Where’s your favorite spot to pick up lunch when you’re at work - and how much do you normally spend? In most of the countries we looked at in our new study, people spend less than 10% of their annual salary on lunch at work, but we were surprised to find the cost is higher in 15% of those countries.
Kickresume put together a list of top 20 countries with the cheapest and healthiest lunches, based on travel websites and popular food blogs’ information about national dishes and lunchtime habits. Every country got a ranking based on the cost of lunches and lowest calories. We've also focused on comparing lunch costs to the country's average salary.
Here’s a quick overview of what we found:
- Workers in the US spend the most on lunch when they eat out, with the most popular lunch being a hamburger, at $8.41
- The country with the cheapest popular lunch option overall is Argentina, where an empanada would cost an average of $0.21
- In Kazakhstan, it would cost the highest percentage of your salary to eat out every day for a year - it’s 40% on average to get a daily helping of beshbarmak
- On the other hand, in Mexico, where we looked at tacos, it would cost less than 1% of your salary to eat out every day
Latin America tops the ranking with the cheapest and healthiest lunches
Colombia
The country with the cheapest and healthiest work lunch option was Colombia, scoring 81 out of 84 points with arepas. An arepa is a type of stuffed maize flatbread that is typically filled with combinations of meat, beans and cheese, and it has about 215 calories. Though of course we imagine it’s hard to stop at one!
It costs $0.24 for an arepa, meaning that eating one every working day for a year would cost you $62.40. That’s about 1% of the average salary in Colombia, which is $11 210.79.
Mexico
Next, Mexico scored 80 out of 84 points, only a single point behind Colombia. One popular lunch here is tacos, which have become very popular outside of their home country too. These small tortillas come with a variety of fillings including meat, cheese, vegetables and often condiments like guacamole. A single taco has 221 kcal, and costs $0.25. If you wanted to grab one for lunch every working day for a year, it would cost $65. That’s less than 1% of the average salary in Mexico, which is $20 534.49.
Argentina
In third place, Argentina scored 59 out of 84 points. One popular dish often eaten at lunchtime here is empanadas, a type of savory pastry that can be either baked or fried. Different regions of the country have their own variations with different fillings, but one of the most well known fillings in Buenos Aires is ground beef, olives and hard boiled egg.
One empanada would be around 263 kcal, though we’re sure plenty of people enjoy two or three on their lunch break! The price is $0.21, and a year’s supply of empanadas for lunch would cost $54.60. That’s 1% of the average salary, $5273.71.
Germany
Our first country outside of the Americas, Germany is next with 68 out of 84 points. The German dish we looked at is bratwurst. This savory sausage is often served with a bread roll, sometimes with sauerkraut on the side. A bratwurst is 283 calories.
It costs around $3.28, so it would be $852.80 to get bratwurst for lunch every working day for a year. That works out as roughly 2% of the average salary in Germany, which is $53 850.97.
Australia
In fifth place, we have Australia, where one popular lunch is a meat pie. The shortcrust pastry is filled with beef, gravy and onions. Australians eat 270 million pies per year, so you can see how popular these are.
One pie would have 285 calories and would usually cost $4.95. At $1287 for a year’s supply every lunch time, that’s 2% of the average salary here.
The rest of the top ten
In sixth place, Japan scored 62 out of 84 for ramen.
Mongolia was next, where people might enjoy bansh on their lunch break, a type of dumpling. The score was 59 out of 84.
India ranked in eighth place with a score of 56 out of 84. About 200,000 people in Mumbai today have a tiffin box for their lunch, delivered by a dabbawala - these multi compartment lunch boxes often contain naan or rice as well as curry.
Niger’s jollof rice scored 53 out of 84. This one pot rice dish has a gorgeous orange color thanks to tomatoes and chili peppers.
Rounding off the top ten, UK workers often have a sandwich meal deal: grabbing a main, a snack and a drink from a shop nearby. More than a third of British workers buy a meal deal at least once a week. The UK scored 44 out of 84.
In contrast to the top ten countries where lunches were cost-effective and low calorie, at the other end of the scale the countries that scored the lowest points were Turkey, Kazakhstan and Greenland. These countries combined higher calorie lunches with a higher overall price tag that would take a higher percentage of your salary to pay for.
The top five countries where work lunches had the lowest calories were Japan, Colombia, Mexico, Mongolia and Argentina - several of these countries also appeared in the top ten overall.
The most expensive country was Greenland followed by Sweden, and interestingly in both of these countries the popular lunch we looked at was open-faced sandwiches. While this was also a popular dish in Norway, this fellow Nordic country did not make it into the top five most expensive places to grab lunch.
Final thoughts
To wrap things up, the incredible variety in national dishes across different countries also surprisingly shows some common threads. For instance, seven countries shared a favorite lunchtime dish - Norway, Sweden, Greenland, France, New Zealand, Italy and the UK all prefer to eat sandwiches.
There were seven countries where the most popular lunch time dish was most likely to exceed 600 calories, sometimes regarded as the upper limit of a lower calorie meal - India, Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, the UK, Italy, France and Indonesia.
Lastly, there were only five of the countries where it would cost more than 10% of your annual salary to eat out at lunch every day - Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Angola and Greenland.
Methodology
We selected 28 of the largest countries in the world based on population size. Then, using travel websites and magazines as well as food blogs, we identified one popular meal or national dish in each country.
We used the same sources to find an approximate cost of each meal, then ranked them in order, giving the cheaper meals a higher rating out of 28.
Using recipe websites and calorie counting websites, we worked out the calorie content for each meal. The higher the calorie count, the lower the score we gave out of 28.
We researched the average yearly salary in each country using Statista as well as websites providing information to people looking to move to those countries. Then, we worked out the approximate cost of eating out everyday for a year by multiplying the cost by 260, a figure often given as the number of working days in a year.
We worked out the percentage that the cost to eat out every day for a year made of the average yearly salary in each country. The countries were ranked out of 28, with the countries with the lowest percentage gaining the most points.
We added each score together to create a total out of a maximum of 84 points, and then ranked the countries to see which had the highest scores.
About Kickresume
Kickresume is a leading AI-based career super app that helps candidates source jobs and raise salary with resume and cover letter tools, skills analytics, and automated job search assistance. A trusted platform for job seekers that already helped more than 6 million people get hired, some of them at top companies like Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
