol's contestable-markets work: entry does not have to happen to do its job. Where a rival could open across the road, an incumbent that prices like a monopolist is writing the entrant's business case; the credible threat disciplines prices without a single new store. But the threat exists only where entry is possible. Rules that make entry practically illegal do not just block the marginal store — they retire the threat everywhere, and with it the discipline. Either way the policy prescription is identical, and so is the test: make entry legal, and watch what happens — or watch prices change because nobody needs to. The one arrangement that keeps the question permanently unanswerable is the current one, where nobody can tell whether entrants are absent because the profits are ordinary or because checking is forbidden.

One piece of evidence needs no spreadsheet: the land. The Commission's first recommendation, ahead of anything about wholesale access or codes of conduct, was to change planning laws to free up sites, ban restrictive covenants, and watch the land-banking. The covenants were banned promptly; the planning half waited three years, until the Government's 2025 supermarket fast-track — Chapter VII takes up what that package does and does not change. Meanwhile, Marko Garlick counts, by his quick tally, about 22 Woolworths stores sitting next to another Woolworths — the famous Napier pair face each other across the street. Holding duplicate sites is expensive. It only pays if the number of places a competitor could legally open is small enough to be worth cornering. Whatever one makes of the Commission's return-on-capital arithmetic, the duopoly's own property strategy is a running market estimate of how scarce legal supermarket sites are, and it says: very.

None of this is a story about anyone breaking the rules. It is a story about the rules. So the useful exercise is to read them — all of them — and draw the map the rules imply.

What the rulebooks actually say

District plans don't ban supermarkets. They grade them — on a ladder that runs from "yes" to "don't bother asking".

Every district plan assigns each activity, in each zone, an activity status. The maps on this site classify a new full-line supermarket of 3,000 to 5,000 square metres — a standard Woolworths or PAK'nSAVE — against each zone's rules. The ladder runs:

One caveat on the bottom rungs: since late 2025, a qualifying grocery project can vault them through the Government's fast-track, which can consent even a prohibited activity — Chapter VII covers what that does and does not fix. The ladder above is the law for everyone else, and for every application outside the lane. And the dots on the maps below carry the more important caveat in reverse: every existing store was sited under decades of these rules, long before any fast-track. The maps show the cumulative output of tight restraint, not a market that chose its own sites — a point Wellington's section makes concrete.

Two features of the rulebooks deserve attention before the maps make sense.

First, "supermarket" is a defined term, and the definitions disagree. In Lower Hutt a supermarket starts at 350 m². In Hamilton and Kāpiti it starts above 1,000 m². Porirua requires foodstuffs to be more than 80 percent of retail floor space; Upper Hutt requires more than 90 percent — strict enough that a full-line store with a generous liquor and general-merchandise offer might not be a "supermarket" there at all, and would fall into the harsher "large format retail" rules instead. A national entrant designing one standard store faces nine rulebooks that cannot agree on what it is.

Second, the centres hierarchy. Roughly two-thirds of councils, on the Productivity Commission's count, run policies that rank their shopping areas — city centre first, then metropolitan, town, local, neighbourhood — and protect the ranking. The RMA has nominally barred councils from considering trade competition since 1997, and "the effects of trade competition" since 2009. But the Supreme Court's Discount Brands approach survives: effects on a centre's "vitality and viability" remain fair game. A new supermarket's customers have to come from somewhere; wherever they come from is some existing centre's vitality. The competition test did not die. It was rezoned.

New Zealand's zoning and consenting processes have treated competition as a harm to be mitigated rather than a benefit to be sought.— Eric Crampton, "Legalising groceries", Newsroom, 8 March 2022 — written the morning the market study landed

The atlas

Six metros, nine plans. Green means the use is lawful. Everything else is a negotiation.

Click any zone for the controlling rule. Dots mark existing grocers, shaded and sized by store footprint where OpenStreetMap has a building outline (large ≳2,000 m²; wholesale-format grocers like Moore Wilson’s included) — a proxy for scale, not measured GFA. The Auckland, Christchurch and Hamilton maps also carry a toggleable layer of published water and wastewater constraint areas — the second gate, discussed in Chapter VI. Unshaded urban land is residential, rural, or open space — where a supermarket is non-complying or discretionary-by-default with a policy framework stacked against it. Each map shows only stores inside that council's boundaries. Some existing stores sit on land the maps leave unshaded — residential edges, special-purpose zones (the Woolworths inside Auckland Airport's zone; Waiheke's stores, governed by the separate Hauraki Gulf Islands plan). These are mostly lawfully established uses continuing under the RMA's existing-use rights: the store may stay, but could not be consented there today — the ratchet in miniature. These maps classify the land use; building-design consents, transport rules, and overlays stack on top. Compiled from the operative plans as at July 2026; a handful of rule numbers flagged in the popups could not be verified against click-walled e-plans. Screening tool, not legal advice.

