First in a series of retail grocery articles focused on what government & business should do to help consumers make wise shopping decisions.

There are three boxes of the same brand of cereal on the grocery store shelf.

Three sizes. Three prices.

What’s the best bang for the buck?

Unit pricing is a practical and cost-effective method for consumers to compare similar offerings of packaged food products and reduce confusion.

While unit pricing labels in grocery stores are mandatory in Quebec and are often provided voluntarily by many retailers in other provinces, they are not required across Canada — yet.

The practice displays the price of an item using a set unit of measurement, such as weight or volume. A shopper can see the jumbo-sized box of cereal costs $0.72 per 100 g, compared with the family-sized box for $1.10 and the original size for $1.13 per 100 g.

Unit prices first appeared on Canadian grocery shelves during the early 1970s, the result of consumer groups, retailers and policymakers working together to help consumers find the lowest prices among the growing number of size offerings.
At that time, standardized sizes for containers had come into effect in Canada and the conversion to the metric system was taking hold.

But with a gallon of milk equivalent to 4.54 litres and the new standard size set at 4 litres, consumers feared they were being swindled by the changes. Unit pricing was one way to address that.

Today, food manufacturers in Canada and the U.S. have pushed to sell a greater variety of package sizes, with some products seeing more options and others removed from regulations altogether.

It’s why there are now 13 permitted sizes of tomato juice and 11 sizes of ketchup, but no standard packages for potato chips or pasta, which allows for quantity reductions and “shrinkflation.”

Working with provinces and territories to create a national approach to unit price labelling practices was one of the key recommendations of both a House of Commons Agri-Committee report and the Competition Bureau review of grocery pricing practices released in June 2023. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada is also actively encouraging consumers to look for unit pricing to help compare prices.

Former NDP MP Alistair MacGregor (Cowichan-Malahat-Langford) put forward a bill in 2024 to make unit pricing mandatory across the country.

“I would like to see some kind of uniform system in place so that no matter where Canadians find themselves shopping, no matter what province they are in, they are informed and they can actually see how much a certain food product costs,” said MacGregor.

He said his bill was partly informed by a presentation on unit pricing by the Consumers Council of Canada.
Consumers expressed strong support for unit pricing in a series of questions about store pricing in a recent online survey of more than 4,500 Canadians by Consumers Council of Canada conducted through Environics Research.

That research found 92 per cent of Canadians want to see standardized labels in grocery stores that include unit pricing and it topped the list of potential strategies to help consumers compare prices.