After Deborah Eakins read the recent CBC News investigation about Loblaw, Sobeys and Walmart grocery stores overcharging customers by selling underweighted meat, she weighed her ground beef.
To her surprise, the meat, bought at Sobeys-owned Pete’s Frootique in the Halifax area, appeared to have been weighed with the hard plastic packaging.
CBC News purchased three packages of ground beef from the same store and got the same results. The calculated overcharge was $1.23 — six per cent on the $21.29 bill.
Under federal regulations, posted net weights for packaged food — and prices based on that weight — can’t include the packaging.
“It makes me angry,” said Eakins, who sent an online complaint to the store. “I really don’t like to think that I’m paying for packaging. Grocery prices have gotten horrendous over the last couple of years.”
CBC’s investigation has sparked anger among shoppers who are grappling with high food prices.
It also prompted NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh to ask the Competition Bureau to “hold these giant corporations accountable” and provide better protections for shoppers.
Meanwhile, the big grocers are making efforts to convince customers there’s no need for concern.
In November 2024, CBC News found underweighted meat at a Sobeys-owned FreshCo store in Toronto. At the time, Sobeys said it was addressing the matter.
In response to the Halifax case, Sobeys spokesperson Karen White-Boswell thanked CBC News for alerting the grocer.
“On the rare occasions when an error occurs, we respond immediately… so that it can be corrected,” she said in an email.
Eakins said a Pete’s Frootique representative offered her compensation for being “mischarged.”
“I said, ‘I actually don’t want to be compensated. What I want is the assurance that every package of meat I buy from now on, I won’t be paying for the packaging.'”
White-Boswell says Sobeys has followed up with the store and reinforced its meat-weighing procedures and policies.
Proposed class action
Loblaw customer Iris Griffin also wants assurance the meat she’s buying has been weighed properly.
In late 2023, Griffin complained to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) about underweighted meat she bought at a Loblaw-owned Superstore. The grocer said it sold “a small number” of underweighted meat products across 80 stores due to an error involving a change in packaging.
The CFIA says it issued no penalties because Loblaw said it fixed the problem.
Close to one year later, CBC News found underweighted meat in two Loblaw stores. In response, Loblaw apologized to customers, and said it fixed the error and refreshed in-store training.
Hello, we sincerely apologize for this error. Most products were corrected in 2023. Since then, we’ve reviewed all weighted items, refreshed in-store team training, and are addressing the issue in affected stores with discounts on select meat products.
—@loblawco
Following her experience, Griffin says she was “pleasantly surprised” to learn that a proposed class-action lawsuit has been filed in Federal Court.
The suit alleges Loblaw, Sobeys and Walmart misrepresented the weight of meat products by including the weight of the packaging, or by “other similarly deceptive means.”
The suit has yet to be certified. Nevertheless, Griffin hopes it sends a message.
“It gives people a sense that something is being done and that the retailer is being held accountable for the money that they’ve taken from consumers,” she said.
Loblaw and Sobeys did not comment on the lawsuit.
Walmart also did not respond directly to the suit. But the retailer, in response to CBC News’s earlier investigation — which found a Richmond, B.C., location sold underweighted meat — said that the third party responsible had immediately corrected the problem.
That third party confirmed that the issue had been “limited to select products” and only happened “during a two-week period in December 2024,” said Walmart spokesperson Stephanie Fusco.
But CBC News spoke with a customer who complained on social media back in October — two months earlier — that the beef steak she bought at the store had been weighed with the packaging. A photo she took of her weighing the meat showed that it was packaged on Oct. 8, 2024.
In response, Fusco said that Walmart is looking into the matter. She added that while this issue “has been limited to third-party packaging,” Walmart is reviewing its weighing systems to ensure it remains compliant.
Investigation by phone and email
Griffin says she was surprised to learn that when the CFIA investigated her complaint about underweighted beef sold by Loblaw, the agency didn’t inspect any stores but, instead, conducted the investigation by phone and email.
Jay Jackson inspected consumer products, including food — for a predecessor of the CFIA — from 1983 to 1987. He says, during this period, a complaint like Griffin’s would automatically prompt onsite inspections.
A CBC News investigation discovered some Canadian grocers were found to be overcharging customers, potentially by including the weight of the packaging in the cost of meat, which over time could add up to millions in profit. One of the grocers has apologized and all have pledged to address the issue.
“We would pick up our scales and go to the place and check not only the product in question, but the entire meat counter to see if this is a systemic problem,” he said. Jackson added that inspectors would also immediately remove any meats that violated the regulations.
The CFIA says it didn’t need to visit any Loblaw stores because the grocer reported it had fixed the error.
In a new webpage about food weight accuracy, launched by the CFIA this week, the agency says its inspectors “regularly go on site” for investigations.
Jackson also says that when he was on the job, inspectors frequently did routine inspections in grocery stores to ensure food was weighed accurately. He and several other former CFIA inspectors told CBC News the agency now does too few of these types of inspections.
“It’s not a great time for rigorous oversight of consumer fraud protection,” said Jackson, who is now director of policy and strategy with the Consumers Council of Canada.
CFIA spokesperson Patrick Girard said in an email that the agency “works every day to protect consumers” from mislabelled food by doing inspections, surveillance, responding to complaints and raising awareness.
The CFIA said that it did 125 planned inspections in the past year for weight accuracy. When asked how many of them were done in grocery stores, the agency replied that such data isn’t available.
Canada is home to more than 8,000 grocery stores.