Auckland: green centres, rationed precincts

Purple dashed areas are precincts that cap or forbid supermarkets on top of the base zoning. Auckland's Heavy Industry Zone (black) is the only place in these nine plans where applying under the district plan is itself forbidden.

The Unitary Plan reads generously at first: retail is permitted in the city centre and every metropolitan and town centre. Then the qualifications start. Supermarkets are singled out for tighter treatment than generic retail in five zones. In the Local Centre zone a store over 2,000 m² is restricted discretionary; in Mixed Use, discretionary; in a Neighbourhood Centre, a store over 4,000 m² is non-complying. In the General Business zone — the big-box zone, where generic large format retail is permitted — supermarkets specifically require consent, assessed for effects on the function of other centres.

The sharper action is in the precincts. A full-text sweep of all 232 published precinct documents found about twenty that cap or forbid supermarkets outright: Wairaka (one supermarket, at most 1,500 m², to protect Pt Chevalier's shops — the policy says so in terms), Westgate ("one only", to 5,500 m²), Hobsonville Corridor (no more than two), Silverdale 2 (supermarkets non-complying across 47 hectares), the Albany campus precincts, Takanini, and more. Auckland does not merely zone supermarket sites; in its growth areas it counts them.

Hamilton: permission means proving there was no alternative

Only the central city is green. Every other commercial zone routes a supermarket through an out-of-centre test.

Hamilton is the purest centres-hierarchy plan in the country. A new supermarket is permitted in the downtown and city-living precincts of the Central City Zone, and nowhere else. Everywhere else that isn't a flat no — the suburban centres, the large-format zone, even ordinary industrial land — the consent test asks the applicant to show that "suitable land is not available within the business centres" and that the proposal reinforces the central city's primacy. The plan's explanation of its own five-tier hierarchy attributes the CBD's underperformance to an "unplanned dispersal of retail" — the diagnosis is competition, and the prescription is less of it.

The Base — the sub-regional centre Waikato-Tainui built and the council fought — operates under a total retail cap of 103,700 m², with a sub-cap of 34,300 m² on small-shop space to protect the CBD's specialty retail. And in the greenfields, Peacocke's plan provisions designate the local centre as "the only location for a supermarket within the Peacocke Structure Plan area", capped at 4,500 m² a tenancy. One growth cell, one supermarket site, chosen in advance.

Wellington City: permissive centres — but only since last year

The 2024 plan permits supermarkets in every centre zone with no supermarket-specific cap. The dots show the store network the old plan built.

Wellington's new plan is, on paper, the most liberal of the nine in its centres: a full-line supermarket is a permitted use in the City Centre, both metropolitan centres (Johnsonville and Kilbirnie), and every local and neighbourhood centre, subject to a design consent for the building. The supermarket-specific rules all sit outside the centres: in the Mixed Use zone a supermarket over 1,500 m² needs consent against a test of whether it would significantly harm the "viability and vitality" of the city centre or any other centre; industrial land is non-complying.

Read the map with its age in mind. The liberal regime is one to two years old — the intensification provisions took effect in March 2024, the standard-track land-use rules on 14 July 2025 — against a restrictive baseline that ran from 2000 to 2024. Under the old plan, Plan Change 73 (operative 2014) made any supermarket over 1,500 m² in the out-of-centre Business 1 areas fully discretionary, assessed against whether it would harm the "viability and vitality" of the Golden Mile or any suburban centre (Policy 33.2.2.4); industrial land was an effective ban; and inside the Johnsonville centre — where supermarkets were at least permitted — heights were capped at 12 to 18 metres with anything taller non-complying. That envelope is why the consented Johnsonville mall redevelopment of 2017 was a two-storey scheme, and why the 11-storey mixed-use tower proposed in 2021 had to route around the plan entirely, through the COVID-19 fast-track. The new Metropolitan Centre zoning allows 35 to 42 metres on the same blocks.

