Raw Meat Is 1,600 Birr a Kilo in Addis, and a Cooperative's Price Has Doubled in a Year

At Ashe Besheger Butchery in Addisu Gebiya, a kilogram of raw meat now costs 1,600 Br to eat in and 1,400 Br to take away. A consumer cooperative in Abay Minch charges 1,200 Br, up from 600 to 650 Br a year ago.

The cooperative price — the cheapest formal channel available to an ordinary household — has roughly doubled in twelve months.

What the cooperative number measures

Use the 1,200 Br figure, not the 1,600 Br one, as the indicator.

A butchery's eat-in price carries rent, service and margin. A consumer cooperative exists to strip those out and sell near cost to members. When the subsidised channel doubles, the move is in the underlying commodity — livestock, feed, transport, slaughter — and not in anybody's markup. That is the cleanest read available on what has actually happened to the price of meat in Addis this year.

It also sets a floor. There is no cheaper formal option below the cooperative for a household to fall back on.

The demand side is already adjusting

Biruk Fantu, a bus driver in his mid-forties, used to meet friends over a platter of tere sega at least once a week — "how we stayed connected", as he put it. Over the past two years the ritual has shrunk to once a month, with rising rent competing for the same earnings.

That is the pattern a business should model: not households that stop buying meat, but households that buy it a quarter as often. Frequency collapses before the basket does.

For restaurants, butcheries and the livestock chain behind them, a four-fold drop in visit frequency among middle-income regulars is a volume problem that raising prices cannot solve, because the price rise is what caused it. For every other consumer-facing business in Addis, the same squeeze is arriving through a different line in the same household budget.

Open

The reported prices are from two specific sellers and are not a citywide average; no official meat price index has been published alongside them. Nor is it established how much of the increase reflects livestock supply, feed and transport costs, or currency pass-through on inputs.

Sources: Addis Fortune, 26 October 2026