The Local Food Paradox: A Second Study of Local Food Affordability in Canada

Sylvain Charlebois, Marie-Ève Ducharme (), Mélanie Morrison, Janèle Vézeau and Stacey Taylor
Additional contact information
Sylvain Charlebois: Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2, Canada
Marie-Ève Ducharme: Marketing, John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montréal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada
Mélanie Morrison: Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5B5, Canada
Janèle Vézeau: Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2, Canada
Stacey Taylor: Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2, Canada

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 6, 1-17

Abstract: The price of food has been affected in recent months in response to events such as the war in Ukraine, energy costs, inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change. Indeed, supply problems, as well as the repercussions of global issues, have had an impact on grocery bills. Just between September and October 2022, the price of food increased by 11.4% and 11% year-to-year. In addition, with the pandemic, buying locally has become a key factor for some in choosing which products to consume. This second edition of the report aims to answer the question Does eating local in Quebec cost more? More precisely, our objective was to identify if local products in the food sector, especially in Quebec, were competitive in their price points compared to foods coming from other regions of the world. To answer this, we used AI and machine learning to harvest data from 99 local products and 335 comparable nonlocal products, totaling 198,990 data points and 3745 prices across six data collection dates. The results showed that a total of 25 categories displayed an advantage for the local product or a neutrality, out of a total of 45 categories identified. Our results demonstrated that 55.6% of the categories that contained the local foods analyzed were price competitive with comparable products or less expensive than them.

Keywords: local foods; Canada; food affordability; food autonomy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/6/5199/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/6/5199/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:6:p:5199-:d:1097884

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().