Is the meat in South Africa too expensive? We checked the prices!

Meat, which is a source of protein, fats and vitamins, is an important part of the diet for many people – an average South African consumes 70 kg of meat annually^[1] or about 5.8 kg monthly. However, isn’t meat in South Africa too expensive?

We decided to compare the prices of 1 kg of chicken fillet around the continent.

Our ranking consists of 7 African countries. It turns out that the continental average price of 1 kg of chicken fillet is $4.68.

The cheapest chicken meat can be found in the eastern part of the continent: in Nigeria (R60.48/kg), South Africa (R77.39/kg) and Algeria (R82.73/kg). On the other hand, citizens of Kenya (R99.06/kg), Morocco (R95.57/kg) and Uganda (R90.70/kg), have to pay the highest prices for their poultry.

In the chicken price ranking, South Africa ranked as the 2^nd country out of 7 countries included – in July 2023, the average price of 1 kg of chicken was R77.39 ($4.25), below the African average.

Comparison of meat prices with wages

In order to make the comparison more fair, we calculated how many kilograms of chicken can be bought with the average wage in each country.

The best relation between meat prices and wages can be found in South Africa, where the average wage can get you 295 kg of chicken breast. Much less fits in the Moroccan (76 kg) and Kenyan (68 kg) average wage.

The average South African wage gets you 295kg of chicken. This is the most chicken in all of Africa, followed by Morocco (76 kg) and Kenya (68 kg).

Prices in British online supermarkets

Chicken fillets in Pick n Pay: R96.99/kg

All of South Africa

To the store

Chicken fillets in Woolworths: R117.99/kg

Eastern Cape, Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal

To the store

Chicken fillets in Shoprite: R84.99/kg

Johannesburg and Cape Town.

To the store

Chicken fillets in Checkers: R69.99/kg

Selected locations.

To the store

Methodology and sources

Prices of 1 kg of chicken breast, as well as the average wages in different African countries, are from numbeo.com, a platform where hundreds of thousands of users from around the world monitor prices of products and services. For currency conversion, we used the average exchange rate data from Google Finance for July 2023. Prices in South African online supermarkets as of 02.08.2023.

Other sources:

[1] https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=91992#

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274522/global-per-capita-consumption-of-meat/

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We juxtaposed the data from 105 countries worldwide