The Grocery Bill
Standing in the checkout line doing math in your head. $200 used to fill the cart. Now it barely fills a bag.
The System
Why Groceries Are So Expensive: How Canada's Food System Works
The top five grocery retailers — Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Costco, and Walmart — control an estimated 80% of the market. The Big Three alone (Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro) tallied over $100 billion in combined sales. Combined profit: $3.6 billion. They set the prices. You pay them. There is no meaningful competition.
Family of 4 food cost (2026)
Food bank visits (2025)
Canadians food insecure
$17,572. That's what a family of four is projected to spend on food in 2026. Up $995 from 2025. Up thousands from five years ago.
$503 million. Loblaw's profit in Q1 2025 alone. Up 9.6% year over year. Your groceries cost more. Their shareholders are doing fine.
The Big Three — Loblaw, Sobeys, and Metro — earned more than $3.6 billion in profit in 2022 on more than $100 billion in sales, according to the Competition Bureau. No Aldi. No Lidl. No discount disruptor. In the UK, Aldi and Lidl grabbed 18-19% of the market and forced prices down. Canada has no equivalent.
The Promise
What the Government Promised About Food Affordability
The grocery chains said the price-fixing was behind them. The Competition Bureau investigated. Politicians held hearings. The grocers signed a voluntary stabilization code. Prices kept climbing.
14 years. That's how long the bread price-fixing scandal ran — 2001 to 2015. Canada Bread was fined $50 million. A $500 million class action followed. The companies that fixed bread prices are still the companies that sell you bread.
The Reality
Grocery Store Profits Are Up While Families Can't Afford Food
2.2 million Canadians visit a food bank every month. That number doubled since 2019. One in five food bank clients has a job. This isn't about laziness. It's about math that doesn't work anymore.
Grocery chain Q1 2025 profit growth
10 million. That's how many Canadians are food insecure — 25.5% of the population in 2024. Including 2.5 million children. In a country that exports food to the world.
2.2 million food bank visits per month in 2025. Doubled since 2019. 1 in 5 clients is employed. They have jobs. They still can't afford groceries.
Grocery is a low-margin business. Loblaw's net margin is roughly 3.5%. But on $61 billion in annual revenue, even a small margin increase means hundreds of millions in additional profit. The question isn't whether margins are thin. It's whether they got thicker during a crisis.
What Works
Countries That Keep Grocery Prices Affordable for Families
France passed an anti-food-waste law in 2016. Supermarkets must donate unsold food or face fines. Donations went up 20%. Canada wastes 46% of the food it produces — $58 billion a year. We don't have that law.
More than 46% of all food in Canada is wasted, and the avoidable part of that waste is worth about $58 billion a year, according to Second Harvest. Meanwhile, food banks logged 2.2 million visits in a single month. The food exists. The system throws it away.
France's 2016 anti-waste law banned supermarkets from destroying unsold edible food and required them to offer it for donation; the French government reported food-bank donations rose more than 20% afterward. Canada has no equivalent federal requirement.
What You Can Do
What You Can Do About Rising Food Costs in Canada
The grocery oligopoly won't fix itself. Real competition, mandatory food donation laws, and transparency on pricing would change things. Ask your MP why Canada doesn't have an anti-food-waste law like France.
Support local food banks. Buy from local producers when you can. Ask your MP to support mandatory food donation legislation and real grocery competition reform. Track corporate grocery profits — they're public quarterly.