The store network on the map, in other words, is the old plan's equilibrium, not the new plan's. Today's outcomes reflect twenty-four years of the previous rules; the new rulebook has had at most two years to work, and its test comes wherever supportive infrastructure and the new zoning overlap — Johnsonville, with rail, a motorway and 42-metre permissions, is the obvious place to watch. The remaining constraints are site assembly in a city short of large flat parcels, and water infrastructure with documented capacity problems and no published constraint map to plan around.

Lower Hutt: one green zone

The operative plan permits a big supermarket only in the CBD. Petone caps retail at 3,000 m² and demands a five-year economic impact study above that.

Lower Hutt still runs on its 2004 plan while the replacement grinds through hearings, and it is the region's most restrictive. A large supermarket is permitted in the Central Commercial area, and that is the list. Petone's big-box strip permits stores only up to a cumulative 3,000 m²; above that, the application must include an economic assessment of effects on the Jackson Street shops and the Lower Hutt CBD "over a minimum time period of 5 years" — a retail-impact study, required by rule, in 2026. Seaview and the other industrial zones are non-complying, with one grandfathered exception written for the existing Naenae supermarket site. The proposed plan would liberalise much of this; it has no legal effect yet.

Porirua: what codified permission looks like

Porirua's 2025 plan writes supermarkets into the rules by name — mostly to say yes.

Porirua's brand-new plan is the tidiest of the nine. Supermarkets are permitted by name in the Metropolitan Centre and in the Large Format Retail zone — where, in a nice inversion, it is the small store under 450 m² that needs consent. In local and neighbourhood centres and the mixed-use zone, larger stores are restricted discretionary with public notification precluded: a consent hurdle, but not a years-long objection war. Industrial land is a hard no. The one bespoke restriction is at Plimmerton Farm, whose commercial centre is defined to exclude large format retail "except one supermarket and one trade supplier".

Upper Hutt: the accidental liberal

The Mixed Use zone permits large format retail with no size cap — the most enabling supermarket zoning in the Wellington region.

Upper Hutt's Mixed Use Zone permits retail and large format retailing outright, with no floor-area cap — subject to a landscaping standard. Nothing else in the region comes close. The city centre permits the use with a design consent for the building; Silverstream's town centre allows up to 1,500 m² before a consent that asks whether the store would "undermine the role and function" of the CBD. Even the residential zones default to discretionary rather than non-complying. Whether the zone's land market can actually supply a five-thousand-square-metre site is another question; the rulebook, unusually, is not the problem.

Kāpiti: no green anywhere

No Kāpiti zone permits a 3,000–5,000 m² supermarket as of right. The airport zone caps the district's grocery competition by rule.

Kāpiti is the only district mapped here with no zone at all where a full-line supermarket is permitted as of right — the best case is Paraparaumu's metropolitan centre, permitted as a use but wrapped in precinct building rules. The airport zone deserves a museum plaque. Its rules allow "one only supermarket with a maximum gross floor area of 3,000m²" as a discretionary activity; any other supermarket is non-complying; more than one store between 151 and 1,500 m² that "retails groceries" is non-complying; and the zone permits exactly one department store, which must be of a brand not already in the district. A schedule of permitted competitors, by format and by brand, written into a district plan.

Christchurch: the quota system

Permitted in the centres — with named-site exceptions, a central-city one-supermarket block, an airport quota already filled, and Homebase's ban-until-2031.

Christchurch permits supermarkets in its town centres, local centres, and city centre without size caps, and its Large Format Retail zone is genuinely open — with one loud exception. At Homebase on Marshland Road, no supermarket over 1,000 m² may open before 4 October 2031, save for a single negotiated exception of 4,300 m². That condition exists because commissioners, weighing a plan change, concluded a supermarket there could threaten the viability of The Palms mall five minutes down the road — and wrote the protection of The Palms' anchor tenants into the plan. The airport zone permits one supermarket of up to 2,700 m²; Spitfire Square's New World has used the quota, and the rule's own commentary cites "distributional effects on nearby commercial centres" for why there will be no second. The central-city mixed-use zone allows one supermarket, up to 2,500 m², in one named block.

Dunedin: permissive, with a transport toll-gate

Permitted in the CBD, the centres, and the big-box zones — where a store under 1,500 m² is, remarkably, non-complying.

