It’s favoured by savvy thieve who know stolen food is hard to trace and there are willing buyers among stores pinched by reduced margins.
Meat, vegetables and butter are among tractor-trailer loads stolen last year.
Three Brampton men were charged in connection with a $1,000 butter theft in December.
That same month police found a car in Hamilton loaded with stolen meat.
Thieves in the U.S. have stolen truckloads of tomatoes, blueberries, pistschios and cucumbers.
CargoNet sounded alarm bells last fall when cargo thefts had risen by 57 per cent.
Experts say more old-fashioned methods of theft such as cutting fences at freight yards and hot-wiring semis at truck stops remain popular. But even those acts are often informed by information gleaned from online load boards – sites that connect shippers and carriers – or phishing scams and other hacking methods.
“The way it used to be was that they would just randomly steal whatever they could get their hands on,” Detective Sergeant Mark Haywood said.
“Now, if they have inside information on something, they'll actually go into a yard and go through half a dozen trailers until they find the product that they were told is there, and then they'll steal that particular one.”
Digital hacks and tracking devices such as Apple AirTags can also yield that inside info – shipment contents or location, for example. They’ve gained traction over the past year, in part because the methods are so cheap, said Danish Yusuf, chief executive of Toronto-based Zensurance.
Food and beverages, household products and metals now comprise Canada’s most sought-after stolen goods, in that order, according to CargoNet.
Food inflation over the past two years sparked a commensurate spike in demand for meat and other edible items.
“They might be able to pick up a $100,000 load for $30,000,” Haywood said of grocers on the grey market. “There’s no way of tracing products like that. It’s not like they have serial numbers on packs of chicken.”
The eventual outlets for hot household goods include independent stores, flea markets and online platforms such as Facebook Marketplace and eBay, Haywood said.
CargoNet said Ontario accounted for 83 per cent of all cargo theft incidents in Canada, with the Toronto area as the reddest of hotspots, though police say offences are radiating westward as perpetrators try to evade a regional crackdown.
