While inflation is showing signs of dissipating, food inflation appears to be on a totally different path. Food inflation has outpaced our general inflation rate for more than 12 months.
Statistics Canada just announced that the food inflation rate for retail was 10.8 percent and 7.4 percent in food service. Canada ranks third among the G7 countries, after Japan at 4.7 percent and France at 7.7 percent.
Canada’s rate remains below that of Italy (10.6 percent), the United States (11.8 percent), the United Kingdom (13.1 percent) and Germany (16.6 percent). Still, food inflation is hurting Canadian consumers and the nightmare won’t end any time soon.
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Canadians have been trying to cope with higher food and menu prices in many ways. The Agri-Food Analytics Lab, in partnership with Caddle, investigated what Canadian consumers have been doing to deal with higher food prices in the last year.
Some have opted to grow their own food. A total of 15.5 percent of Canadians have started to do so in the last year. Ontario is where the highest percentage of people started to grow their own food, at 17.4 percent, followed by British Columbia at 16.2 percent. Atlantic Canada (15.2 percent), Quebec (13.7 percent), and the Prairies (13.1 percent) were next. While a total of 6.2 percent of Canadians use hydroponics at home to grow food, 4.5 percent claim they have livestock at home, and didn’t 12 months ago.
Others are just trying to navigate through by using new options.
The most popular grocery shopping habit change we measured was that many Canadians have used loyalty program points. A total of 33.7 percent have been using them to pay for groceries in the last 12 months. The second option is weekly flyers (32.1 percent), followed by coupons, at 23.9 percent.
While 19.1 percent of Canadians have visited discount stores in the last 12 months, 11.5 percent of Canadians have visited them more often to purchase food. Eight percent are visiting farmers markets more often, and 7.1 percent of consumers visited roadside stands to buy directly from farmers in the last year.
Interestingly, 40.6 percent of Canadians are trying to waste less food now, a much higher rate than 12 months ago.
The hidden darker side of food inflation is worrisome. Almost 24 percent of Canadians are cutting back on the amount of food they buy due to higher food inflation, and almost 70 percent of them are women. Dietary changes have been made by 8.2 percent just to save money. While 7.1 percent are skipping meals now, 6.6 percent of Canadians are paying for their groceries with a credit card without knowing when they will be able to pay it back.
Coping with food inflation is not a simple matter of finding new strategies. For many, higher food prices have pushed them toward desperation.
Many Canadians are really battling it out there. In Europe, where food inflation in some regions is even higher than here, grocers are guaranteeing some prices for certain staples for a month or two to help low-income families. They are freezing prices on a limited number of essential staples. These campaigns are all initiated by industry, not government.
Perhaps it’s time for Canadian grocers to sympathize with struggling consumers in meaningful ways. Maybe, just maybe, if they took steps to support consumers, the baseless accusations of “greedflation” would go away, if only for a while.
Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. This article originally appeared on the Troy Media website. It has been edited for length.
