Downtown shoppers paying a premium for groceries

Neighbourhood grocery stores are not all created equal. Where Ottawans live can have a big effect on their grocery bills every week.

OpenFile visited grocery stores in different parts of Ottawa and recorded the prices of 10 basic items. When we compared the total cost of that basic shopping list, some trends emerged. Downtown grocery stores were more expensive than stores in suburbs like Kanata and Barrhaven. Our research suggests that Centretown shoppers can expect to pay on average 14.5 percent more for the same set of items than shoppers in Barrhaven.

View Ottawa Grocery Stores in a larger map

Grocery pricing is “both an art and a science,” says Nick Jennery, president of the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors, a trade association for grocery companies. Everything from currency markets to weather conditions can influence what you pay at the checkout.

“The price of goods on the shelf reflects the cost of goods purchased by distributors,” he says. “Things like changes in commodity costs are built into the overall supplier input cost, which is obviously passed on to the retailer.”

The average store does over a thousand prices changes a week, says Jennery, which reflects how fluid the market is.

To explain specific differences, such as why a 4-litre bag of milk costs $5.09 in the Isabella Street Loblaws downtown and only $4.19 in the Barrhaven Loblaws on Greenbank Road, Jennery says that it comes down to competition between individual stores. “If a particular store or a chain is trying to gain additional market share or prominence or send a message to what they think are some potential consumers, they will have different merchandising strategies to back that up.”

Many consumers might be willing to pay a few dollars extra on their grocery bill for the convenience of shopping close to home. For people on a tight budget, though, those few dollars can mean a world of difference.

“When these people are making choices about their meals, three dollars is a lot. It can be a meal or two,” says Peter Tilley, the executive director of the Ottawa Food Bank.

Tilley says that when people are budgeting very tightly, they often don’t have money for transportation and are forced to shop at their neighbourhood grocery store, even when it’s more expensive. That means that they might need to adjust their grocery list.

“When you look at the fact that they probably buy several boxes of macaroni and cheese and feed a family several times over—for the price that they can buy one head of broccoli—it’s unfortunate they’re forced into making poor nutritional choices,” says Tilley.

Those choices can have consequences.

“We do end up with scenarios where you’re going to be more susceptible in the long term to chronic diseases,” says Marie-Claude Thibault, a public health nutritionist with Ottawa Public Health. “We’re talking about obesity, heart disease, diabetes. You can talk about osteoporosis even, for women.”

For the best deals and the healthiest diet, those who can should shop around, says Thibault. Those who are stuck shopping at expensive downtown stores need to plan their menus carefully and look for specials.

The OpenFile Grocery List

To research this story, OpenFile journalists shopped at stores around the city using a 10-item list of basic foods like apples, milk, bread and chicken.

This list was pulled from the “Nutritious Food Basket” survey conducted every spring by public health boards across Ontario. The Nutritious Food Basket is a list of items that represent a healthy family diet. Every year, Ottawa Public Health surveys grocery stores to come up with an average cost of feeding a family in Ottawa.

In 2010, that cost was $723 a month for a family of four.

Contribute to our research:

Help us out by adding your local store to our map. Just download our grocery list, note the prices on your next grocery trip and add up the totals. Then add those totals to the comments, and we'll add them to the map. The survey takes only about 10 minutes to complete.

The rules:

-Do NOT mark down sale prices of items. Regular prices only!

-Write down the cheapest version available of each item. For example, Omega 3 eggs are great, but cost a lot more than ordinary large eggs. We want to see the price of regular eggs.

OpenFile Ottawa Sample Grocery List