About
A simple dish, a sharper way to compare cities.
The Fried Rice Index is a food-based affordability project that tracks fried rice prices across cities. It uses restaurant menu data to study baseline affordability, price variation, dish variety, and premiumization in urban restaurant markets.
Why this exists
Cost of living is usually described through broad statistics: CPI, rent, wages, exchange rates, and purchasing power parity. Those measures matter, but they can feel abstract.
The Fried Rice Index starts with something concrete: the price of a familiar restaurant dish. By comparing fried rice prices across cities, the project creates a simple way to see how everyday affordability changes from place to place.
What the index does
The index collects restaurant-level fried rice prices, preserves the original local price and currency, converts prices into Canadian dollars, assigns source confidence scores, and summarizes city-level patterns.
It does not treat every fried rice dish as identical. Basic, vegetable, meat-based, seafood, house special, and premium fried rice dishes are categorized separately so the data can be analyzed more carefully.
What the index is not
The Fried Rice Index is not a complete cost-of-living model. It does not replace official inflation data, rent data, wage data, CPI, or PPP.
It is a transparent restaurant-price signal: narrow, imperfect, but concrete. Its value comes from making affordability easier to see, question, and compare.
Where the project is going
The project is being expanded with a stronger methodology, public restaurant submissions, downloadable datasets, twice-yearly insights, and weekly writing on economic affairs.
The goal is to build a public dataset that can support real statistical analysis while remaining readable to people who simply want to understand how cities compare.