Where do you shop, and what does food cost?

Food here is cheap if you shop like a local, and surprisingly expensive if you try to buy what you ate at home. The gap between the two is tens of percent on the same basket.

This is about where things are bought, what they cost, and what to stop looking for.

Four kinds of shop and what each is for

Hard discounters: D1 and Ara. Small shops on every corner, own brands, a few hundred lines and the lowest prices in the country. On basics like rice, pasta, oil or eggs the gap against a big chain runs twenty to thirty percent. This is where you buy dry goods and household stuff.

Big chains: Éxito, Jumbo, Olímpica. Everything under one roof, including imports, electronics and a meat counter. Dearer, but the only place for things Europeans treat as ordinary: hard cheese, decent coffee to brew at home (yes, really), olive oil, wholegrain bread.

Carulla is the premium arm of Éxito. Nicer, pricier, and everywhere in Poblado. Shop there out of habit and you pay nearly double the discounter.

Markets. The Plaza Minorista downtown is the wholesale market with the lowest fruit and vegetable prices in the city. Sunday mercados campesinos in the parks cost more than the minorista and are far more pleasant. Go in the morning, with cash and your own bag.

The corner tienda. A small shop for one beer, three eggs and bread. Dearer per item, and open when nothing else is.

What a week of groceries costs

The best available yardstick is the basic basket, 23 staple items measured monthly in seven cities. In Medellín it came to 147,771 pesos in 2026, among the cheapest of the cities compared; the national average was 148,567 and it fell 1.8% year on year.

Translated into practice for one person who cooks at home and skips imports:

• a weekly shop of roughly 100,000 to 150,000 pesos, with fruit and vegetables from the market and the rest from a discounter
• around 500,000 to 700,000 a month, more with meat and a few bottles of wine
• lunch out at 15,000 to 25,000 pesos for a menú del día: soup, a main and a juice

The prices I record myself live in the price log with a date and a place, not in an article. An article goes stale; the log does not.

What is cheap and what is not

Cheap: tropical fruit, bananas, avocado, eggs, chicken, rice, beans, panela, coffee at the market, fresh juices, lunch in a local restaurant.

Middling: beef, fish away from the coast, milk, yoghurt, beer from a shop.

Expensive: hard cheese, butter, European style charcuterie, wholegrain bread, muesli, olive oil, wine, imported chocolate, anything labelled importado. Alcohol other than aguardiente and beer is dear, because it is heavily taxed.

The fastest way to double your spending here is trying to eat the way you did at home. The second fastest is buying everything at Carulla.

Weights, units and prices

• A libra is half a kilo, and markets and counters price in it. A price "per pound" therefore looks half as attractive as it is.
• Prices are quoted in thousands. Cinco mil is five thousand pesos, about a euro.
• You do not haggle over a few hundred pesos, but on a bigger purchase you can ask for a ñapa, a little extra thrown in.
• Cards work anywhere with a counter and a till. At markets, stalls and street food it is cash, or Bre-B, the QR payment everyone uses.

Fruit you cannot buy at home

This is the part that makes the market worth visiting even if you do not cook:

• Guanábana, a huge green spiky thing with creamy flesh; best as a juice with milk.
• Lulo, sour and yellow-green, makes the most refreshing drink I know.
• Maracuyá and granadilla are relatives: the first sour, for juice, the second sweet, eaten with a spoon.
• Tomate de árbol, the tamarillo, tastes like a tomato that decided to be a fruit.
• Pitahaya, the yellow dragon fruit, works reliably on your digestion; one a day is plenty.
• Uchuva, the physalis, is sold by the kilo and ends up in yoghurt.
• Mangostán, zapote, borojó, mamoncillo are the next level; buy them from a seller who will tell you how to eat them.

Eating out without overpaying

Menú del día is the best value there is: soup, a main with rice, beans and meat, a juice, sometimes dessert, for 15,000 to 25,000 pesos. Served at midday and gone by three.

Corrientazo is the same word for the same meal in an even plainer place.

Restaurants in Poblado cost three times that and the food tends to be international. Nothing wrong with it, it is just not the price of Colombia.

Delivery apps charge more than the restaurant does, plus a delivery fee. Convenient, as long as you know you are paying a markup twice.

What I would tell myself after a year of shopping

1. Split the shop across three places. Fruit and vegetables at the market, dry goods at D1 or Ara, one big monthly run to Éxito for what the others do not carry.
2. Do not buy imports out of habit. Most of what you miss has a cheaper and better local equivalent.
3. Learn three local staples. Panela instead of sugar, arracacha instead of potatoes, plátano as a side. Cheap, everywhere, and good.
4. Take your own bag and small notes to the market. Very few sellers can change a fifty thousand peso note.
5. Write your prices down. After three months you will see where the money actually goes, and it will surprise you.