The most recent official figure for what food costs in Nigeria describes May 2026. Today is 30 August. That is ninety-one days.
This is not an accusation. The National Bureau of Statistics publishes the Selected Food Price Watch monthly, it is careful work with a real sample frame, and it is current through May — we checked the catalogue this week and pulled the file. Every statistical office in the world publishes with a lag, because doing it properly takes time.
But a lag is still a lag. A woman deciding what to put in the pot this week cannot use a number about May. Neither can a trader pricing stock, a lender sizing a loan, or an economist trying to see inflation while it is happening rather than after it has finished.
So we built the fast half: foodtracker.apexgridapps.com. Crowd-reported retail food prices, by state, in the units people actually buy in. It updates the moment someone reports a price.
It does not replace the official series and it is not trying to. NBS remains the statutory record, and where the two disagree, NBS is the one that counts. What we can add is speed — and, over time, something more interesting: the gap between the two is itself a measurement.
Who this came from
The idea did not start with us. It came out of a set of questions from Queen Esther Oye , one of the advisors who reviews our work.
She asked three things that all turned out to need the same missing ingredient: a model of how food inflation would move in the fourth quarter; whether diaspora remittances act as informal adaptation grants when food prices spike and state safety nets fail; and a measure of purchasing power adjusted for localised food shocks rather than a national average.
Every one of those needs food prices by state , close to now. We went to look at what we held.
We held 229 rows. One month. Nine of thirty-seven states.
That is the honest inventory. We had built engines that needed state-level food prices and we did not have state-level food prices. You cannot model a localised food shock from nine states.
Ninety-one days is not a rounding error in food
With most numbers, a quarter’s lag is an inconvenience. With food it can invert the answer.
Nigerian food prices are seasonal, and the season that matters most is the one we are in. Grain stocks run down between planting and harvest, and prices climb through the lean months before falling back when the new crop arrives. A figure describing May, read in late August, is not simply an old number — it is a number from the other side of that curve, and nothing in it tells you which way things have moved since.
So the honest position is not that a May figure is a bit out of date. It is that a May figure cannot answer an August question at all , and quoting it as though it can is how a stale number does real damage. It is not a price any more; it is a claim about the past wearing today’s clothes.
That is the gap this fills. Not better than the official series — sooner than it, and openly rougher.
What we are asking
The tracker is live and nearly empty. That is the awkward stage of every crowd project, and there is only one way through it.
Report one price. Open the site, tap the item you bought, confirm the price if it looks right or type what you actually paid. It takes about fifteen seconds. No account, no email, no phone number — we do not collect your name or your IP address, and there is nothing to sign up for.
Then send it to somebody in another state. This is the part that matters more than the reporting. A food price tracker with ten states is a Lagos newsletter. Nigeria has thirty-seven, and the prices that move first are rarely the ones in the cities that already get written about.
We are tracking the basket people actually buy: rice, beans, gari, yam, tomatoes, pepper, onions, palm oil, bread, eggs, with millet, sorghum, maize and the rest one tap away. Prices are reported in market units — per mudu, per paint, per tuber — because asking a shopper for a price per kilogram gets you a guess.
The rules we set ourselves
A crowd tracker is only worth having if it is honest about being one.
Every figure carries how many people reported it, the spread between the highest and lowest, and how old the newest report is. A median of one report is labelled “ single report — not a price”, because that is what it is. There is no way to get the bare number out of our API without that context attached — we built it that way deliberately, since the bare number is what ends up quoted.
And we do not convert a mudu into a kilogram. A mudu of gari and a mudu of beans do not weigh the same, and the vessel varies by region and by trader. Publishing a kilogram price we had not measured would be inventing precision. So the conversion factor sits in our data as null, marked UNCALIBRATED, until somebody weighs it properly.
Why it matters who counts
There is a version of this country’s economic story that is told entirely from outside it — assembled from satellite passes, wire copy, and quarterly reports written three months after the fact. It is not usually wrong. It is just late, and thin, and shaped by whoever had the budget to collect it.
The alternative is not complaining about that. It is counting.
A woman in Gombe reporting what she paid for a mudu of rice this morning is doing statistics. Ten thousand of those, across thirty-seven states, is a national series that belongs to the people who generated it — published under a licence that keeps it free for researchers, journalists and NGOs, with the code open so anyone can check our arithmetic or run their own copy.
We are ninety-one days behind on what food costs. We do not have to be.
foodtracker.apexgridapps.com — report one price, then share it with someone in a state we are missing.
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