Northeastern Ontario potato farm pivots to make up for waning demand
CBC
A northeastern Ontario potato farmer says he’s shipping more bags of potatoes to southern Ontario to make up for waning demand.
“In general, people are eating less potatoes and we're forced to kind of ship a little bit more down south just to be able to maintain what we want,” said Robert Poulin, a fifth-generation potato grower with Don Poulin Potatoes in the Azilda community of Greater Sudbury.
“As in acreage and volume of potatoes we want to go through, right?”
Despite a good growing season in 2025, Poulin said local demand for his potatoes, which are a mainstay in area grocery stores, is down.
Victoria Stamper, the general manager with the United Potato Growers of Canada, has a couple of theories as to why Canadians are eating fewer potatoes this year.
One is known as the “Ozempic effect.”
“All the experts I've spoken to agree that there is an impact,” said Stamper.
The drug, which is popularly taken for weight loss, reduces a person’s appetite.
That means people on Ozempic and similar weight-loss medications are buying fewer groceries in general.
“So that could translate, for example, into, ‘I'm not necessarily going to buy a 10-pound bag of potatoes, but I might buy a five-pound or a three-pound bag of potatoes,’” Stamper said.
Beyond a general slump in potato sales across Canada, Stamper said Canadian producers are also facing more competition from the U.S. now than they were earlier in the year.
“We've seen sort of the pedal come off the gas with that ‘buy Canadian’ sentiment at the retail level,” she said.
At the peak of the Buy Canadian movement, Stamper said retailers were buying more potatoes from other parts of Canada so they could rely less on American spuds.
Normally, grocery stores in Western Canada, for example, wouldn’t have as many potatoes from the Maritimes due to the logistics involved in transporting them.
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