It’s a busy Saturday at FreshCo on B.C.’s northern Sunshine Coast, and Laurance Playford-Beaudet is stocking up on a week of essentials. He has two goals: keep his bill as close to $100 as possible, and prioritize calorie-dense foods, as he’s got a tree-planting contract coming up on Texada Island, where he lives.

“I’m trying to get cheaper meals and staples,” he says, standing in front of the eggs. FreshCo used to have a well-priced carton of 18 eggs, he says, that were good, with rich, orange yolks, but they don’t carry them anymore. He settles for a dozen large brown eggs and moves on to the canned food aisle, where he gets just one can of tuna — too expensive to buy more, these days — and some canned ham.

Playford-Beaudet, who works at the qathet Resource Recovery Centre and does trash collection on Texada, is on a tight budget. He earns about $40,000 per year and spends between $400 and $600 per month on groceries for his one-person household. It’s increasingly difficult to make ends meet, he says.

Playford-Beaudet is not alone. Since COVID-19 hit in 2020, grocery prices have skyrocketed, even in comparison to inflation.

Laurance Playford-Beaudet is shopping for cheaper meals and staples. Photo for The Tyee by andrea bennett.

If you look at the consumer price index, says Iglika Ivanova, co-executive director of BC Policy Solutions, grocery prices in B.C. increased 24 per cent between December 2021 and December 2025. That’s nine points higher than general inflation, which rose a total of 15 per cent over the same period. And prices keep rising: in December alone, food prices were up 6.2 per cent in Canada — twice the rate of the United States, and three times the rate of France and Germany.

Certain staples, such as coffee, are even worse. A bag of beans was up 31 per cent in December 2025 compared with the previous year.

In part, Ivanova says, especially when you’re looking at a weather-sensitive crop such as coffee, this is due to climate change, other pressures such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and war.

“The war in Ukraine caused high energy costs and spikes in the price of wheat and some other things that were coming out of that region,” she says.

She adds that those have since come down. (The United States’ war against Iran is now expected to push the cost of oil and food up again.)

Even taking geopolitical trends and climate change into consideration, Ivanova says, the biggest single contributing factor pushing prices up is “market power” and the concentration of power in the food industry.

“Five players control a big chunk of it,” she says, referring to the large companies that control the grocery business in Canada. “But it’s not just the grocers. Meat processing and other kinds of intermediary steps in that supply chain are also very highly concentrated.”

What’s bad in big cities is even worse in B.C.’s rural and remote communities, where groceries cost more, according to BC Centre for Disease Control food costing reports.

When people are food insecure, experts told The Tyee, every little bit helps — like the federal government’s recently announced increased Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, formerly known as the GST credit. But to meaningfully address the problem, bigger and better solutions are needed.

‘I start every month in the red’

Grace Chaster, the community house co-ordinator for LIFT, a non-profit society serving Powell River, sees the grocery affordability crunch up close. She experiences it herself as a single mom with three kids at home, and sees the struggle her clients face as she tries to help them access housing, mental health and food supports.

“I start every month in the red,” she tells me, describing her finances, as she pulls a pan of chicken thighs out of the oven.

Chaster’s kitchen fills with the smell of lemon and herbs. Her two teen boys come in to make a plate, while her youngest sends in a parade of robotic dinosaurs. (He’s more of a snacker, and ate earlier.)

Grace Chaster prioritizes feeding her kids healthy, nutritious meals. But the math on her earnings, rent and groceries increasingly doesn’t add up. Photos for The Tyee by andrea bennett.

Chaster prioritizes feeding her kids hearty, nutritious meals. The oldest two will eat a second dinner later, she says. Still, some grocery items are so costly these days that when they’ve run out, they don’t buy more until the next paycheque. Cheese, for example.

Chaster estimates that she earns about $56,000 a year, spending $1,500 minimum per month on groceries and $3,000 on rent. Increasingly, she says, the math just doesn’t add up.

