This past year, something changed in how Canadians talk about food prices.

For a long time, the conversation focused on finding someone to blame. Too often, it was reduced to simple slogans or accusations that didn’t reflect how the food system actually works. In 2025, that began to shift.

Canadians felt poorer at the grocery store, and the discussion became more serious. Attention moved toward the underlying forces shaping food prices in this country, not just at the checkout, but across the entire system.

Those forces aren’t new. They’ve been building for years.

Canada’s food inflation challenge is rooted in structural issues: logistics inefficiencies, interprovincial trade barriers, labour shortages, rising input and energy costs, and supply-chain imbalances that compound pressure at every step. One factor that deserves far more attention is regulatory cost.

Canada has one of the most complex regulatory environments in the developed world. Regulations play a vital role in food safety, environmental protection, and consumer trust. But complexity, duplication, and slow modernization also add real cost, to manufacturing, transportation, packaging, and compliance. Those costs don’t disappear. They ultimately show up in prices.

A clear example is recycling policy.

In provinces like Ontario and Quebec, changes to extended producer responsibility (EPR) and recycling frameworks have significantly increased costs for food manufacturers. Those costs are real and rising, yet the outcomes have often fallen short of what was promised. Recycling rates have not improved proportionally, and system efficiency has not kept pace with the additional financial burden placed on producers.

This is not an argument against sustainability. It’s an argument for better policy design. When environmental policy drives up costs without delivering measurable environmental gains, it becomes part of the affordability problem, and it erodes public trust.

Unlike global commodity cycles or weather shocks, regulatory modernization is squarely within government control. Governments can simplify rules, align systems across jurisdictions, improve accountability for outcomes, and ensure that policies deliver real environmental and affordability benefits at the same time.

The human consequences of inaction are now impossible to ignore. In 2025, food insecurity reached historic levels. More than two million Canadians relied on food banks each month, and roughly one in four experienced some level of food insecurity. That reality should stop all of us in our tracks.

What’s often missed in public debate is where food inflation actually begins. The checkout line is not the starting point. Prices reflect real costs that accumulate long before food reaches store shelves, from farming and processing to transportation, labour, energy, financing, and compliance.

Across Canada, food manufacturers and suppliers have spent years working to manage these pressures. They’ve absorbed costs, invested in efficiency and productivity, strengthened supply chains, redesigned packaging, and collaborated across the system to meet environmental and safety expectations while keeping food affordable.

But there are limits to what any single company or sector can do alone.

If Canadians want lasting relief, the focus now has to shift from blame to reform. That includes tackling the harder, less visible issues: improving productivity, reducing regulatory duplication, modernizing recycling and environmental frameworks to deliver real outcomes, strengthening domestic manufacturing capacity, and making it easier to move food efficiently within our own country.

These are not easy conversations. They involve trade-offs and political discomfort. But avoiding them has not made food more affordable, or more sustainable.

2025 wasn’t the end of the affordability conversation. It was the moment of clarity.

The real test now is whether we’re prepared to act on what we finally understand, and whether governments are willing to use the tools they have to lower costs, improve outcomes, and rebuild trust.

This op-ed was originally published on LinkedIn.