After Deborah Eakins read the recent CBC News Investigation about grocery stores Loblaw, Sobeys and Walmart overcharging customers by selling underweight meat, weighed its ground beef.
To their surprise, the meat, purchased at Sobeys-owned Pete’s Frootique in the Halifax area, appeared to have been weighed with the hard plastic packaging.
CBC News bought three packages of ground beef at the same store and had the same results. The calculated surcharge was $1.23, six percent of the $21.29 bill.
Under federal regulations, published net weights for packaged foods (and prices based on that weight) cannot include packaging.
“It makes me angry,” said Eakins, who sent an online complaint to the store. “I really don’t like to think I’m paying for packaging. Grocery prices have become terrible in recent years.”
The CBC investigation has sparked anger among shoppers struggling with high food prices.
It also prompted NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh to call on the Competition Bureau to “hold these giant corporations accountable” and provide better protections for buyers.
Meanwhile, large supermarkets are trying hard to convince customers that there is nothing to worry about.
In November 2024, CBC News found underweight meat at a FreshCo store owned by Sobeys 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 occasion that an error occurs, we respond immediately… so it can be corrected,” he said in an email.
Eakins said a Pete’s Frootique representative offered her compensation for being “incorrectly discarded.”
“I said, ‘I don’t really want to be compensated. What I want is to be sure that I won’t pay for every package of meat I buy from now on.'”
White-Boswell says Sobeys followed up with the store and reinforced its meat weighing procedures and policies.
Proposed Class Action Lawsuit
Loblaw customer Iris Griffin also wants to make sure the meat she is purchasing has been weighed correctly.
In late 2023, Griffin complained to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) about underweight meat he purchased at a supermarket owned by Loblaw. The grocer said it sold “a small amount” of underweight meat products in 80 stores due to an error involving a change in packaging.
The CFIA says it did not impose sanctions because Loblaw said it fixed the problem.
Almost a year later, CBC News found underweight meat at two Loblaw stores. In response, Loblaw apologized to customers and said it fixed the error and updated in-store training.
Hello, we sincerely apologize for this error. Most products were corrected in 2023. Since then, we have reviewed all weighted items, updated in-store team training, and are addressing the issue in affected stores with discounts on select meat products.
After her experience, Griffin says she was “pleasantly surprised” to learn that a proposed class action lawsuit was filed in Federal Court.
The lawsuit alleges that Loblaw, Sobeys and Walmart misrepresented the weight of meat products by including packaging weight, or by “other equally deceptive means.”
The suit has not yet been certified. However, Griffin hopes it sends a message.
“It gives people a feeling that something is being done and that the retailer needs to be held accountable for the money they have taken from consumers,” he said.
Loblaw and Sobeys did not comment on the lawsuit.
Walmart also did not respond directly to the lawsuit. But the retailer, in response to CBC News’ earlier investigation, which found a location in Richmond, B.C., was selling underweight meat, said the responsible third party had immediately corrected the problem.
That third party confirmed that the issue had been “limited to select products” and only occurred “during a two-week period in December 2024,” Walmart spokeswoman Stephanie Fusco said.
But CBC News spoke to a customer who complained on social media in October, two months earlier, that the beef steak he bought at the store had been weighed along with the packaging. A photograph he took weighing the meat showed it was packaged on October 8, 2024.
In response, Fusco said Walmart is investigating the matter. He added that while this issue “has been limited to third-party packaging,” Walmart is reviewing its weighing systems to ensure it remains in compliance.
Research by phone and email.
Griffin says he was surprised to learn that when the CFIA investigated his complaint about underweight beef sold by Loblaw, the agency did not inspect any stores but instead conducted the investigation by phone and email.
Jay Jackson inspected consumer products, including food (for a CFIA predecessor) from 1983 to 1987. He says that during this period, a complaint like Griffin’s would automatically trigger on-site inspections.
A CBC News investigation found that some Canadian grocery stores were overcharging their customers, potentially by including packaging weight in the cost of meat, which could eventually lead to millions in profits. One of the shopkeepers apologized and everyone agreed to solve the problem.
“We take our scale and go to the location 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 meat that violated regulations.
The CFIA says it did not need to visit any Loblaw stores because the grocer reported it had fixed the error.
On a new web page On Food Weight Accuracy, released by the CFIA this week, the agency says its inspectors “regularly go on site” to conduct investigations.
Jackson also says that when he was on the job, inspectors frequently did routine inspections at grocery stores to make sure food was weighed accurately. He and several other former CFIA inspectors told CBC News that the agency now conducts very few such inspections.
“It’s not a good time for rigorous oversight of consumer fraud protection,” said Jackson, who is now director of policy and strategy at the Consumer Council of Canada.
CFIA spokesman Patrick Girard said in an email that the agency “works every day to protect consumers” from mislabeled foods through inspections, surveillance, responding to complaints and raising awareness.
The CFIA said it conducted 125 planned inspections last year to verify weight accuracy. When asked how many of them were made in grocery stores, the agency said that data is not available.
Canada is home to more than 8,000 grocery stores.
