“Food Insecurity”

Consumer empowerment – amplified by social media – continues to accelerate, while geopolitics, particularly tensions with our southern neighbour, are becoming increasingly disruptive. Together, these dynamics will push food policy issues that once lived in technical silos into the public spotlight.

A quarter of Canadians are food insecure. Addressing this must be a national priority

Across the country, more and more people can’t meet their basic needs. Families are stretching paycheques to the breaking point – juggling rising rents, transportation costs and grocery bills. These pressures aren’t limited to those living in deep poverty. It’s become mainstream: Full-time workers, students, seniors and parents are making difficult trade-offs that strain their health and well-being.

There’s no shortage of beef in southern Alberta, but food banks around Lethbridge are looking for help covering the costs of turning donated cattle into meat they can dish out to clients.

Counties across the province this week endorsed a call for the Alberta government to restart a short-lived pilot program from 2014 that covered the associated costs of butchering, inspecting and packaging thousands of packs of hamburger given to food bank clients.

Canada’s relationship with food is shifting in ways that should concern all of us.

The latest Canadian Food Sentiment Index: Fall 2025, produced by the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in partnership with Caddle, reveals a population still grappling with affordability pressures, changing habits, and diminishing trust in the food system.

For those searching for savings at the grocery store, many are finding out that there’s no safe place to take cover from sky-high food costs.

“The problem in recent years is all categories (of groceries) are going up in price, all at once,” said Sylvain Charlebois, Agri-Food lab director at Dalhousie University.

One shopper outside a Toronto-area Loblaw Grocery store shared with CTV News that in years past, her weekly grocery bill was around $80, but it now falls between $150 and $200.

Soon the government will feed their cheap foreign workers with Soylent Green!

Cassandra Shedden has sometimes had to rummage around her home, looking for things to hawk, just to pay for baby formula.

The 33-year-old mother of three in Thunder Bay, Ont., describes the price of formula today as “gross.”

According to Statistics Canada, formula prices have climbed nearly 84 per cent since 2017 and about 30 per cent in just the last two years.

I wonder if this has anything to do with it. As I recall this is the only Baby Formula producer in Canada.

A winning formula? China invests in Canadian dairy to help feed its baby boom

Donald Trump called Canada’s supply-managed dairy sector a “disgrace.”

Indeed, Canada’s strict system of production quotas, import restrictions and price and quality controls is a perennial target for free traders.

But guess who likes it? The biggest market Canada is wooing right now: China.

Supply management is a big reason why a Chinese corporation is investing an unprecedented $225 million in eastern Ontario. Feihe International, Inc. wants cows. Goats, too. Lots of them.

We’re now in November, and Canada’s so-called grocery “blackout period” has begun — that stretch when major grocers ask suppliers to hold off on price increases until Feb. 1. On paper, it’s meant to stabilize prices during the holiday season. But in practice, consumers lose, big time.

Canadians are struggling to put food on the table like never before, according to Food Banks Canada’s 2025 Hunger Count.

The report shows 2,165,766 visits to food banks in March, the highest in Canadian history and nearly double the number in 2019.

Food prices have risen 25% over the last four years, and 39% of Canadians now experience food insecurity.

Over the weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump promised Americans cheaper steaks by saying he’s ready to buy beef from Argentina. It was a classic populist flourish — short on economics, long on optics.

But beneath the campaign-style rhetoric lies a deeper story: How global beef politics are shifting, and how Canada could quietly become a price-taker in its own market.

If you needed a wake-up call for the global food-manufacturing complex, these past few months delivered it with a roar.

Dr Pepper Keurig is breaking apart. Kellogg is splitting again. Kraft-Heinz is unravelling. And now Nestle has dropped a bombshell: A plan to cut 16,000 jobs globally — one of the largest layoffs ever seen in the consumer-goods space outside of bankruptcy. In Canada, Nestle refuses to disclose how many jobs will go, despite employing more than 3,500 people across several locations.

No, you haven’t been imagining it: your grocery bill may have gotten more expensive recently, at least according to Loblaw’s September Food Inflation report, which states that food prices have remained above the general rate of inflation due to external pressures.

The report, released on Sept. 30, shows that food inflation in Canada rose 3.5 per cent in August compared to the overall Consumer Price Index (CPI) at 1.9 per cent.