Dunedin's plan barely says the word: "supermarket" appears four times in the whole document, and there are no site-specific caps anywhere. A full-line store is permitted in the CBD, the principal and suburban centres, and the trade-related and large-format zones — where the plan directs "large supermarkets" and where, in the strangest inverse cap on these maps, a food store under 1,500 m² is non-complying. Small-format grocers — the Aldi model — are locked out of the very zones built for grocery. Every store over 250 m² everywhere trips a "high trip generator" consent, but discretion is limited to transport matters. The centres-hierarchy policing is done with a scalpel: no single activity may occupy more than half of a neighbourhood centre, and dairies are capped at 200 m² so that none grows into "a destination supermarket".

One supermarket only

The clearest rules in these plans are not about where supermarkets may go. They are about how many there may be.

Reading nine plans end to end turns up a genre: the supermarket quota. Thirteen provisions across these plans set a numeric limit on the number of supermarkets in an area — usually one — and often a size for it. This is not a metaphor for restrictive zoning. These are counting rules.

Homebase belongs on the list too, as the limiting case: a dated prohibition — no supermarket before 4 October 2031 — imposed to protect a specific competitor, softened on appeal to permit exactly one store of exactly 4,300 m².

If those shopping malls agreed to that privately – to geographically not compete for ten years in East Christchurch – that's cartel conduct, collusion, a criminal offence. But if the council does it publicly, off their own accord, though resource management processes, we call that good urban planning.— Marko Garlick, Yes In Our Backyards, February 2025

Try to write down the economic model in which these quotas help consumers. The council must know the efficient number of supermarkets per suburb, decades ahead, better than entrants risking their own money. It must be right about catchment growth, formats not yet invented, and preferences not yet expressed. And it must gain more by preventing a redundant store than it loses by preventing a competing one. Nobody believes all three. The quotas survive because their costs are invisible — the store not built, the price not cut — and their beneficiaries are the incumbents already inside the ring.

Case files

The rules above are the system working as designed. Here is what it looks like case by case.

Homebase, Christchurch, worked through. In 2020 the Homebase centre sought a plan change to expand onto adjacent vacant land. The council's concern was that a supermarket there could "seriously threaten the viability" of The Palms — a mall five minutes away, owned at the time by Australian private equity, anchored by a Woolworths with roughly $6 billion in national revenue behind it. Commissioners granted the rezoning with a condition: no supermarket before 2031. On appeal the parties settled on the one-store, 4,300 m² exception, plus staging caps on total retail. The economic evidence traversed local incomes, spending, and travel patterns to establish whether East Christchurch could support the extra floorspace without pinching The Palms. Whether East Christchurch shoppers might simply prefer having two places to buy milk was not the question before anyone. That is the tell for the whole regime: the inquiry runs on protecting suppliers of retail space, and consumer interest appears nowhere in it.

Costco, Westgate — what entry looks like when it works. New Zealand's one large-format entrant this century took three years and three and a half months from announcement (June 2019) to opening (September 2022) — and the consenting was the fast part. Auckland Council granted the resource consents non-notified, in about three months, because Costco bought into the one sub-precinct of the master-planned Westgate precinct where a 14,740 m² single tenancy was a permitted activity — fitting under the 15,000 m² tenancy cap by 260 square metres. The Overseas Investment Office approval took roughly eight months for a $23 million land purchase deemed sensitive because the site adjoins a stormwater reserve; the regulator now showcases the decision as a case study. What actually bound: the store needed a purpose-built precinct to exist at all (the product of nearly three decades of private master-planning at Westgate); two years of COVID-era construction; and — still unresolved — the West Auckland licensing-trust monopoly, which means the country's largest grocery store cannot sell wine. The sequel makes the pattern explicit: a consent obtained for a Costco at Rolleston by the landowner, not Costco, sits unused; the confirmed second store, at Drury, again buys pre-planned land inside a master developer's fast-track-consented project. Entry happens where someone has already built the permission. The atlas above maps how rarely that is.

The shorter files (drawn largely from Garlick's case notes and the decisions cited in Sources). Wairau Valley, Auckland: a PAK'nSAVE fought consent litigation — much of it from what is now Woolworths — for 18 years; the completed building sat empty from 2005 to 2009 awaiting judgments. Stonefields, Auckland: after nearby business associations objected, the town centre was limited to 4,500 m² of retail including "a superette of no more than 500m²" — the court heard that a real supermarket runs 4,000–5,000 m². Paerata Rise, Auckland: consent for a supermarket was refused as contrary to a precinct framework protecting Pukekohe's town centre, seven kilometres away; on appeal, consent came in exchange for a covenant restricting commercial activity on the applicant's adjacent land — a council extracting a private non-compete as the price of entry. Queenstown: the Frankton PAK'nSAVE was asked, along the way, to read as a fruit-packing shed and to justify its energy efficiency; the appeal was opposed by the owner of a competing centre 500 metres away that already hosted a Woolworths. And IKEA was kept out of Sylvia Park in 2008 on the ground that it would be too popular for the roads; New Zealand's first IKEA opened in 2025 — at Sylvia Park.

