Butter, cheese are hot commodities on black market

globalnews.ca:

British Columbia business owner Joe Chaput will spend $5,500 a month on security guards during the holiday season and plans on upgrading his store’s video camera system for around $5,000 more.

He’s not selling luxury brands or expensive jewels.

Chaput sells cheese, and at Christmas, cheese is a hot commodity.

He is the co-owner of specialty cheese store les amis du Fromage, with two locations in Vancouver.

While cheeselifting is rare in their Kitsilano store, the outlet in East Vancouver is hit in waves, with nothing happening for a month, then three of four people trying to steal their inventory within a week.

“Sometimes, you miss it. Sometimes, you catch it. The way shoplifters behave … they tend to gravitate toward expensive things,” said Chaput.

Expensive cheese is on shoplifters’ Christmas list, he said.

“They tend to do the classic examples of staying away from customer service and trying to go to a different part of the store so they can be left alone to steal.”

Chaput isn’t alone. Police say food-related crimes on are the rise in Canada and as prices climb for items such as cheese and butter, they become lucrative on the black market for organized crime groups, not to mention theft for local resale.

Sylvain Charlebois, the director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-food Analytics Lab, said a black market tends to emerge as soon as food prices surge.

“Organized crime will steal anything (if) they know they can sell it and so, they probably would have known who their clients are before even stealing anything at all, and that’s how a black market is organized,” said Charlebois.

He said he believes there are two categories of people shoplifting — those who do so out of desperation because they can’t afford the food, or