Nigerian Food Doesn't Have a Pricing Problem. It Has a Market-Size Problem.

There's an argument that resurfaces every few months among Nigerians in the diaspora: why is Nigerian food so expensive abroad?

£20 for jollof and chicken. £25 for soup. A few pieces of suya beginning to resemble the price of a full sit-down meal.

The complaints are predictable, and so are the explanations. Rent is expensive. Labour costs more abroad. Some ingredients are imported. Energy costs are high. Delivery platforms take their cut. Taxes have to be paid.

All of this may be true. But I think we're looking at the wrong numbers.

The more interesting question isn't "why does this plate of jollof cost £20?" It's "how many people were ever realistically going to buy it?"

We are loud. But there aren't that many of us.

Nigerian culture has an extraordinary ability to make Nigeria feel much larger than it is within the diaspora. Afrobeats is everywhere. Nigerian artists sell out some of Britain's biggest venues. Nollywood travels. Nigerian slang increasingly crosses cultural boundaries. Jollof rice has somehow become the subject of an international rivalry.

That cultural footprint creates the impression of an enormous Nigerian consumer market. The population data tells a different story.

According to the 2021 Census, 271,390 people in England and Wales wrote in Nigerian as their ethnic group, approximately 0.5% of the population. For comparison, the Indian ethnic population was around 1.86 million, or 3.1%. The Chinese population was 445,646, or 0.7%.

That Chinese number matters. Nobody seriously believes Britain's Chinese restaurants survive by selling Chinese food to 445,646 Chinese people. Chinese cuisine escaped its demographic boundary a long time ago. Its market is Britain. The same is broadly true of Indian food.

And that exposes the real issue for Nigerian food. The problem isn't that there aren't enough Nigerians. The problem is that Nigerian restaurants keep building businesses primarily dependent on Nigerians, when Nigerians represent roughly one person in every 200 in England and Wales.

...and 0.5% isn't even the real market

That 0.5% is just where the calculation begins. Not every Nigerian lives within travelling distance of a given restaurant. Not everyone buys Nigerian restaurant food regularly. Not everyone likes what's on the menu. Not everyone is willing to pay the price on the board.

And Nigerians have a source of Nigerian food that many arriving cuisines don't have to compete against quite so aggressively: their own kitchens. Or their mother's. Or their auntie's. Or the woman five minutes away selling soup by the litre on WhatsApp.

"There are Nigerians in London" isn't market research. The real questions are: How many potential customers are within my catchment? How often do they buy Nigerian food out? What are they willing to spend? How many competing restaurants are already chasing them? How much of that demand do I need to break even? And ultimately how much of my revenue needs to come from people who aren't Nigerian?

The demand is real. It's just concentrated.

This isn't an argument that Africans don't want African food. A 2026 study of 1,507 African diaspora consumers across the UK found that 97% regularly consumed African food, 35% daily, another 39% at least once a week. Researchers estimated Britain's broader African diaspora food market at approximately £1.5 billion annually.

The question isn't whether the appetite exists. It's whether diaspora demand alone can support the number and type of restaurants being opened, particularly restaurants carrying the cost structure of modern British hospitality.

And oddly, one of the most important numbers in this whole debate doesn't seem to exist anywhere: what percentage of Nigerian restaurant customers are actually Nigerian, versus other African, Caribbean, White British, Asian British, or otherwise? There's demographic data on Nigerians. There's research on diaspora food consumption. There are restaurant listings and reports on Britain's wider ethnic-food market. But nobody seems to know who's actually in the seats. That number would tell us whether Nigerian cuisine has genuinely escaped the diaspora or is still circling inside it.

Same rent. Different market.

A Nigerian restaurant in London competes for commercial property in the same market as a Chinese restaurant, hires from the same labour pool as an Indian restaurant, buys electricity from the same suppliers as an Italian restaurant, and pays the same business rates, insurance, and delivery commissions as everyone else. But if these restaurants have wildly different addressable markets, they don't have the same economics.

"My costs mean I have to charge £20." "I'm not paying £20 for rice and chicken." Both can be right, this isn't a moral argument about the fair price of jollof, it's a business model that doesn't work at the available volume.

The Chinese comparison should make us uncomfortable

Chinese people are about 0.7% of England and Wales. Nigerians are about 0.5%. The demographic gap is small. The gap in cultural penetration of the cuisine is enormous.

A Chinese restaurant doesn't need someone to identify as Chinese before it counts them as a customer. Millions of British people have folded Chinese food into ordinary life without a second thought, nobody orders it thinking "tonight I'm supporting the Chinese diaspora food market." They think: "shall we get Chinese?"

That's the destination Nigerian food needs to reach. Nigerian food needs to escape Nigerians. Commercially, not culturally.

It's worth being honest, though, about why Chinese food got there first. That penetration didn't happen in five years, or even fifteen. It happened over six decades, largely through takeaways operating on a completely different cost base than today's high streets, cheap rents, no delivery-platform commissions, none of the "experience" expectations that come with modern hospitality. Nigerian restaurants are trying to make the same leap from diaspora staple to national habit, but under a much harsher margin environment than the cuisines that got there before them. That doesn't undermine the argument, it just means the timeline is longer, and the businesses that pull it off will probably look more like disciplined fast-casual formats than independent sit-down restaurants.

There's a second, less comfortable factor too, Nigerian restaurants are competing against actual aunties. A free, often superior substitute that few other arriving cuisines had to contend with at the same scale. That's a structural disadvantage the rent-and-labour conversation never accounts for.

The opportunity isn't dividing 271,390 people more cleverly

It's adding millions of people to the market. Jollof is the obvious gateway, probably West African cuisine's most recognisable export. But the real breakthrough may come from thinking less about dishes and more about formats.

Pizza became a format. Sushi became a format. Tacos became a format. Curry became an entire category. Korean fried chicken became a globally legible product almost overnight. What's the Nigerian equivalent?

Maybe it's the jollof bowl. Jollof with suya chicken. Jollof with grilled beef. Plantain on the side. Suya wraps. Pepper sauces as a condiment category, the way sriracha or chimichurri became one. Combinations simple and recognisable enough that someone who has never been to a Nigerian wedding can walk in and order without needing a Nigerian friend to translate the menu. Authenticity and accessibility don't have to be opposites, they just require someone to build the on-ramp.

The better question

The debate started as "why is Nigerian food abroad so expensive?" The better question is: "why, despite Nigeria's enormous cultural influence, haven't we built a substantially larger market for Nigerian food?"

There are roughly 445,646 Chinese people in England and Wales, and roughly 271,390 Nigerians. One cuisine became part of everyday British life. The other is still arguing over whether £20 jollof is daylight robbery. Population alone doesn't explain that gap. Market penetration does.

Before the lease. Before the branding. Before the Instagram page. Before deciding what the jollof should cost, ask the boring question first: how big is my market?

If the honest answer is "Nigerians living nearby," the problem probably isn't that Nigerians won't pay enough. It's that the market was defined too narrowly from the start.