Although most of us still travel to the supermarket for our food, our busy lives mean that more and more of us are choosing to stay at home and surf the net for our groceries.

We want to know whether the produce that's picked, packed, and delivered to your door is as fresh as the food we'd choose for ourselves. Jessie enlisted the help of some colleagues in north Wales - Sarah Easedale in Minera near Wrexham and Stuart Robinson in Llandudno Junction near Bangor, to see what the situation's like with the three big supermarkets that deliver across Wales.

Sarah's a busy working mum of one, with another on the way. "Sometimes I do use the online shopping service with Asda," she says. "Most of the time it's pretty successful, but sometimes they do bring things that are quite close to the sell by date."

Stuart works from home, as well as on the road, and he's open minded about shopping online.

"We use Tesco quite a bit and I tend to go there myself rather than using the online facility, although we have used that once or twice, and it's been fine," he told us.

Jessie, Sarah and Stuart made lists of the basic groceries the average family might want, placed orders on-line, and to keep it fair they visited their local store within two hours of the delivery so they would choose from the same stock as the store's own shoppers.

At the moment, online shopping only makes up a tiny amount of food sales - about 2% of food is bought online. But with most of the big supermarkets providing on-line ordering services, it's predicted that one in 10 shoppers will no longer visit a supermarket by 2012 and, in Wales, sales of groceries on-line will reach £250 million within five years.

Jessie went to Cardiff's Sainsbury's in Thornhill, Sarah visited the Wrexham branch of Asda, and Stuart travelled to Tesco in Llandudno Junction. They applied the same principles to buy a basket of goodies worth around £25.

The results

When their deliveries arrived, Jessie, Sarah and Stuart compared the dates of the shopping they had chosen with the items which had been delivered. We worked out which items were fresher when they were delivered, compared to those we'd selected in store - and we worked out how many days fresher our purchases were.

Sarah shopped with Asda and had three items delivered which were fresher than she'd chosen, but they weren't the exact items she'd ordered. Five items which were delivered were less fresh than she'd found. On average her items had the same shelf-life as those bought online.

Jessie ordered from Sainsbury's. One item they delivered was fresher than she'd found, but seven items were less fresh, and overall, the online delivery would last 15 days less than the shopping she'd chosen.

Stuart used Tesco. He received one item fresher than he chose himself, and only three items were less fresh, but the big shocker was the cheese Stuart picked for himself. The one delivered online had a sell by date of 1 February, and Stuart found cheese with a date of 22 February - three week's difference! That cheese means his overall online shop was 23 days less fresh than he found himself.

Our findings seem to back-up a report by Which?. The consumer body found that the stores' best-before dates are on average a day later than those for the same products bought online. In their survey, no supermarket chain performed worse than any other overall. And, for us, all the stores delivered at least one item fresher than we'd found, although cheese seemed to be an item it was easy to find fresher in-store.

So all in all, a mixed bag, you might say. It seems on-line shopping certainly offers convenience, but you might not necessarily get what you want, and you might have to rush to eat some of the products you've bought.

The supermarkets' responses

Asda, who delivered to Sarah at her home near Wrexham, didn't appear too pleased when we asked if their in-store shoppers always looked for the freshest produce. They told us that their home shopping comes from exactly the same place as every customer's shopping, and that it's nonsense to suggest that their home shopping team actually has the time or inclination to root though sell by dates and off load short ones on to their dot.com customers.

Sainsbury's told us their shoppers are trained to find the freshest food available and there should have been no difference between the online shop and the personal shop. In fact, they say there's no reason why this has happened, and they'll be passing our findings on to the Cardiff store we visited.

And what about Tesco? Stuart shopped in their Llandudno Junction branch - which sent him that cheese with the sell-by date three weeks earlier than the one he bought himself. So how did they account for that?

They say that their online orders are picked by experienced shoppers, and that choosing the longest sell by date is an option for online customers.

Sounds like it's one worth clicking on.