Canadians can expect to 'soon' see grocery price freezes, matching to address high costs

Canadians will 'soon' start to see the big grocers taking action to address food prices, including price freezes and price-matching campaigns, Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne announced Thursday, providing an update on what he is calling the 'initial commitments' from Loblaw, Metro, Empire, Walmart and Costco.

Canadians will "soon" start to see the big grocers taking action to address food prices, including price freezes and price-matching campaigns, Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne announced Thursday.

Providing an update on what he is calling the "initial commitments" from Loblaw, Metro, Empire, Walmart and Costco, Champagne said all five have agreed to begin rolling out various actions at each of their stores that will result in lower grocery prices for Canadians "in the coming days and weeks."

For example, the government is promising that grocers will implement "aggressive discounts across a basket of key food products that represent the most important purchases for most households," a step the minister said is just the beginning "of a number of actions" being taken.

In addition, Champagne said the federal government is establishing a "grocery task force" within the Office of Consumer Affairs that will be focused on monthly monitoring of grocers' commitments and actions taken by others in the food industry.

This task force will be empowered to "investigate and uncover practices that hurt consumers, such as ‘shrinkflation’ and ‘dequaliflation’."

Champagne said plans are still in the works to establish a grocery "code of conduct" to support fairness and transparency in the sector, and to create a new food price "data hub" to allow better access to information about the price of food in Canada.

These steps come after Champagne held a series of meetings over the last few weeks, starting with the CEOs and senior leaders from Canada's five major grocery chains, with the goal of working towards presenting a plan to stabilize food prices by Thanksgiving.