Our View: Is sour grapes behind Consumers Association attack on e-kalathi?

The Cyprus Consumers’ Association issued an announcement on Monday declaring that the e-kalathi app – created by the government to list the prices of a large range of goods in all supermarkets to help shoppers get the best deals – had failed, to a large extent, to achieve its aims.

The main objective of e-kalathi, which was set up in June 2025, the association said, was to offer consumers a tool that would help them find the cheapest supermarket or cheapest products while also pushing down prices, in general, through competition. It admitted, however, that there was a small increase in the total number of products in e-kalathi in December, while pointing out that no supermarket lists the prices of all 478 products included in the basket. Some big chains with shops everywhere in Cyprus include a very small amount of products in the e-kalathi.

This criticism of e-kalathi by a group that calls itself the Cyprus Consumers’ Association is astonishing. It gives the impression that it wants e-kalathi, a tool created to help consumers, to fail and is pleased that, after six months it has been, at best, a mixed success. Could this be the result of rivalry? E-kalathi was the idea of former commerce minister Giorgos Papanastasiou and is being operated by the government-run Consumer Protection Service, while the association seems to be a personal vehicle for one man to pursue a political agenda, usually in line with Akel thinking.

Leaving aside the association’s negativity, the introduction of e-kalathi has not been a failure. Its introduction alone must be considered a success, considering the strong opposition to it by all the supermarkets and the pressure they applied on the government not to go ahead with it. All that the supermarkets achieved was to delay its introduction, but they have not carried out threats to not cooperate by not giving prices of products daily. What they have done, to undermine the project, is not to give the prices of as many products as the Consumer Protection Service was seeking.

On the plus side, however, consumers can compare prices on a reasonable number of products in a selection of supermarkets and go after the best deal, which was the main thinking behind the creation of e-kalathi. It was never going to achieve perfection from day one, as the Consumers’ Association seemed to think. In the first six months of its operation, there were bound to have been teething problems and weakness were certain to surface. The target, for now, is to deal with the weaknesses and to gradually expand the number of products each supermarket lists the prices of.

E-kalathi is a work in progress, which has started well, but will need time to offer all the information consumers require.