Watch Loblaw’s Galen Weston defend chicken prices

Galen Weston, chairman and president of Loblaw, defended the price of chicken breasts at the company’s stores in response to online images showing packages of the premium brand selling for more than $27 a kilogram.

In January, CTV News Toronto Queen’s Park reporter Siobhan Morris shared a photo of a five-pack of President’s Choice Free From Chicken, which the company calls a premium product, being sold at a Toronto Loblaws for almost a premium. $27 per kilo.

Another image shared by CTV Toronto showed a package of chicken at a Toronto Sobeys selling for roughly $28 a kilogram.

On Wednesday, Weston appeared at a parliamentary committee meeting in Ottawa, alongside the CEOs and presidents of grocers Metro and Empire, which are MPs. examining inflated food prices in Canada.

According to Statistics Canada’s latest inflation report; food prices increased by 11.4 percent Inflation almost doubled to 5.9 percent year-on-year in January and compared to 11 percent in the previous month.

In the video at the top of this articleWeston was responding to a question about the high price of such items at Loblaws, where he told reporters Wednesday: “I think these are examples of customers gravitating towards the most expensive products when there’s perfectly competitively priced chicken right next door.

“And we’ve looked at our chicken prices across the enterprise and we’re very confident that we offer excellent value. As an aside, we lose money on every chicken breast we sell.”

Asked if it was a “failure” on his part to allow the product to hit the shelves at that price, Weston replied: continue to make every effort to make it so.”

He later added that the chicken in question is a “specialized product.”

Executives at Loblaw, Metro and Empire, which operate the Sobeys, Safeway and FreshCo chains, have denied. parliamentary committee session that they are responsible for food price inflation in Canada, claiming that their profit margins on food products have remained low.

All three companies posted higher profits in the first half of 2022 compared to their average performance over the past five years. Dalhousie University was found.

Weston argued that Loblaw’s made larger profits from sales of financial services, clothing and drugstores. He added that the profit is about $1 for every $25 spent on groceries, with grocery prices rising about 25 times faster than grocery profit margins.

The Competition Bureau is also investigating whether the lack of competition in the grocery industry is contributing to higher prices. The federal government expects to receive a report and recommendations in June.

With files from CTV News Toronto Multi-Platform Writer Abby O’Brien, CTV News Toronto Queen’s Park Correspondent Siobhan Morris, CTVNews.ca Writer Tom Youn and The Canadian Press.