Your $100 grocery cart now costs $130. Here's the receipt.

Take a $100 grocery cart from 2019. Ring it through today and it costs about $130. That's not a feeling — it's TD Economics' estimate of how far food bought from stores has risen since before the pandemic. And the family-level math is worse: Canada's Food Price Report puts the average family of four's 2026 food bill at $17,571.79, up from $12,180 in 2019 — a 44.3 per cent increase, or $5,392 a year.

The damage is uneven. Meat is the worst of it — up 40 per cent or more since December 2019, according to RBC Economics — and ground beef, the traditional budget protein, now costs more than chicken breast. Statistics Canada's August data shows the monthly pace cooling: food from stores rose 2.8 per cent year over year, below the 3.0 per cent headline rate for the first time since July 2024. Eggs even fell 1.9 per cent. But cooling inflation from a 30-per-cent-higher price level is cold comfort — the level never comes back down.

So where did the money go? Start with the supply chain: Prairie drought shrank the cattle herd, avian flu hit poultry, and U.S. tariffs — including 50 per cent on coffee giant Brazil — rippled through imports. Then look at the grocers' own books. Loblaw reported a 31.3 per cent retail gross margin for fiscal 2025 on $63.9 billion in retail revenue, with net earnings of $2.667 billion. Metro reported a 19.9 per cent gross margin. Those are company-reported figures — and Loblaw's blends food with Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacy and general merchandise, so it isn't a pure food margin. But they explain why the "we're barely scraping by" defense never quite landed with shoppers.

And the policy response? The Grocery Code of Conduct took full effect on January 1, 2026, with Loblaw, Walmart Canada, Costco, Metro and Sobeys' parent Empire all signed on. Here's what it doesn't do: regulate prices. It governs retailer-supplier conduct — fees, penalties, contract changes. It was never designed as an affordability measure, whatever the press releases implied.

What comes next isn't comforting either. The Food Price Report forecasts overall food inflation of 4 to 6 per cent for 2026, with meat up 5 to 7 per cent. RBC expects grocery prices to keep rising faster than overall inflation in the near term. The structural drivers — climate volatility, tariffs, consolidation — aren't going away.

My take: stop watching the inflation rate and watch the price level. A 2.8 per cent food print sounds like relief until you remember it's 2.8 per cent on top of 30. The $130 cart is permanent. The policy question was never "how do we get food inflation to 2 per cent" — it's "what do we do for the family paying $5,392 more a year for the same food." Nobody in Ottawa has answered that one yet.