A plain-English explainer, written from a kitchen window in Lower Albany. If you've ever wondered what your Ront is actually worth — not what the bank tells you, but what it buys — this is for you.
The Nandex measures how strong the Ront is by comparing the cost of a Nando's chicken burger around the world. Same burger, different countries, different prices — and those differences tell you something interesting about your money.
It's directly inspired by The Economist's Big Mac Index, which has been doing the same trick with a Big Mac since 1986. We use a chicken burger because Nando's is South African, and we anchor on our Rand instead of dollars because that's the whole joke — burger economics from a Bathurst kitchen, not a Wall Street one.
There's a concept in economics called purchasing power parity — PPP if you want to sound clever at the braai. It says that if two countries had identical economies, identical costs, identical everything, the same item would cost the same amount in both.
Obviously that's never true. Wages are different. Rent is different. Chicken and Beef is different. But if you pick something that's genuinely identical in every country — like a fast food chain item, made from the same recipe, sold everywhere — then the price differences that DO show up are telling you about the differences in the currencies themselves, not the burger.
That's the trick. Same burger, different price, and the difference is a window into your Rand.
Boet takes the price of a chicken burger in each country (in local currency), and compares it to the price in South Africa (in Rand). That gives you an implied exchange rate — what one Rand SHOULD buy, if a burger was the only thing that mattered. Then you compare that implied rate to what the market actually says today.
If the burger costs more overseas than the exchange rate would say it should, that currency is overcooked (Boet's word for overvalued). If it costs less, it's undercooked (undervalued).
Suppose a Nando's chicken burger costs R64 in Slummies, and the same burger costs £5.95 in a London Nando's.
Burger economics says one pound should buy about R10.75 (that's 64 ÷ 5.95), because that's how many Rands you'd need to buy the same lunch.
Actual market rate today, say the bank tells you £1 = R23.30.
Reading: the pound is overcooked against the Rand by roughly 116%. Or, said the other way — the Rand is dramatically undervalued vs the pound. Your money at Nando's in Slummies goes twice as far as your money at Nando's London, once you've done the conversion.
Everyone else in currency-nerd land uses "overvalued" and "undervalued". Fine words. Boet uses overcooked and undercooked because it's more useful:
If a country's burger is priced higher than PPP says it should be at today's market rate, the burger's overcooked — you're paying too much for the same chicken. And if the burger is cheaper than PPP says, it's undercooked — you're getting a bargain, boet, go eat.
Anything within about 5% of "fair" is just right. Boet defaults to a warm compliment there.
Big Mac Index anchors on the US dollar and treats a Chicago burger as the reference. That works because the dollar is the world's reserve currency and the US is McDonald's home.
The Nandex anchors on the Rand and treats a Bathurst chicken burger as the reference, because Nando's started in Rosettenville in 1987 and grew from there. Anchoring on the Rand means when the Rand moves, every rate on the index moves too — which is inconvenient if you want a stable-looking dataset, but perfect if you actually want to know how the Rand is doing today.
Put differently: the Nandex is a barometer of the Rand, pretending to be a currency converter. Same as how the Pig & Whistle is a pub, pretending to be a hotel. It's the useful accident of a design decision.
Three things:
1. Sanity-checking the Rand. If the Rand feels weak, the Nandex will tell you whether it's actually weak against burger fundamentals, or whether the market has just gotten ahead of itself.
2. Comparing across countries. Ask "how far does my money go in Australia?" and the Nandex gives you a plain-English answer without needing to run a spreadsheet.
3. Tracking inflation, sort of. If a chicken burger costs R64 today and R74 next year, the price has moved 15% — and that's a rough proxy for how inflation is treating fast food in South Africa. Not as clean as CPI, but easier to explain.
The Nandex is not investment advice. Currencies move for a hundred reasons that have nothing to do with burgers — interest rates, politics, oil, expectations, herd behaviour, plain old market mood.
A "50% overcooked" currency doesn't mean it will crash. A "70% undercooked" currency doesn't mean it'll rally. It means the burger price and the exchange rate aren't matching — and there are usually good structural reasons for the mismatch. Labour laws, rent, quality of the ingredients, whether the local franchisee is charging a premium because it's the only fast food for 200km.
The Big Mac Index has its own critics who point out that burger prices in the developing world are cheap partly because the burger itself is a bit different — smaller patty, cheaper cheese, thinner buns. Same likely applies to a Nando's Chicken Burger in different countries. So take everything here with a peri-peri grain of salt and keep your greenbacks hidden in the sofa.
Three sources, in this order of trust:
User submissions. Signed-in users can send Boet a photo of a menu or receipt from any Nando's in the world. An admin verifies it and the price goes live, with the submitter credited by name when their price is quoted.
Scrapes. Boet checks the official Nando's country websites monthly for a few key markets. Failed scrapes never overwrite good data — the last known price stays put with a "here's when I last saw it" flag.
Seeds and admin edits. A handful of prices are baked in for the countries Nando's started with, and admins can bulk-update whenever a market shifts. Every change writes a new verified row and keeps the old one for history — nothing's ever quietly deleted.
Where Boet has no Nando's data at all, he falls back to the Big Mac Index for that leg of the conversion, marked with an asterisk so it's obvious. Different bird, same purchasing-power trick.
The Nandex compares two rates: the burger rate (what PPP says) and the market rate (what the bank would give you). The market rate is pulled fresh from a public exchange-rate source and updated hourly. When the two rates disagree, that gap is what "overcooked" or "undercooked" is measuring.
Every submission makes the Nandex better and more accurate. If you're signed in and have AI access, you can send Boet a photo of a menu or receipt from anywhere in the world.
Add a price →Concept inspired by The Economist's Big Mac Index (est. 1986) and the accessible plain-English treatment by Simesihle Zulu at the Institute of Race Relations. Live exchange rates via exchangerate-api.com. Made in Lower Albany with dry humour and mild peri-peri.