Ganna Food Basket Index
One number for what a Sri Lankan food basket costs — built from our own daily price archive, with every choice disclosed.
Ganna Food Basket Index
How the index is built
27 items, equal weights. The Department of Census and Statistics publishes only group weights for its basket, not item weights — so any weighting we invented would be fake precision. Equal weights, stated openly.
An item joins only if it has a wholesale price on every archive day (24 July – 30 October 2026, 68 days). 15 items fail that rule and are listed below with their reason. Nothing is ever imputed or carried forward.
Base = each item's mean wholesale price over the first 7 archive days (= 100). The index on a day is the mean of the 27 price relatives × 100. Wholesale means each item's primary-market wholesale: Pettah for vegetables and rice, Peliyagoda for fish.
Retail prices now appear in the Household Food Index below, built from the same archive under the same strict rule — a line with any missing retail day is left out. The wholesale index above stays wholesale-only.
Household Food Index
What the same food basket costs a family at retail — same archive, household quantities, same strict rule.
Basket = the Household Cost Tracker's 23 weekly lines for a 4-person household (planning quantities, not survey data). Lines that miss any retail day are left out and listed below.
Method = Laspeyres: each line's weekly quantity × its retail price, summed, against the same sum over the first 7 archive days (= 100). Retail = primary-market retail: Pettah for vegetables, rice and other items, Peliyagoda for fish.
A line joins only with a retail price on every archive day — the same strict rule as the wholesale index. Nothing is imputed or carried forward.
In the household basket
Left out — and why
- coconut-oil — had days with no retail price
- brinjal — had days with no retail price
- salaya — had days with no retail price
- thalapath — had days with no retail price
How this compares with official inflation
The Department of Census and Statistics' CCPI food-group inflation (year-on-year) was 6.3% in July, 8.5% in August, 8.7% in September and 8.8% in October 2026. Those are year-on-year rates — versus the same month last year — so they do not plot on the same line as our indexes, which start at 100 in late July 2026. A plotted official line needs the DCS food-group index levels, which we have not verified from the DCS bulletin yet; until then this note is the comparison, not a guess.
Department of Census and Statistics — CCPI releases, July–October 2026
In the basket (27 items)
- Banana (Sour)—
- Beans—
- Big Onion (Imp)—
- Cabbage—
- Carrot—
- Coconut (Avg.)—
- Dried Chilli (Imp)—
- Egg (White)—
- Green Chilli—
- Katta (Imp)—
- Kekulu (Red)—
- Kekulu (White)—
- Lime—
- Linna—
- Nadu—
- Papaw—
- Ponni Samba (Imp)—
- Potato (Imp)—
- Potato (Local)—
- Pumpkin—
- Red Dhal—
- Red Onion (Local)—
- Samba—
- Snake gourd—
- Sprat (Imp)—
- Sugar (White)—
- Tomato—
Wholesale, primary market, on the latest archive day. What a household pays is retail — see the Household Food Index above.
Left out — and why
- apple-imp — never had a wholesale price in the archive
- kekulu-white-imp — never had a wholesale price in the archive
- nadu-imp — never had a wholesale price in the archive
- orange-imp — never had a wholesale price in the archive
- pineapple — had a wholesale price on only 1 of 68 days
- brinjal — missed one reporting day
- coconut-oil — missed one reporting day
- kelawalla — had days with no wholesale price
- salaya — had days with no wholesale price
- hurulla — had days with no wholesale price
- red-onion-lmp — had days with no wholesale price
- thalapath — had days with no wholesale price
- balaya — had days with no wholesale price
- paraw — had days with no wholesale price
- big-onion-local — had days with no wholesale price
Bilingual LKR invoices with VAT/SSCL, bank details, PDF download and WhatsApp share.
Trilingual business cards with a QR contact code, PNG download, .vcf file and WhatsApp share.
Materials + labor + overhead → unit cost and selling price for multiple products.
Questions
No. This is our own index over 27 food items with equal weights. The official CCPI covers hundreds of items with surveyed weights and includes housing, transport and services. Ours answers a narrower question: what happened to food prices at wholesale since late July 2026.
Each missed exactly one reporting day in the archive. The rule is strict — an item joins only with a price on every day — because filling a gap with a guess would make the index partly invented. They rejoin automatically once their series is complete over the window.
Vegetables drove it: beans and tomato roughly doubled from their base-week averages, and carrots doubled in a single day on 27 October. Rice, eggs and some fish fell over the same period, which is why the index rose less than the worst vegetable moves alone suggest.
The same archive, but at retail prices and with household quantities: the Household Cost Tracker's weekly basket for four people, summed at primary-market retail each day against its first-week average (= 100). It answers what a family pays, while the wholesale index answers what wholesale food prices did.
A line joins only with a retail price on every archive day. Lines that missed a day are listed with their reason — nothing is guessed or carried forward.
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