Food inflation bites as healthy diet hits N1,541

Nigeria’s cost of a healthy diet (CoHD) climbed to N1,541 in March. This has intensified pressure on households already grappling with high inflation.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), who made the disclosure, in a document, explained that the figure indicates an increase of 1.89 per cent when compared to the amount recorded in the previous month (February 2026 was N1,513).

According to the document, the average CoHD was highest in the south-east at N1,899 per adult per day, compared to N1,233 per adult per day in the north-east.

The CoHD, NBS, said, has risen faster than general inflation and food inflation. However, the CoHD and the food Consumer Price Index (CPI) are not directly comparable.

Meanwhile, the CoHD includes fewer items and is measured in naira per day, while the food CPI is a weighted index which include

kulikuli (groundnut cake), akara (beans cake), and locust beans (dawadawa, iru) which have been excluded from the list of

possible least-cost items in CoHD baskets, though they were sometimes selected in 2025.

Kulikuli and akara were removed because they are mixed items containing significant amounts of more than one food group (pulses, oil), while dawadawa and iru were excluded as they are typically used as a condiment and consumed in small amounts.

“Food environments determine a household’s physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food for an active

and a healthy life. A suite of indicators known as the Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet (CoAHD) have been developed to

improve the measurement of food access and are now monitored globally by the United Nations and the World Bank as a metric of food security. The CoHD metric uses the availability, price, and nutritional composition of retail food items to identify the least expensive combination of items that meet requirements for a healthy diet.

“To compute the Cost of a Healthy Diet indicator, the following data are required: (a) retail food prices, (b) food composition data, and (c) a healthy diet standard” NBS said.

The cost of CoHD is the least expensive combination of locally available items that meet globally consistent food-based dietary guidelines. It is used as a measure of physical and economic access to healthy diets. This is a lower bound (or floor) of the cost per adult per day excluding the cost of transportation and meal preparation.