Aldi's Australian playbook is to open, on average, about 400 metres from an existing supermarket, and to say plainly that it intends to take the incumbents' customers. Put that application in front of a New Zealand centres-vitality test and it fails by its own honesty.

The second gate: pipes

A legal site still needs a wastewater connection. In parts of three cities, that is now the binding constraint.

Zoning is the first screen, not the last. In Auckland, Watercare's published capacity maps make a supermarket-scale wastewater connection effectively unobtainable across a band of suburbs — the Hibiscus Coast, Warkworth, Ōtara/Papatoetoe, Favona, Beachlands, East Auckland, parts of Waitākere and the lower North Shore — where demand above roughly five household-equivalents is declined at consent. In Christchurch, the post-quake vacuum sewer areas of Shirley, Aranui and Prestons are effectively closed to demand-adding development, with an unfunded replacement bill in the hundreds of millions. Hamilton publishes suburb-level capacity warnings and can refuse a network connection even to a permitted development.

Where councils publish the constraint polygons, they are now drawn on the maps above: toggle the "Infrastructure constraints" layer on the Auckland map (Watercare's network capacity areas, by severity), the Christchurch map (wastewater capacity constraint and limited sewer discharge areas), and the Hamilton map (the council's wastewater constraints layer). Wellington is the gap that proves the point: both its treatment plants run at capacity and the network constraints are real, but no constraint map is published anywhere — an entrant cannot find out where the no-go areas are without asking, site by site. The general point: a purple precinct rule can be appealed; a full pipe cannot.

What would actually work

The Government built an express lane in 2025. The atlas above shows why the destinations are still missing.

The Commission said it in 2022: free up sites. Eric Crampton's version of the argument was operational — an entrant cannot assemble a network of sites when each one needs its own multi-year consent fight, and the Overseas Investment Act screens the very land assembly the Government says it wants. He proposed that a new entrant's full slate of stores be handled in one simultaneous process — rezoning, consenting, and overseas-investment approval together, decided in months. Benno Blaschke turned that into full drafting instructions in May 2025: a Competitive Streamlined Planning Process for any genuine new entrant proposing ten or more stores, bundled multi-site rezoning plus consents, an independent economist on every panel, and statutory language directing panels not to decline or condition applications for effects on the "viability, vitality, amenity, hierarchy or function of any existing centre". Marko Garlick's version is a National Policy Statement on Supermarket Development: change the plans themselves, permanently and for everyone, not just the first entrant through the door.

The Crampton–Blaschke blueprint had two further limbs worth recording, because neither made it into the 2025 package. First, full mixed-use rights on approved sites, with height limits set aside: the supermarket as a podium, commercial or residential towers above, so the store buys its land jointly with the housing the same site can carry. Second, Kāinga Ora's landholdings as dealable currency — the Crown owns a great deal of well-located urban land, and could strike bargains in which an entering supermarket and a private developer build out a site together, with Kāinga Ora taking leases on a share of the apartments as its price. Both limbs answer the same economic problem: where the zoning is friendliest — downtowns — land is dearest, and a single-storey shed on the most expensive dirt in the country is the format least likely to pencil. A downtown supermarket works as the bottom of a tower; a cheap-land supermarket works near where people actually live. Permitting large-footprint stores only where land costs the most is a quieter way of not permitting them.

The Government moved in August 2025. The Fast-track Approvals Act now covers competition-enhancing grocery developments, backed by a Government Policy Statement on Grocery Competition; a single national building consent authority (Christchurch City Council, as it happens) handles supermarket building consents; the overseas-investment pathway has a grocery directive. Consents in under a year, on the advertised timeline.

