Price freezes, discounts on pantry items among grocery stabilization efforts coming ‘soon’: minister

Canadians frustrated by their food bills will “soon” start to see the big grocers taking action to address 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.
The minister said these examples are just some of the measures pitched to him by the big grocers, suggesting that the government’s pressure on them to get prices under control, has spurred a more competitive dynamic between the big five. “The winners of that are obviously Canadians,” the minister said, pointing to recent grocery flyers as evidence of pre-Thanksgiving sales. “It will be up to Canadians to judge them, to benefit from the best offers.” 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 also met with international manufacturing companies and domestic manufacturers, after the Retail Council of Canada called for Ottawa to work with more players along the supply chain to tackle the issue.In a statement on Thursday, Retail Council of Canada spokesperson Michelle Wasylyshen said “keeping food prices as low as possible” has been Canadian grocers’ top priority since inflation surged at the end of the pandemic, pointing to how domestic prices have fared in comparison to other countries… Source: ctvnews.ca