Some Loblaw-owned and Sobeys-affiliated grocery stores are still overcharging for meat, says a new investigation
Over the past two months, calculated overcharges ranged from two to 16.7 per cent
In January 2025, a CBC investigation found that some stores within the Loblaw and Sobeys chains had been overcharging customers for underweighted meat. At the time, the CBC reported that overcharges ranged from four to 11 per cent, per item, at some of the stores its journalists visited.
A Loblaw Companies Ltd. spokesperson told the CBC that these were packaging errors affecting “a small number” of products sold in 80 Western Canada stores. “We have robust internal processes and controls in place; however, they are subject to the occasional operational error,” the spokesperson said. A Sobeys spokesperson said the issue was being addressed with the third parties responsible for weighing.
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Well, the CBC published another investigation yesterday, and concluded that the grocers are still overcharging customers for meat, again based on underweighting. The CBC’s reporters purchased packaged meat from 17 Loblaw-owned or Sobeys-affiliated grocery stores in the Toronto, Halifax and Vancouver regions, then weighed the packages using a kitchen scale. Over the past two months, calculated overcharges ranged from two to 16.7 per cent.
“People are getting ripped off,” Terri Lee, a former inspector with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, told the CBC. Lee estimated that misweighed meat costs Canadian grocery consumers millions of dollars each year.
“Obviously, these retail stores are not to be trusted that the weight on the package is accurate,” she said. Per the CBC, the issue seemed to be that meat products were priced with packaging included in the total weight.
The CBC’s investigation was based on a tip from a Halifax shopper who weighed her meat at home and discovered it was underweighted. “You’re only supposed to charge people for what they can actually eat,” she said.
A spokesperson for Sobeys and its parent company, Empire, told the CBC, “On occasion, when errors occur, we investigate the issue so that it can be corrected.”
And a spokesperson for Loblaw apologized: “We are truly sorry this happened,” they said. “We take weight accuracy seriously.”
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