One layer the package does not reach: alcohol. A full-service supermarket needs an off-licence as surely as it needs a building consent, and both Crampton and Blaschke flagged the case for bundling alcohol licensing into the same one-stop process — Blaschke's note names it as adjacent red tape without drafting the mechanism. Licensing runs on its own clock, before its own committees, with its own objectors. Leaving it outside the bundle leaves a full-service entrant one contested hearing away from opening a supermarket that cannot sell wine.

It is worth being precise about what the express lane does, because the mechanics decide how much it is worth. At the moment of decision, the fast track beats the plan: the panel gives the greatest weight to the Act's development-facilitating purpose (Schedule 5, clause 17), the non-complying gateway test is switched off, inconsistency with a district plan cannot on its own justify declining an application (section 85(4)), and a panel may even consent an activity the plan prohibits (section 42(5)(a)). Every centres-hierarchy policy mapped above is, for that one decision, demoted to a consideration.

Then the moment passes. The Act's exhaustive list of obtainable approvals (section 42(4)) contains no plan change: nothing a panel grants is ever embedded in a district plan. The consent is handed back to the council and treated "as if it were granted under the Resource Management Act" (Schedule 5, clause 31). Every later adjustment — expanding the store, reconfiguring the site, changing a condition — runs through ordinary RMA processes, decided by the council, against the same unchanged zoning, with none of the fast track's weighting. A condition change goes through RMA section 127; an expansion beyond the consented envelope is a fresh application in which non-complying status revives in full; and the fast-track default lapse is two years against the RMA's five. The plan learns nothing from the consent — no rule changes for the next store, or the next entrant. The Government adopted the consenting half of the blueprint and left the rezoning half on the table. The express lane crosses over the plans without changing them, and every store it delivers lands on the far side, governed thereafter by the rules the lane was built to bypass.

As of mid-2026, no third chain has committed. Aldi, Lidl and Tesco reportedly declined even to answer the Government's request for information. The old economists' joke says there are no $20 notes on the sidewalk — if there were, someone would have picked one up. One reading of the silence is that grocery's excess profits were never as large as the return-on-capital arithmetic suggested: the notes are counterfeit. The other reading is the one this atlas supports: for twenty years, checking whether the notes were real has itself been against the rules. An express lane is a process, and a process does not answer an entrant's first question, which is where. The mechanics above cut both ways here. At the moment of grant, the lane genuinely overrides the maps: a panel can consent a store the plan makes non-complying, and the quotas and centre-vitality tests cannot on their own sink the application. But the override is case-by-case and expires at the decision. The nine rulebooks mapped above remain the law of the land — governing every site an entrant does not fast-track, every expansion and condition change after a grant, and every assumption a network plan must be built on. A supermarket network is a multi-decade asset; an entrant weighing New Zealand is not pricing one consent but a portfolio of stores that must live, grow, and be refitted under rules the express lane leaves untouched.

The charitable reading of the consent-only design is expedience: a fast-track amendment was quick to draft, and the Government's stated expectation is that the full resource-management reform will embed competitive urban land markets properly, making bespoke supermarket machinery unnecessary. Fair enough — and it supplies a clean test of the reform itself. If the RMA's replacement genuinely delivers contestable urban land markets, the supermarket fast-track becomes irrelevant: nobody needs an express lane where the ordinary roads work. If entrants still need the fast-track once the reform is in force, the reform will not have gone far enough. The lane's traffic is the measure of the road network.

The remaining work is not mysterious, and it comes in a first-best and a second-best. First-best is to fix it at the source: write the resource-management legislation that replaces the RMA so that councils cannot run centres-hierarchy planning or retail-viability tests at all — the new system simply should not recognise a competitor's lost customers, however described, as an effect to be managed. And because plans will keep finding new ways to embed the old outcomes, pair the prohibition with ongoing review: a standing check that plan provisions are not quietly rebuilding anticompetitive protections under new names, caught by an auditor rather than discovered by the next entrant's lawyers.

Second-best, while the reform is written: strip the centre-viability tests out of retail consenting by national direction, as the Commission's first recommendation implied and as Blaschke's draft clauses and Garlick's NPS-SD would each do. Delete the quotas — no plan should count supermarkets. Publish the infrastructure constraint maps everywhere, so an entrant can screen sites from a desk instead of discovering the full pipe after the land deal. And add the limb the 2025 package left out: a mechanism that changes the plans themselves — bundled multi-site rezoning for an entrant's whole network, or national direction making supermarkets permitted in every centre and mixed-use zone — so that permission outlives the consent that granted it. Entry is the only test of whether the grocery profits are real. Make the land legal, and run the test.

