Why Canadians are angry with their biggest supermarket

Canada is searching for an international grocer to enter its domestic market, after years of anger from shoppers over high food prices, much of it directed at one of the big players. But would an Aldi or a Lidl solve the problem?

Late last year, Emily Johnson took to Reddit to share her frustration with how expensive food in Canada has become.

She fixated on one grocer in particular: Loblaw, the dominant food retailer in Canada, boasting nearly 2,500 stores.

Her Reddit group – named LoblawsIsOutofControl – was filled with photos of grocery items for sale at seemingly egregious prices, like C$40 ($29.36; £23.06) for 1.4 kilograms of chicken.

Soon after, Ms Johnson and others banded together to launch a nation-wide boycott against Loblaw, saying they were fed up with the disparity between rising food prices and record profits.

As anger grew, the grocer’s former president Galen Weston, who has defended the profits, became the de facto face of food inflation in Canada, thanks to his regular appearances in Loblaw commercials and his annual reported salary of C$8.4m.

Some even began selling T-shirts featuring a spoof “Roblaw$” logo, which were met with copyright infringement complaints from the grocer.

The boycott, which began in May and is set to continue indefinitely, has since sparked a national conversation on how groceries in Canada are priced, and why a company like Loblaw continues to be profitable as more Canadians struggle to afford food.

It has also ignited political pressure and scrutiny on the grocery practices of not just Loblaw, but other major grocers in the country.

“Groceries did not used to be such an issue but the prices have skyrocketed this past year so we’re going without anything frivolous,” Terra Suffel, a 49-year-old single mother of two living in Toronto, told the BBC.