Food banks, clients hit hard by rising food costs

Everyone’s wallet has been taking a hit at the grocery store lately, but inflation is also having a significant effect on the province’s most vulnerable.

The rising cost of food is impacting the Saskatoon Food Bank and Learning Centre in various ways, said executive director Laurie O’Conner.

She said budgets for people who use the food bank’s services won’t go as far with higher prices at the grocery store.

The food bank might have a bit less to go around, too.

“Our ability to purchase will be definitely decrease with the food that we purchase increasing in cost,” she said.

Donors might not have pockets as deep as normal either, spending more on groceries for themselves and having less to put in the bin.

That doesn’t help with the increasing demand for the food bank’s services, however.

“We are definitely seeing a steady increase over the last six months of folks using the food bank and learning centre,” O’Conner said.

She said the pandemic has brought a lot of new faces to use the food bank’s services.

Regardless of the high cost of food, O’Conner said the food bank will continue to prepare to welcome as many people as possible.

According to Statistics Canada, the cost of groceries is up about 2.7 per cent from last year, but food analysts are saying the prices consumers are being greeted with on the shelves are anywhere from 10 to 15 per cent higher than normal, depending on the item.

Experts like Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University, point out that this type of a hike is something relatively new to most Canadians within the last decade or so.

Charlebois made an appearance on the Roy Green Show Saturday.

“For about 30 years, food prices in Canada were a non-issue, really. Between the great oil crisis in the 70’s and the great financial crisis of 2008, during that period, we saw prices go up, but very insignificantly. People just didn’t notice,” he recalled.

“The era of cheap food really ended about a decade ago. Since then, we’ve seen prices rise.”

He pointed to a few reasons for the significant change.

“It’s essentially because growing products is becoming more complicated, markets fluctuate quite a bit … The macro environment overall is much less predictable than a few decades ago, and that is reflected in the cost of food.”

Charlebois believes this last year has been eye-opening for Canadians.

“We’ve reached the point where people are actually noticing and they can actually quantify the impact of their grocery bill on their lives. So, this year was particularly difficult and challenging for a lot of people, because you may feel you’re paying more for stuff, but when you actually start to realize how much money you’re spending on something, that’s when behaviour changes,” he said.