Grocery Giants Need to be Investigated for Misrepresenting Meat Weight

In a move that’s as shocking as the sun rising, grocery giants Loblaw, Walmart Canada and Sobeys have once again been named in a class action lawsuit that alleges they are shortchanging customers in the amount of meat they are purchasing. If the lawsuit has merit, it will represent yet another example of a tight-knit industry hellbent on nickel-and-diming every cent they can gouge out of Canadians.

The lawsuit was filed in Vancouver by lead plaintiff Carrie Corrall in Vancouver on January 9^th. The lawsuit alleges that these grocers are deceptively including the weight of the packaging when selling meat products to customers when those products are sold by weight, a violation of federal and provincial regulations.

While the proposed class action suit must be certified by a judge to proceed, there is more than enough precedent for grocery giants playing fast and loose with the law to merit at least an examination. Many will likely recall grocery giants like Loblaw, Weston, Canada Bread, Sobeys, Metro, Walmart Canada and Giant Tiger were all named in a class-action suit for fixing the price of bread between 2001 and 2015. Six months ago, Weston and Loblaw agreed to pay $500 million between them to settle class actions against them in Ontario and Quebec, the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. It’s not exactly difficult to draw the conclusion that if a company like Loblaw would be unscrupulous enough to fix the price of bread, they could very well have applied this corporate strategy to include the weight of packaging as meat.

A recent CBC News investigation found that the Loblaw chain was “selling underweighted meat across 80 stores for an undisclosed period that ended in December 2023.” They also conducted another investigation of seven different grocery stores across the country in 2024, and found underweighted meat in four, resulting in overcharges per item ranging from four to eleven percent. To put this in perspective, as of the writing of this column, a pound of extra lean ground beef was going for $9.49. Splitting the difference, let’s say packaging accounts for 7.5 percent of the weight of that pound of beef sale. That is $0.71 cents of the total cost of the pound of beef. While not too significant on an individual level, it would cost Canadians a significant amount of money over, months, years, and decades. That same pound of beef, unchanged in cost, bought once a week over the course of a year, would mean someone was overcharged $36.92.

While we wait to see if a judge determines if the class action suit has merit, it should be noted that Canadian food labelling laws require that net quantity declarations must accurately reflect the amount of food in the package. If companies are misleading consumers about the volume and content of the food they are selling, they are breaking the law. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has a duty to investigate claims such as those found in the class action lawsuit and ensure that grocery giants are adhering to the letter of the law. But when investigating a claim that Loblaw and other grocery giants were doing this in late 2023, CFIA claimed they didn’t investigate the complaint because the grocer reported that they had fixed the problem. Its discouraging for industry regulators like CFIA to take the word of a retailer like that. They conducted 11 other investigations between 2019 and 2023 where food weight didn’t match what was being sold, and yet no fines were issued.

This lawsuit speaks to many of the issues that are present in the grocery industry, and when too few players control far too much of the industry itself, much like the telecom industry that gouges Canadians with few choices for essential products. Restrictive covenants, which limit the kind of store that can open at a location when a grocer leaves a certain property, keep new entrants out of the market. Exclusivity clauses, which prevent a company from leasing land to direct competitors, also directly harms competition and keeps grocery prices artificially high. Yet beyond this, when grocery giants bite consumers, our federal protection agencies like CFIA and the Competition Bureau need to be given the teeth to bite back.

Food costs continue to be far too high, and the corporate giants continue to rake in record profits. We need to leverage the power of federal agencies to ensure they aren’t doing it illegally.