Cost of healthy groceries up 15% in under a year
The average cost of filling your grocery cart with basic ingredients for a healthy diet has shot up 15 per cent in the past year, according to an annual report by the Montreal Diet Dispensary.
According to the report, the annual cost of feeding a family of four in Montreal was at least $12,987.35, or $8.90 per person per day in July. That is up from $11,286.81 per year, or $7.73 per person per day in October 2021, less than a year earlier.
Julie Paquette, general director of the Montreal Diet Dispensary, told an online news conference the data supports what her staff has been noticing with clients in recent months.
“We sense that the needs are more virulent in terms of food, and when we see data like this we say: `OK, our feeling was right. It is true that there's been a big jump (in prices).'
“So we are sensing it on the ground. It is supported by this data. People are having a very hard time making ends meet with their food budget.”
The Montreal Diet Dispensary is one of the city's oldest community organizations. Founded in 1879, the organization now provides a meals-on-wheels-type service, as well as counselling on nutrition, breastfeeding and budgeting to about 900 vulnerable pregnant women each year. For the past 70 years, the organization has also been surveying the cost of groceries in Montreal.
For this report, researchers for the dispensary did price surveys in October, January, April and July of 68 basic food items at selected standard and discount food retailers in Lachine. (Lachine was chosen because it was determined to be median among Montreal's boroughs in terms of after-tax revenue, percentage of property owners versus renters, and average rent.)
The report found sharp price increases for some very basic pantry items, such as white flour (225 per cent), pasta (116 per cent), canned tomatoes (31 per cent) and white sugar (25 per cent). Other basic items that saw major increases include grain products (up 37 per cent), canned, frozen or fresh fruits (41 per cent), margarine (51 per cent), frozen spinach (35 per cent), dairy products and substitutes (eight to 20 per cent).
Troublingly, the report also notes an increase in the price of baby formula (40 per cent) and baby foods (36 per cent) between October 2021 and July 2022.
“A three-month-old baby who drinks eight bottles of 120 ml per day would cost $4.56 a day to feed. In the case of a mother ... who breastfeeds, the additional cost to respond to (her own and her baby's) needs is estimated at $1.01. This data shows that nursing leads to a savings of up to 78 per cent ($3.55 per day).
“This trend is worrisome because it affects the cost of basic foods, which until now have never known increases of this amplitude,” the report says.
The study looked at the cost to provide a healthy but basic diet to an average family, which they defined as a man and a woman between the ages of 31 and 50, a boy between 14 and 18 years old and a girl between nine and 13 years old. In October 2021, it cost $216.46 a week for a family to meet basic nutritional needs. By July 2022, feeding the same family cost $249.07 per week.
“That represents $32.61 more each week, week after week,” nutritionist Geneviève O'gleman said at the news conference. She said the real cost to most families is likely higher.
She noted those numbers presume a family doesn't go to restaurants, get takeout or waste any food, she noted.
“This requires having a wellequipped kitchen, which is not the case for all families experiencing poverty. You need equipment to cook with and to preserve foods. Think of a kitchen that has just a toaster oven and a mini-fridge. If that's all you've got, you can't buy foods in big quantities, you can't cook all these budget recipes, so these are already constraints that increase the weekly average price. And building a menu that incorporates all the ingredients you have on hand requires a certain culinary competence and literacy and understanding of official languages to make good choices at the grocery store, to profit from specials and avoid marketing traps and follow recipes.”
Cooking and preserving foods efficiently also requires time and mental energy, O'gleman said, which are often in short supply for those experiencing personal or financial problems, mental health issues, a disability or addiction.
“And that represents the real situation of many families, so this increase in the price of foods will hit a lot of families really hard. When we don't have enough to eat, our children's growth and development can be compromised and our capacity to function in our daily life, to work or to study is affected.”
“The situation is indeed alarming,” said François Fournier, a researcher with the Observatoire québécois des inégalités, a research centre based at the Université de Montréal. “We have to take a step back and ask ourselves if our current responses to food insecurity are sufficient.”
He said strategies like food banks, food literacy programs, and efforts to increase access to fresh, local produce are necessary, but at best are succeeding only at attenuating food insecurity.
“The level of food insecurity year after year does not decline. So if we want to go faster in this struggle, we have to aim at ... significant and durable reduction. To do that, we have to attack at the source: the inadequate financial resources of households.”
Fournier's recent study said the percentage of Quebecers experiencing food insecurity — the inability to acquire an adequate supply of healthy food in a socially acceptable way — increased from 10 to 15 per cent during the pandemic. About 850,000 Quebecers were affected by food insecurity between March 2020 and August 2021. That number jumped to 1.3 million by May 2022.