From Inflation to Innovation: Retail Expert Bruce Winder Talks Canada’s Grocery Future

And so, you know, how do you define the, I call it a phase, but how do you define where we are in the food inflation? Are we stable? Is it growing? And how do you think about, and how did you write about that?

Yeah, I think it's growing a bit now.

You know, we had some pretty massive food inflation a few years ago for a lot of different reasons, mostly input costs.

But that kind of subsided for a while.

And now I think, you know, we're starting to see a bit of that come back.

You know, if I look at StatsCan for September, their food inflation on the CPI was up about 4% above the standard 2% for everything else.

And that's on top of August, where it was up 3.5%.

So I think we're unfortunately entering a bit of a time of food inflation again.

Now, as you thought and did the analysis around that, You know, from a retail perspective, what are the most visible kind of downstream consequences of that? I mean, you've got grocers, you've got CPGs, you've got vendors, you've got supply chain participants.

You know, what should retailers and what should consumers be thinking about as we kind of enter in, I don't know what we'd call this phase, but, you know, we're clearly going down and we're clearly seeing more inflation, right?

Yeah, when I think about it, I mean, the downstream effects, you know, obviously you start to see some inflation on the shelf.

You start to see retail prices rise.

You also see consumers shopping differently, buying more private label, and also down-channeling a bit.

So in grocery, you know, moving more toward the hard discount segment versus the full service segment, and maybe consumers buying more frozen and less fresh, protein alternatives as well.

And you start to see CPGs having to pivot in terms of innovating with different products and, you know, in some cases maybe offering value items.

But everyone kind of has to pivot to follow the consumer as this inflation takes effect.

So, you know, if we unpack this inflation, let's just, you know, double-click, so to speak.

I don't want to steal your brand now.

Let's just double-click on that.

That's okay.

You know, there's a number of elements, as you know so well, from the supply, you know, from how a product gets from a farm or a factory to on the grocery shelf.

There's a lot of different inputs and a lot of different players.

You know, as you think about, you know, the supply chain inflation, labor costs, environmental factors, commodities like fuel, whatever, what do you think is kind of behind the inflation numbers, like the key drivers? Any or all of those jump out at you?

Yeah, it's a good question.

You know, I think that it really depends on the category you're looking at, but, you know, I think to some degree all of them are in play.