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

Quebec is the only province that requires grocers to display the unit price of packaged goods. Retailers in other provinces provide unit pricing information voluntarily, or not at all. This gives Quebec consumers an advantage in making informed choices, and better protection against shrinkflation, at least in theory.

“Unit pricing is a good tool for consumers to compare prices when products shrink and they end up paying more for smaller quantities,” said Sara Eve Levac, a lawyer with Quebec-based consumer organization Option Consommateurs.

The key advantage, Levac said, is the transparency it provides when products are routinely sold in different quantities. “Consumers should not have to take out their calculator at the store to compare two products to see which one provides more for less money,” Levac said.

Quebec’s regulation has been in effect since June 2001. Responsibility for the regulations rests with the province’s Consumer Protection Bureau, which can investigate and impose penalties.
“Of course, it puts Quebecers in a better position,” said Charles Tanguay of the bureau. “It’s definitely a good thing to have that information.”

Enforcement comes from both spot checks and consumer complaints, Tanguay said. “It has been largely adopted by grocery stores,” he said. “As with all aspects of price labelling, spot checks are conducted, but I don’t think this is particularly problematic.”

The Bureau does not statistically track unit pricing compliance, however. For the greater category of price indication, product labelling and scanning, the Bureau received 127 complaints and 124 inquiries between mid-August 2023 and mid-August 2024. Quebec adopted new consumer protection legislation that came into effect in May 2025 that improves the disclosure of unit pricing in grocery stores.

Grocers must provide unit pricing labels with a minimum type size so people can read it and must use the same measurement for all “goods of the same nature.”

A national study of Canadian grocery shopping by Environics Research on behalf of the Consumers Council of Canada showed 92 per cent of Canadians agreed that clear, standardized, legible and accurate shelf labels based on unit pricing would make it easier to compare prices. In that study, participants named inaccurate pricing as the most serious problem with unit pricing, followed by type that is too small to read. Quebec respondents viewed those two issues even more seriously than participants from other provinces.

“Our point of view is it could be implemented federally because we know federal legislation already imposes certain norms for labelling, sales and advertising through the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act, so it would be possible to make this law Canada-wide,” said Levac.

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Consumers expressed strong support for unit pricing in an online survey of more than 4,500 Canadians by Consumers Council of Canada conducted through Environics Research.