Food pricing experts contacted by Humber News on Wednesday reacted to news that Loblaws has lifted its freeze on No Name groceries.
The price freeze for three months, announced by the grocery chain last October, was to help shoppers manage their grocery budget due to high inflation costs.
The freeze is ending, at least for now.
“The more than three-month price freeze ends January 31,” a Loblaw spokesperson told CTV News in an email this week.
“Looking ahead, we’ll continue to hold those prices flat wherever possible, and switching to No Name will still save the average family thousands this year,” the statement to CTV\ said.
Ken Whitehurst, Executive Director of Consumers Council of Canada, spoke to Humber News about the move.
“The announcement by Loblaws was mostly a stunt, so it’s hard to say how meaningful this change will be,” said Whitehurst.
Whitehurst is urging shoppers to realize that consumers have left a period of price stability, and shoppers should to be on guard concerning prices that everyone pays for all products right now.
“There’s a lot of factors influencing prices, but whenever there’s price volatility, companies will often seek the opportunity to exploit moments of uncertainty among consumers to try to command the highest price for their products that they can,” he said.
Food prices from stores rose 9.8 per cent in 2022, the fastest growth since 1981, as reported by Statistics Canada.
Overall in Canada, “the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 6.3 per cent year over year in December, following a 6.8 per cent increase in November,” Statistics Canada reported in January.
“Year over year, prices for food purchased from stores decelerated marginally in December (+11.0 per cent) compared with November (+11.4 per cent),” the agency said, adding that price growth was “hovering around 11 percent for the last five months.”
“Food inflation has still risen while the No Name freeze was in effect so I would expect that most, if not all products will see some increase moving forward,” said Stuart Smyth, Industry Research Chair in Agricultural Food Innovation at University of Saskatchewan.
Smyth shared his insights on what this could mean for the first half of 2023.
“[The] falling value of the Canadian dollar, high fuel prices, and I think the 30 percent increase on carbon tax in April will affect food prices, at least for the first six months of this year,” he said.