Nutrition North Canada Frustration

Last week there was an Nutrition North Canada meeting. It left me feeling more frustrated than when I arrived! I suppose I felt "heard", but not optimistic that the problems would be ironed out at all.

The meeting involved a very rough overview of what the program was, how it is different from food mail, why it was changed. It's supposed to keep prices of healthy food reasonable in the North. There were a lot of great questions asked - lots about accountability of the program - how will the government and consumers know that subsidies that are given to participating stores are actually passed on to us? There were a lot of "the program is still in it's infancy, we are still working things out".

One of the remarks that impressed me most, and that really helped put things into perspective was by Ken Harper, owner of Arctic Ventures. He clearly explained how the program was set up to create a monopoly for the biggest stores at the expense of the smaller ones. Evil NorthMart has the biggest food order and therefore gets the best food rate for freight with the airlines. Say 90 cents per kilo. Ventures has a smaller order and can only negotiate 1 dollar per kg. The subsidy covers 50 cents for all stores, and that means the price evil NorthMart has to pay is so now 40 cents while Ventures is 50 cents, what was a 10% difference is now a 20% difference in favour of evil NorthMart. Now think about the fact that they're getting a whole lot bang for their buck because they order a lot more. How are smaller stores supposed to compete with this? They're clearly not. This system is designed to benefit the biggest, who already have insane mark-ups and profit margins in the North.

Who doesn't believe that the largest companies had their hands in someone's back pocket when this new system was cooked up? hmmm...

That's only one of about 40 different comments pointing out the shortsightedness of the new program and issues with it. Hopefully the newly appointed Board was listening, and hopefully they actually have the power to do something about it. I may have to post another blog to vent about how a number of reviews of prices are going on and that I've been keeping track of whether things are in fact getting cheaper. The preview answer is yes if you are buying only cheese from NorthMart, otherwise not exactly.

Sincerely, frustrated shopper.