Her clients are struggling, too. More people are coming in to ask for grocery cards. LIFT’s free food shelves are very, very busy. People are moving in with family members, or having family move in with them. It’s harder for single parents, Chaster says, which is reflected in Statistics Canada data — single-parent families are by far the most likely to be food insecure.

The Loop program has been a help, Chaster says. Every week, she picks up groceries, fruits and vegetables from local stores that are still good but, for whatever reason, aren’t saleable. Food from the program is used by LIFT’s Community Resource Centre to cook a daily hot lunch. Chaster distributes the rest to families in the community. If there’s a surplus, staff take some home. Chaster was hoping to make dinner tonight with food from Loop, but there wasn’t any meat today.

When I ask Chaster if she thinks the increased Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit will help in a meaningful way, she takes a moment to mentally crunch the numbers. Everything helps, she says. But it could be better. And for families like hers, the low-income benefits cutoff could be higher. The government is missing a lot of people on the lower end of middle class who are struggling, she says.

Ivanova echoes Chaster’s sentiments. In short, every bit helps.

“But the amount’s not enough to take most people out of poverty,” Ivanova says. “They're not high enough to really cover much of the grocery bill.”

And there’s another issue. “It doesn’t tackle the root causes,” Ivanova says.

“It’s not going to do anything for market power. If you think about it, [the benefit] subsidizes profits for grocers. A transfer says, ‘It’s OK to keep prices high, we'll just give people some government money,’ right?” she says.

“In that way, it needs to be combined with some other measures that are aimed at breaking up that market power, or at least breaking up the profiteering from the market power.”

The impacts of food insecurity on health

Though the consumer price index is useful for a big-picture idea of grocery affordability trends, it doesn’t tell the whole story in places like the northern Sunshine Coast, which is a long drive and a ferry ride away from Victoria, or two ferries away from Vancouver — meaning grocery staples have farther to travel before they hit the shelves.

In 2022, the most recent year it was completed, the BC Centre for Disease Control’s Food Costing report estimated food costs for a family of four in Vancouver Coastal Health’s geographic area at $1,311. The same cart of groceries cost $1,441 in Powell River, and $1,480 in Bella Coola.

Laurance Playford-Beaudet shops with a basket instead of a cart in order to help keep his grocery bill down. Photo for The Tyee by andrea bennett.

When The Tyee asked if the BC Centre for Disease Control would be replicating and updating this report, a spokesperson told The Tyee by email that the centre is “reviewing how it reports on food costing in B.C. and looking at other data sources that may help monitor food security throughout the province going forward.”

Those data sources, the spokesperson added, include Statistics Canada’s Food Price Data Hub and Market Basket Measure.

Health Canada’s nutritious food basket, which was developed by the federal government and is used to create food costing reports, also has its drawbacks.

It contains mostly unprocessed food that takes time to prepare. And while the BC Centre for Disease Control’s 2022 report adds five per cent to the basket to “account for miscellaneous foods such as coffee, tea, herbs, spices and condiments,” the nutritious food basket doesn’t include snack food or treats like chocolate or chips — items most people do need to build into their diets in moderation in order to avoid eschewing their “healthy” packed lunch for takeout. The 2022 report acknowledges a few more drawbacks: the basket also doesn’t consider cultural preferences, dietary restrictions, allergies or special diets.

“The food basket is not a shopping list, nor is it intended to be a recommendation for a nutritious diet,” says Gerry Kasten, a retired honorary lecturer in food, nutrition and health at the University of British Columbia.

“What the food basket is is a tool — so that we have a standardized food list that can be priced over, time and again.”

We’ve known for a long time that food insecurity has significant health impacts, Kasten says, pointing to the University of Toronto’s PROOF project, which studies food insecurity as a public health problem, and the federal government’s “Key Health Inequalities in Canada” report.

Diabetes, for example, is almost twice as high in the lowest income quintile as in the highest income quintile, Kasten says.

While the factors are a bit complex, Kasten says — highly processed foods tend to be more affordable than nutritious foods, for example — the fix is not that complicated.

