Amarpreet Singh has been drinking protein shakes since he was 16. The 30-year-old, who lives in London and works in banking, started going to the gym when protein supplements were still mostly associated with bodybuilders.
What has happened to the price
Fourteen years later, shakes are still part of his routine — and considerably more expensive. A 4.5kg bag of the whey protein he buys cost around £60 in 2020. By last year the price had risen to £120, though he managed to find one on eBay for £90. Bags now reach £170.
The cause is not mysterious. Whey is a by-product of cheese-making, so supply is tied to dairy output rather than to demand for protein powder. Demand, meanwhile, has moved far beyond bodybuilders: protein is now a marketing claim on cereal, yoghurt, bars, drinks and biscuits. When a by-product with fixed supply meets a demand curve that has shifted that far, the price is the only thing that can move.
What it means in Bangladesh
The imported version of this problem is worse here. Whey protein sold in Dhaka carries the world price plus shipping, duty and a distribution margin, which puts a genuine branded tub well beyond ordinary incomes — and creates exactly the conditions in which counterfeit and adulterated supplements flourish. The Bangladeshi supplement market is largely unregulated, much of the stock arrives informally, and there is no routine testing of what is in the tub.
That matters because the adulterants are not harmless. Cheap fillers, undeclared caffeine and, in documented cases elsewhere in South Asia, anabolic steroids in products sold as protein. A young man who cannot verify the label is taking a risk that has nothing to do with his training.
The more useful point is that almost nobody in Bangladesh needs the powder. Protein powder is a convenience product — it solves the problem of getting protein without cooking. It is not a superior source. For most people training normally, a target of roughly 1.6g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day is sufficient, and Bangladeshi food reaches it cheaply.
The arithmetic is worth doing once. A 70kg person needs about 112g of protein a day. Eggs give roughly 6g each, a 100g serving of cooked chicken around 27g, 100g of fish 20–22g, a cup of cooked dal 8–9g, a cup of milk 8g. Three eggs, a piece of fish, chicken at one meal, dal twice and a glass of milk reaches the target — at a fraction of the cost of any imported tub, in food people are already buying.
The same lesson about a commodity's price being set by what everyone else is doing runs through India's avocado boom.
