It’s no secret that Canada’s grocery giants have participated in acts of deception in the last two decades.
From 2001 to 2015, Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys, Giant Tiger and Walmart were involved in the bread fixing scandal, which resulted in a class-action lawsuit. In 2023, Canada’s grocery oligopoly was again in hot water, this time due to artificially inflating the weight of meat and seafood products by including the packaging weight.
Read More
It’s clear these breaches of consumer trust have eroded consumer confidence, as there are still countless posts on social media where people complain about the weight discrepancy of their groceries. Sylvian Charlebois, a Canadian food professor, posted to X, predicting more grocery-related lawsuits to come.
Keldon Bester, the executive director at the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, says there’s two explanations for why your pre-packaged groceries weigh less than what it says on the label. A benign explanation and a less benign explanation.
“These companies are weighing out thousands of products every day and there’s a possibility that the machines they’re using become uncalibrated over time,” Bester explains.
He says grocery store employees might have incentives to get the most out of any particular product they’re selling. And more nefariously than that is, whether on purpose or not, how these employees go about weighing products is getting out of whack.
“There is a structural bias in the direction that is not in the consumer’s favour, which results in the grocery store making a couple of extra cents on every product they sell.”
Bester says the weight discrepancy of groceries threatens to erode a real core condition of trust that consumers expect when they go food shopping. Even amid rising prices, he says, Canadians deserve to actually get what they pay for.
Is it a conspiracy?
Bester says it’s not surprising that people assume Canada’s grocery giants are conspiring against them again, especially when these same companies actually did engage in a nationwide conspiracy just a few years ago.
But he says this is much more likely the sum of many, many individual actions and some sort of structural bias.
“We’re all human. We make mistakes, and machines can get out of whack without us noticing them. So, rather than a sort of grand conspiracy, which would certainly be more thrilling, I think it really is this combination of individual action and this bias towards getting the most out of everything that you’re selling.”
In an era when the federal government should be fully funding the inspection and calibration efforts by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Bester says the agency has unfortunately been hit hard by a workforce adjustment and spending reduction.
What should consumers do?
Consumers shouldn’t have to go grocery shopping with a digital scale, Bester says. He reiterates that it’s the responsibility of companies to be righteous.
“Consumers shouldn’t have to be on the lookout for what is effectively deception. We need to hold these companies to a higher standard.”
