The honest anchor is the World Food Programme's minimum food basket for a family of five in Haiti: about $180 a month (23,543 gourdes at the November 2025 rate). Any price anyone quotes you — ours included, when we open — should be readable against that number.
At the prices on our monthly basket page, $100 is a 55 lb bag of rice, 10 lb of beans, a gallon of oil, spaghetti, cornmeal, canned fish, sugar, salt and soap — about two weeks of staples for a family of five. Not a month. Sellers who imply a month at $100 are stretching something.
A barrel itself, the shipping, and customs commonly run into the hundreds of dollars before the food inside is counted — and 3 to 6 weeks pass. That cost makes sense for personal goods; for rice and beans that Haitian depots stock, it is paying freight on food that never needed to travel.
A package price is set with the distributor in each city, because his shelf prices are the real ones. Publishing a price before he signs would be inventing it. When a city opens, its prices appear on the food shelf and on the basket page in the same week.
It is the range the biggest seller in this field charges for its three packages, and it brackets the $180 monthly basket sensibly: the small package is part of a month, the big one is about a month. Judge any package by its item list against the basket page — never by the package name.
Roads, season, and the gourde. The basket page is re-checked monthly for exactly this reason, and its date always shows.
When ordering opens, the price of a package is the price — the distributor's work is inside it, the way the field's honest sellers already do it. There is no separate line added at the end.