In 2014, languages and humanities graduate Dan Kelly was looking for a new job when an unusual opportunity caught his eye. “The first line was: could you find the price of an apple in Liberia?” he says.
“I applied – and 10 years later, I’ve been spat out the other side.”
The role, it transpired, was to collect data on the cost of living for companies which relocated people around the world for business. The findings were passed back to his London office which would use the data to compare costs.
Dan would turn up to a new city every two days —New York, Buenos Aires, Ulaanbaatar [the capital of Mongolia] — with a list of 164 items and a single mission: to find out how much they cost.
On the list, which Dan can still recite, was a combination of food items, household goods, electronics and services, like internet, haircuts, shoe repairs and cinema tickets. “[It’s the] 164 items that make up a life,” says Dan, who is 38.
“Item number one: white bread. Number two: brown bread. Number 19: canned tomatoes. 33 is a litre of orange juice. Then hard cheese, soft cheese, meats, eggs, alcohol, fruit, veg.”
Over the next decade, Dan would visit more than 1,000 supermarkets in 150 countries, from vast American megastores to the high-tech, electronically labelled shelves of Tokyo and Seoul, to the Caribbean shops blaring music like clubs.
Dan Kelly is turning his experience into a comedy show (Photo: EDWARD MOORE/@EDSHOTS)He would scour malls, city centres, alleys and car garages on the edge of town, recording prices on his dictaphone. “One of the things I really liked about it was that you always had to go out and walk around. It forced a level of exploration that you wouldn’t usually do.”
While some products —miso paste, sushi rice, tofu— required more searching, others were strangely ubiquitous: tinned tomatoes, canned tuna, tinned fruit, jam, Oreos.
“You’d always be able to find them, even at the back of a dusty shelf,” he says. “Tea and coffee as well. I would see the 100g red box of Twining’s English Breakfast Tea everywhere. And 100g jars of Nescafe Gold.”
In “Mayfair Supermarket” in Benin [Africa], Dan was surprised to discover a whole shelf of Batchelor’s cup-a-soup, despite sweltering temperatures outside.
Prices could vary wildly across the world, Dan found. A pineapple in Angola cost 21p, £5 in Novosibirsk, Siberia, and £11.50 for an imported type in Beijing.
Predictably, cities like New York and Tokyo emerged as amongst the most expensive places to live —a single, individually wrapped apple could cost £4 in Tokyo— but Luanda, Angola, once topped the list because of the astronomical cost of imported goods.
Dan once spotted a 100-gram bar of Lindt there for £9, while in Nigeria, an American Coke cost £8 – eight times more than a Nigerian can. “You could find cheap things and expensive things in the same place,” he says. “I’d try to reflect the cost based on a realistic lifestyle.”
There were other challenges too. When it came to asking for the cost of services like haircuts, mistranslations could make business owners cagey. It was often easier, Dan found, to ask on behalf of a fictitious wife with “average length hair”.
One Indian supermarket, meanwhile, had a strict no-data collection policy. “I sellotaped the dictaphone under my clothes so I could record into it. That was a mark of how seriously I took it.”
Dan would spend around six months of the year away, coming back to London every few weeks between trips, adding he was able to maintain a normal life in the UK despite the amount of travel.
He travelled alone with a £70-a-day accommodation budget. “In some places, that was palatial. In others, like New York, I was in a ropey hostel.”
His travels took him well off the tourist trail, to Mongolia, the Pacific Islands, Iran, Chad, La Reunion.
He rode the trans-Siberian railway; visited the pyramids of Meroë in Sudan. “Greenland was probably my favourite place,” he says.
“Nuuk was a city, but it almost felt like a village, with a butcher, supermarket, restaurant, bar. By the end of the day, I felt like I knew the whole town. And the scenery around was all ice. To travel to all these places was a real privilege.”
In 2025, after 11 years in the job, Dan finally hung up his dictaphone. Data collection, he says, was moving online.
“Usually, people only do it for a few years, because it’s quite intense,” he says. “I got quite good at it. And then I [realised] that it was quite a unique opportunity. I thought I should try to maximise it.”
But old habits die hard. Dan still reads petrol prices at lightning speed —“if I go somewhere, my eyes still zip to the petrol rates on the board”— and trawls the world food sections of UK supermarkets in search of items on his list.
“That’s where I’d always go for the miso paste, or the instant noodles. I always have a glance at them and relive the glory days.”
He is still trying to piece together his experience. He has written a comedy show about his time in the job, which he will be performing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and is working on a book.
“One fun thing about the job was that you always had to talk to people, even if just to say hi or ask for a price. Walking in with a big smile and saying hello would open everything up,” he says.
“That bit of human connection will go a long way. It’s hard not to be cheesy, but that would be my grand learning.”
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