Loblaws and Sobeys, Canada’s largest supermarket chains, have once again been caught by CBC News charging too much for meats.
The issue is including the weight of packaging in prices, a practice that breaks Canadian rules which are supposed to be enforced by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
It seems the CBC reporters are better at detecting weight-related meat pricing errors than the government inspection agency.
After CBC’s shoppers found similar weight issues last year the grocers said they had taken steps to rectify pricing.
"People are getting ripped off," said Terri Lee, a former inspector with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Lee, who spent 24 years with the federal food regulator before retiring in 2021, estimates mis-weighed meat costs Canadian shoppers millions of dollars a year.
"Obviously, these retail stores are not to be trusted that the weight on the package is accurate," she is quoted by CBC News..
Over the past two months, CBC visited 17 Loblaw-owned or Sobeys-affiliated stores in the Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax areas, targeting packaged fresh meat sold by weight.
In all, CBC purchased and documented 32 underweight meat products from seven stores: two Safeways and a Thrifty Foods in North Vancouver (owned by Sobeys); two Farm Boys in the Greater Toronto Area (owned by Sobeys' parent company, Empire); and two Real Canadian Superstores in the Halifax area (owned by Loblaw).
The CFIA is also responsible for inspecting scales at meat-packing plants used in calculating what’s owed to farmers.
