Inflation biting into your grocery bill? Follow the food from farm to fork to see why

Everything seems to be getting more expensive. Food, gas and housing prices are on the rise while paycheques are slow to keep pace.

The CBC News series Priced Out explains why you're paying more at the register and how Canadians are coping with the high cost of everything.

Canadians don't need to go any farther than their local green grocer for a reminder that food prices are shooting up. But a look at the long journey from farm to fork gives a better picture of why it's happening.

While Canada is blessed with abundant agricultural land, the country imports $10 billion worth of fresh fruit and vegetables every year — especially in the winter months.

Outside of the relatively little produce grown in Canadian greenhouses, the vast majority of fresh food that Canadians eat this time of year comes from the United States or overseas. And when one considers what's involved in getting it from there to here, it's no wonder the prices posted on grocery store shelves are rising.

Larry Davidson deals with it every day. He's president of North American Produce Buyers, one of the biggest importers of various types of fruits, vegetables and nuts into Canada. He's used to managing the ups and downs of a complex supply chain, but the pandemic has been something else entirely.

"This year is unprecedented," he told CBC News in an interview. "Last year was a cakewalk in terms of logistics compared to what we're dealing with now."

This time of year, Davidson is mostly importing grapes — "the best you've ever had," one of his customers told CBC News — along with stone fruits like peaches, plums, nectarines and cherries.

Much of what Davidson brings in at the moment comes from South America and Africa, two parts of the world that have been dealing with everything from higher costs for fertilizer to extreme weather events such as droughts, frost and floods washing out crop yields.

On top of the basic cost of the food going up, Davidson also has to factor for sharply higher costs of getting it here.

"[Most of] the costs that we're seeing right now relate to transportation issues, whether it be ocean, air earlier in the season or overland trucking from any place you can imagine," he said.

Typically, a shipment of his prized grapes would leave a port in Peru and sail through the Panama Canal before making their way to be offloaded somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard of North America. His stuff mostly comes through Philadelphia, Wilmington, Del., or sometimes Halifax, and if he's lucky, he'll have his hands on his shipment about two weeks after it was loaded on to the boat.

But the global supply and demand crunch that has ensnared everything from cars and semiconductors to furniture and appliances and even toys has walloped food like grapes, too, leading to higher costs at every link in the chain.

Getting a truck to take offloaded fruit from the port in Philadelphia to make the 800-kilometre journey to a Canadian hub such as Toronto would have cost buyers like North American Produce about $1,800 US last year. But now that price of the journey has doubled, if not tripled.