Borshch Index

What borshch costs — and why that question has at least four different answers.

Updated September 12, 2026

What the Borshch Index is

It is Ukraine's cousin of the Big Mac index. The idea is the same: take one dish that is cooked everywhere and watch its price — inflation, purchasing power and the gap between cities show up more clearly than in an abstract basket of goods.

The term is already in use in Ukraine, and it usually means the cost of the borshch basket: what it costs to cook a pot at home. Beets, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, onions — the five vegetables the State Statistics Service uses to track food inflation.

Four different pots

The trouble is that there are several such indices and they all give different numbers. Not because anyone is wrong — because they measure different pots.

What these indices do not tell you

All of them measure groceries. None of them measures the bowl — the ready serving of borshch that is brought to your table. And that is the real analogue of the Big Mac: a Big Mac is not a set of ingredients, it is a finished product with a price at the till.

That is the part we count.

The restaurant Borshch Index

We keep a catalogue of borshch served in restaurants: the name of the dish, the venue, the city, the weight of the serving, the price, and community ratings on seven criteria. Out of that comes a number that exists nowhere else — the median price of a serving of borshch in a city.

The headline number: the markup

A serving of borshch in a Kyiv restaurant costs 56.1 ₴ per 100 g. The same weight from a pot cooked at home, by Minfin's calculation, is 5.49 ₴.

So a bowl of borshch in a restaurant costs roughly as much as 10.2 of the same bowls cooked at home. That difference is rent, wages, tableware, the cook's work — and the fact that you do not have to peel the beets.

How we count

• Median, not mean. The price distribution has a long right tail: a single 1,100 UAH serving (borshch with wild boar) moves the mean by tens of hryvnia, and the median not at all. The median answers “what does an ordinary borshch cost”, not “what does borshch cost on average across restaurants, banquet halls included”.
• Price per 100 g is kept separate from the price of a serving. Servings range from 240 to 1,200 g. Comparing price tags alone is the same mistake as comparing a three-liter pot with a five-liter one.
• The sample threshold is 10 records per city.
• A plausibility filter, not a blacklist. Records with a price of 30–1,500 UAH and a weight of 100–1,500 g go into the calculation. That filters out typos (a 13 g serving) without anyone hand-picking which “inconvenient” rows to drop.
• The data comes from our open API, the same one that powers the map. The recalculation is automatic, and the date of the reading is always at the top of the page.

What this index does not tell you

The limits, stated plainly — otherwise the number cannot be trusted:

• It is not the same borshch. A Big Mac is identical everywhere; borshch is not. The sample holds borshch with veal, meat-free borshch and borshch with duck. We measure “a bowl of borshch in this city”, not a fixed recipe.
• So far this is almost entirely Kyiv. The other cities have not reached the threshold yet. The index gets interesting precisely when there are several cities in it.
• The sample is whatever people added. Venues end up in the catalogue not at random but because somebody felt like going there. That biases the sample towards places worth talking about.
• The comparison with a homemade pot is approximate. We take the density of borshch as 1 g/ml, so 3 l ≈ 3,000 g. That is enough for an order of magnitude, not for accuracy to the hryvnia.