Sources

Authorship

This site was researched and written by Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic). The analytical framing draws on the published corpus of Eric Crampton and the New Zealand Initiative, Benno Blaschke's fast-track research note, and Marko Garlick's Yes In Our Backyards. Eric Crampton reviewed the text; for attribution purposes he is reviewer, not author. Errors are likelier to be the machine's than the reviewer's — and some surely remain: nine district plans, ~250 zone classifications, and a moving legislative target leave room for mistakes. Corrections and comments are invited via this form; submissions are reviewed periodically and material corrections are noted on the page.

Method

Zone classifications were compiled from the operative text of each district plan as at 3–6 July 2026: the Auckland Unitary Plan (chapter PDFs, including a full-text sweep of all 232 published Chapter I precinct documents), the Christchurch District Plan (post-PC14), the Wellington City 2024 District Plan (IHP decision documents; the live ePlan sits behind a terms click-wall and a few rule numbers are reconstructed — flagged in the map popups), Hamilton's operative plan (PC12 clean-version chapters), Dunedin's 2GP (live ePlan), the operative Lower Hutt plan, the Porirua District Plan 2025, Upper Hutt's operative plan (archived consolidation), and the Kāpiti Operative District Plan 2021. Zone polygons are the councils' own published GIS layers. Every zone popup carries its controlling rule reference so the classification can be checked. This is a screening tool, not legal advice.

Reading

• Commerce Commission, Market Study into the Retail Grocery Sector — Final Report (8 March 2022).
• Eric Crampton, "Legalising groceries", Newsroom (8 March 2022); "Real supermarket competition will require planning reform", NZ Herald (3 April 2025); "The only way to find out if more supermarket competition is real", The Post (2 June 2025).
• Benno Blaschke, Fast-Track Supermarket Entry and Expansion Omnibus Bill, NZ Initiative research note (29 May 2025); "Breaking up supermarkets won't solve competition issues", NZ Herald (22 May 2025).
• Marko Garlick, "Supermarket YIMBYism" and "More stories of how councils accidentally on purpose banned competition", Yes In Our Backyards (February 2025).
• Hon Nicola Willis, "Express lane for new supermarkets" (27 August 2025); MBIE, "Supermarket fast-track pathway opening".
• Joel MacManus, "Why New Zealand can't get a third supermarket chain", The Spinoff (28 April 2026).
• District plans: Auckland Unitary Plan · Hamilton · Wellington City · Hutt City · Porirua · Upper Hutt · Kāpiti Coast · Christchurch · Dunedin 2GP.
• Case law and decisions: Landco Mt Wellington Ltd v Auckland City Council EnvC A035/2007 (Stonefields); Grafton Downs Ltd v Auckland Council [2024] NZEnvC 122 (Paerata Rise); Foodstuffs (South Island) Ltd v Queenstown Lakes District Council [2012] NZEnvC 135; the Homebase plan change decision and appeal consent order (CCC, 2022–23).
• Costco case study: LINZ overseas investment decision 201900422 (5 February 2020); Stuff on the non-notified consents (28 April 2020); Newsroom on the landowner-initiated Rolleston consent (7 December 2021); RNZ on the Drury second store (12 November 2025); AUP I615 Westgate Precinct.
• Productivity Commission, Better Urban Planning — final report (2017): centres-hierarchy prevalence and consenting case studies.
• Fast-track mechanics: Fast-track Approvals Act 2024 (esp. ss 42, 81, 85; Schedule 5 cll 17, 26, 31); Fast-track Approvals Amendment Act 2025; Government Policy Statement on Grocery Competition (Gazette, 17 December 2025); commentary from Bell Gully and Russell McVeagh.
• Wellington's previous plan: the 2000 District Plan's Centres objectives, Centres rules, and Business Area rules (Plan Change 73, operative 2014); Joel MacManus, "Who killed the Johnsonville mall?", The Spinoff.
• Infrastructure overlays: Watercare network capacity (GIS layer, 6 categories); CCC wastewater capacity open-data layers; HCC wastewater constraints layer. Existing supermarket locations © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

Disclosure: The New Zealand Initiative is funded by member organisations, which include both major grocery chains. The argument here — that entry should be legal — is the one position in grocery policy that incumbents have the least reason to fund. Design after Alex Tabarrok's The Ceiling Trap. Basemaps © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO. Zone data © the respective councils (CC BY 4.0 where stated).