Loblaw price freeze ends as dairy aisle sees increase

The price freeze is ending at Loblaw stores, but how quickly will grocery prices rise? Plus, Canada's economy is slowing down, and a new report shows how little money the average Uber driver makes. Richard Southern reports.

By Sonia Aslam

You’re running out of time if you were hoping to save a little money on groceries. The Loblaw price freeze on 1,500 No Name brand products ends Tuesday, ahead of a different kind of price increase Wednesday.

Some of the items that were said to have not really budged in price included things like coffee pods, pasta, and toilet paper. But now that the promotion, which was announced last October, is coming to an end, you may notice your grocery bill going up.

“Suppliers always get increases in February. So, they’ll likely be paying more for those products. Pressures are absolutely real, and they’ll have to increase prices because the volume of sales of these products is quite high,” explained Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University.


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“The food inflation rate was steadily over 10 per cent for the entire campaign so obviously prices did go up while the freeze was going on, so I can only assume it was an advantage given to people buying No Name branded products,” he continued. “At the time in October, people felt the worst was behind them — not exactly. Prices did continue to rise for three months.”

Charlebois feels what one of the country’s largest grocers did was good marketing.

“It was a marketing ploy for sure, but it was also a demonstration that the grocer wanted to show sympathy. But … when you have 25,000 SKUs and only 1,500 of them are No Name branded products, you still have options to raise prices somewhere else in the store. I suspect they were able to hedge or they were able to rebalance things … because when you look at some of the sales, they’ve remained robust in the grocery business.”

Loblaw tells CityNews it will try to continue helping its consumers moving forward but didn’t provide much detail.

“We’re not done. Looking ahead, we’ll continue to hold those prices flat wherever possible,” a statement from the company reads.

The No Name brand is sold in more than 2,400 stores across the country, including at Real Canadian Superstore, No Frills, T&T, and Shoppers Drug Mart.

Not milking dairy prices

Effective Feb. 1, customers across the country will see a price increase when it comes to buying milk, cheese, yogurt, and butter.

The Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) has had another hike approved as it says farmers are trying to cope with the cost of their operations while dealing with inflation.

“The farm gate milk price will increase by 2.2% which translates to less than 2 cents per litre. This increase is the result of the National Pricing Formula, a pricing mechanism that was determined by the industry. It takes into account dairy farmers’ costs of production as well as the consumer price index. As indicated last June, the increase of the price of milk at the farm level that took place on September 1st, 2022 was subtracted from the result of the pricing formula,” it says in a statement.

“The cost of milk used to make dairy products such as milk, cream, yogurt, cheese and butter for the retail and restaurant sectors will increase by an average of 2.2%. The net impact on consumers will also be influenced by factors such as transportation, distribution, and packaging costs throughout the supply chain. The price paid to farmers is only part of the price paid by consumers.”

The CDC tells CityNews there won’t be other increases this year.

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