TheCafeIndex is a price index for Australian café food. We read what's on every menu we can find, match it to a fixed canonical list, and report the median. This page tells you exactly how.
Every six months we take the public-facing menu of every café we can find with a digital footprint in Australia — 22,182 venues at the April 2026 reading, across 1,618 suburbs. We don't survey, don't ask, don't accept submissions for a fee. The menu is the source.
Café menus are a mess of synonyms — "smashed avo", "avocado on sourdough", "smashed avocado with feta". We maintain a canonical list of 108 dishes and drinks and match each menu item we read against it. The unmatched tail is either off-canon (a special), or wording we haven't learned yet.
For each canonical item, in each region, we report the median price across all matched observations. Median, not mean — one $42 outlier doesn't move the number. We also report the spread (p10 to p90) and the sample size (n). Both belong on the page; one without the other is a half-truth.
We write four rules into the page so you know what we'll never do.
We never name the venue.An index reports on places, not on tenants. The unit is the SA3 region. If you want a directory of cafés by name, that's a different product.
We never publish a single-venue number.If a region or suburb has fewer than five matched observations for a plate, we surface the number with a “thin” badge and tell you not to quote it. Below five, it's a data point, not an index.
We never accept paid placement.No sponsored regions, no boosted dishes, no “featured” anything. The only way a number on this site moves is if a menu, somewhere, changes.
We always show our working.Every published number is paired with the sample size that produced it. If a venue thinks our reading is wrong, they can submit their menu; we'll re-read.
We take every menu we can find. Six weeks of collection.
Each menu item is matched to one of 108 canonical dishes.
New medians for every region, every plate. Site refreshes.
We track new menus, corrections, submissions. Rolling.
The Flat White Index — coffee-only depth. Same method, narrower lens. smallflatwhite.com →
New Zealand, then the UK, Singapore and Canada. We'll publish each country's first reading the same way: medians and confidence, no venues.