What if you paid ₦5,000 for a food product but received only ₦4,000 worth of genuine content? Your money hasn’t just lost purchasing power through inflation. You’ve paid for something you didn’t actually receive. And that’s another financial problem facing Nigerian households. A new BusinessDay investigation published on October 26 examines how Nigerians are increasingly trying to identify adulterated food themselves. Palm oil, honey, beans and other everyday products are at the centre of growing consumer concerns. Some shoppers now rely on WhatsApp groups, TikTok videos and homemade tests to decide which products are genuine. But there’s an economic dimension to this story that deserves more attention. Let’s do a simple calculation. Imagine buying one litre of a food product for ₦5,000. If 20% of its contents were substituted with a cheaper ingredient, the product would contain only 800ml of what you intended to purchase. Your effective price per litre of genuine content would become: ₦5,000 ÷ 0.8 = ₦6,250. That’s a 25% hidden price penalty. This is a hypothetical illustration, not a measured adulteration rate in Nigerian markets. And importantly, a contaminated product may be unsafe in its entirety. The calculation doesn’t mean the remaining 80% is safe to consume. Now consider what this means for household finances. Nigeria’s inflation statistics measure changes in consumer prices. But when product quality or genuine content deteriorates, the economic value households receive can fall even without a visible price increase. A family may believe its food budget has remained unchanged while receiving less genuine value for the same money. There’s another cost: trust. Consumers may spend more time searching for reliable sellers, travel farther to buy directly from farms or pay premiums for products they believe are traceable. These costs don’t disappear simply because headline inflation declines. So who’s responsible for protecting consumers? BusinessDay’s investigation highlights gaps in oversight between agencies responsible for agriculture, food processing and consumer protection. NAFDAC has acknowledged that it does not exercise direct and absolute oversight over every unbranded staple sold in open markets. But consumers shouldn’t have to become laboratory technicians just to buy cooking ingredients. There’s also a warning here. On October 23, Africa Check debunked a viral list falsely attributed to NAFDAC that labelled numerous products as counterfeit. Social media suspicion is not scientific verification. A product’s colour, appearance or behaviour in a homemade test cannot reliably establish whether it contains dangerous contaminants. My read? Food affordability and food safety should be treated as connected economic priorities. Nigeria needs stronger market surveillance, clearer regulatory responsibilities, reliable product testing and traceability that consumers can actually trust. Because when food quality becomes uncertain, households face more than a health risk. They also face wasted spending, higher search costs and potentially expensive consequences. The real cost of food isn’t simply what Nigerians pay at the market. It’s what they genuinely receive, and whether it’s safe to consume. Have you ever stopped buying a particular food product because you no longer trusted its quality?