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An easing in overall inflation is not being mirrored in food prices, and experts say severe weather and geopolitical disruptions will continue to cause pain for Canadians at the grocery store.
Statistics Canada’s latest Consumer Price Index report for June released Tuesday showed that while the overall annual inflation rate cooled to 2.8 per cent last month, prices for food bought at the grocery stores continued to accelerate at a pace of 9.1 per cent year-over-year.
Sylvain Charlebois, the director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, says the gap between general inflation and rising prices for food in particular is a source of frustration for shoppers.
“That’s the sticker shock factor,” he tells Global News. “That gap really makes people mad because they’re looking at the economy, things are getting back to normal, but not at the grocery store.”
StatCan said the biggest contributors to food inflation in June were meat (up 6.9 per cent), bakery products (up 12.9 per cent) and dairy products (up 7.4 per cent). StatCan also pointed to a 30 per cent month-to-month jump in prices for grapes as pushing the price of fresh fruit up 10.7 per cent annually.
Charlebois says that extreme weather events are a primary driver of higher prices for fresh foods right now.
Droughts are affecting cow herds in the west of Canada and in the U.S. and are driving prices higher for beef, he says. It’s an issue he expects will continue to put pressure on fresh meat prices for months to come.
While one-off weather events can be blamed for spikes in food prices month-to-month, Charlebois says that each disruption is part of a wider trend. Over the past 15 years of analyzing food prices, he says that the impacts of climate
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