CONSUMER GOODS REPORT

Botswana groceries,
measured by the basket.

BasketIQ publishes intelligence on Botswana's consumer goods categories, built from real receipts collected through a WhatsApp consumer panel. No estimates. No surveys-only. Just what people actually bought.

Get the Milk After VAT Report How we collect the data

July 2026 · Headline Findings

Three numbers from the latest issue.

Drawn from 2,963 classified milk purchases across 2,699 verified baskets from 310 Gaborone consumers, March to early August 2026.

hub
14.0%

exact price step on multiple milk products after VAT took effect — the full tax, passed straight to the shelf.

shopping_basket
0–1%

price movement on identical zero-rated staples — maize meal, cooking oil, sugar, bread — over the same weeks. It's the tax, not inflation.

payments
13.4%

of all verified baskets contain milk — the VAT change lands on one of every seven Gaborone shops.

Latest Issue

July 2026 · Milk After VAT

The second issue in the series. VAT pass-through measured on identical products, the zero-rated control group, the repricing lag, and the small-pack downsizing signal.

water_drop Dairy
Dairy · 9 pages

Milk After VAT: What Batswana Are Actually Paying — July 2026

From 1 July 2026, milk attracts VAT at 14% under the new VAT Act. We tracked 2,963 real milk purchases from 310 Gaborone consumers to measure exactly how much of the tax reached the shelf — and how fast.

August 2026 arrow_forward

Methodology

How we collect the data.

Every number in a BasketIQ report comes from a real till slip. Consumers in Gaborone send us photographs of their grocery receipts through WhatsApp. We extract line items, match them against a curated product catalog, and aggregate across the panel to produce category-level views.

We do not model, extrapolate, or back-fill. When a sample is small, we say so. When a finding is directional rather than conclusive, we flag it. Every chart in every issue carries the exact sample size it was computed on.

The public Consumer Goods Report series is a teaser of what BasketIQ's panel can answer. Custom questions — brand-level deep dives, retailer-resolved pricing, category-specific cuts, private surveys placed to active shoppers — are available to subscribers on request.

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