Most writing about grocery costs treats the problem as an optimization puzzle. For a large share of Canadian households, it is not. It is a question of whether there is enough food.
According to PROOF at the University of Toronto, working from Statistics Canada’s Canadian Income Survey, 9.8 million Canadians, including 2.4 million children, lived in food-insecure households in 2025. Canada’s Food Price Report 2026 puts it another way: roughly one in four Canadian households.
What food insecurity actually means
The term is often read as a synonym for hunger. It is broader than that, and the distinction matters.
Food insecurity describes inadequate or insecure access to food because of financial constraint. It runs along a spectrum: worrying about running out before there is money to buy more, compromising on quality or variety, reducing portions, and at the severe end, missing meals or going a day without eating.
Most food-insecure households are not at the severe end. They are making constant small compromises that do not look like a crisis from outside.
Food bank use has doubled in six years
Food Banks Canada’s HungerCount 2025 counted 2,165,776 visits to food banks in a single month, March 2025, across 2,725 participating organizations. Those visits produced 4,522,356 meals and snacks.
The trajectory is the part worth sitting with.
| Comparison | Change in monthly food bank visits |
|---|---|
| Versus 2024 | +5.15% |
| Versus 2019 | +99.37% |
It took decades for Canada to reach one million monthly food bank visits. It took about five years to double that.
A job is no longer protection
The single most revealing figure in HungerCount 2025 concerns who is showing up.
19% of food bank clients report employment as their main source of income, up from 12% in 2019. Nearly one in five people using a food bank has a job.
That breaks the assumption underneath most public conversation about this, which treats food bank use as a proxy for unemployment. It is increasingly a proxy for wages and benefits that do not cover what food, rent, and transport now cost together.
One in three drew on savings or borrowing
The Canadian Food Sentiment Index for spring 2026, based on a national survey of approximately 3,000 people, found that 34% of respondents had drawn on savings or borrowed money to buy food during the previous 12 months. That was up from 28% in fall 2025 and back to the level measured in fall 2024.
That figure combines two different actions: using savings and taking on debt. It would be inaccurate to say that one in three Canadians went into debt to eat. The result still shows how often grocery costs are consuming the financial cushion households would otherwise use for emergencies.
Why groceries specifically
Food costs have moved differently from everything else. The Bank of Canada found that since 2022, grocery prices rose about 22%, compared with 13% for other consumer prices.
Statistics Canada’s July 2026 figures showed groceries rising 3.1% against 3.0% for prices in general, the 18th consecutive month that groceries outpaced the rest.
Food is also the most compressible line in a household budget. Rent is fixed. A car payment is fixed. Groceries are the item people cut when something has to give, which is exactly why food insecurity rises before other indicators do.
Where to get help
If you are struggling right now, these are the concrete starting points.
The Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit. This replaced the GST/HST credit in July 2026. Eligibility, payment calculation, and structure are unchanged under the new name, and it is paid quarterly and tax-free. If you received the GST/HST credit before, this is the same benefit. Details are on the Canada Revenue Agency page. Filing a tax return is what triggers it, even with no income to report.
Food banks. Food Banks Canada can direct you to a member organization near you. Many now operate on a no-referral basis.
211. Dialling 2-1-1 or visiting 211.ca connects you to community and social services in your area, including food programs, in multiple languages.
There is no eligibility test for reading a page like this, and using these services is not a failure. Nearly two million visits a month is not an edge case.
What price tools can and cannot do
We build a grocery price app, so it is worth being direct about the limits.
A price tracker does not solve food insecurity. When the gap between income and cost is structural, better shopping does not close it, and any tool that markets itself as a solution to hunger is overselling.
What a tool can do is smaller and more honest: reduce the amount of money lost to the same product being priced differently across formats, stores, and weeks. Checking unit price rather than shelf price catches shrinkflation. Keeping a short list of the products you rebuy and checking the price history available in BarcodeVibe’s price tracker gives the next tag a reference point when observations exist.
That is worth something. It is not worth as much as a benefit payment you are eligible for and have not claimed.
For the broader picture on why costs stay where they are, see our explainer on why grocery prices stay high in Canada.