“Dietitians and people working in social services have met with politicians over the years,” Kasten says, and the message has remained the same. “If we spent more money on assuring that people had sufficient income, the health costs would drop dramatically enough to pay for that added expense.”

“Food insecurity cannot be addressed with food. It must be addressed via income,” Kasten says.

“We can't ‘food bank’ our way out of food insecurity, we can't ‘decrease food waste’ our way out of food insecurity, we can't ‘smart shopping’ our way out of food insecurity,” he says.

Basic income, windfall taxes, grocery controls

So, what should Canada be doing differently?

Both the 1970s basic income experiment out of Dauphin, Manitoba, and the more recent basic income pilot project in Ontario have shown that basic income “makes an enormous difference to health,” Kasten says.

Canada could also consider grocery price control tools.

One place to consider looking to is France, where legislation ties food prices to food production costs — meaning the cost of goods decreases when the cost of agricultural commodities such as grains and sugar goes down.

Last April, just ahead of the election, then-leader of the NDP Jagmeet Singh vowed the party would “move fast” to bring down grocery prices.

“If the grocers won’t play fair, we’ll legislate,” he promised.

The NDP proposed introducing “emergency price caps” on grocery essentials, and a windfall tax on grocery profits. It cited France, and Greece, which has combated what its prime minister has referred to as “greedflation” with profit caps on basic grocery staples, and fines for exceeding those caps.

The NDP then suffered a historic loss as voters shifted their vote to the Liberals, considering Mark Carney the best bet to stand up to Donald Trump.

But government intervention on grocery prices might be more popular than the NDP’s election results would imply. A recent Nanos Research poll showed grocery prices were the “primary concern” for 52.3 per cent of Canadians when saving money this year.

Most of the time, Laurance Playford-Beaudet chooses grocery items based on price. Photo for The Tyee by andrea bennett.

In 2023, Canadian public policy expert Vass Bednar argued for “a temporary price ceiling on a selection of core grocery goods,” again citing policies adopted by Greece and France.

And Carney’s announcement about the GST credit increase and rebranding did include other grocery affordability promises.

He promised the creation of a national food security strategy that “strengthens domestic food production and improves access to affordable, nutritious food.”

The strategy, Carney said, would “include measures to implement unit price labelling and support the work of the Competition Bureau in monitoring and enforcing competition in the market, including food supply chains.”

But that promise, Ivanova points out, rings a bit hollow — he’s cutting staff from the Competition Bureau, she says, and it’s unclear how the bureau will carry out more work with less staff.

Kasten points out there are precedents in Canada for measures like grocery caps.

“I’m so old that I remember Trudeau the elder implementing wage and price freezes. And that included things like rent freezes,” Kasten told The Tyee.

“So governments do have those tools,” Kasten said. But, he added, “in this neoliberal, conservative world, I cannot picture those being used.”

‘I’m basically working all the time’

Back at the FreshCo, Playford-Beaudet is running out of space in the basket he uses instead of a cart — it helps him keep from overspending.

He’s picked up a pork shoulder, some bacon, some turkey, some eggs and some ham. Nutella, peanut butter, coffee creamer, bagels, ice cream and onions. Frozen corn dogs, potato patties, perogies, dish detergent. Most of the time, he’s choosing items based on price. Except for the tomato paste. The Mutti brand is just much better than the alternatives, and it’s worth the extra cost.

It’s increasingly difficult to make ends meet, says Laurance Playford-Beaudet. Photo for The Tyee by andrea bennett.

Playford-Beaudet’s modest basket of groceries comes out to $126.62, close to, but over, what he was hoping to spend. In February 2020, the butter in his basket would have cost $4.65, according to the consumer price index. Today, it’s $5.99. That’s a 28.8 per cent increase, common for so many of the other staple items in his basket.

It's been “pretty hard” to afford everything, Playford-Beaudet says.

“I’m basically working all the time. I never pass up on an extra shift,” he says.