We still have a breadmaker in our house and Jill likes making various kinds of homemade bread (we’re now on our third such machine).

We still buy some bread and probably we eat more store-bought bread than home-baked. 

Baking bread used to be a big chore when I was growing up. It was a task that my mother never enjoyed and so when a bread delivery truck visited the farm, she started buying bread. With two working men (my dad and uncle), two boys and my mother, we ate a lot of bread. Not only did my brother and I take sandwiches to school but when we arrived home, we immediately made sandwiches to tide us over until suppertime. We ate so much bread that I think I remember my mother buying 21 loaves a week (no wonder she didn’t want to bake bread!)

Jill and I were talking about the rising cost of bread. When we first got married 57 years ago, we had a Becker’s Convenience store near where we lived in Toronto. Cheap bread brought in customers and Jill remembers specials where we got bread for 19 cents a loaf.

All this provides background for a story I read from a while back about how large bakery companies had been found guilty of fixing the price of bread. The bakery industry, the article read, was expected to deliver a $10 billion profit in 2025. 

Farmers, who grow the wheat that is ground into flour, the main ingredient in bread, receive about 22 cents a loaf. Meanwhile the price of bread keeps rising. In 2014 the average price of a 675 gram loaf was $2.83. In 2024 it was $3.45 and by 2028 the price is forecast to be $6.82. This is compared to 19 cents in 1969!

Part of the problem is the lack of competition in the business. When I was young we had a bakery on the main street of Lucknow, my hometown. Nearly every town and village did. I remember Eedy’s Bakery in tiny Dungannon.

A major sponsor on CKNX television back then was Wittich’s  Bakery in Ayton which delivered its product throughout western Ontario.      

All those competitors are gone now which has given major bakery companies more control.

Back in 2016 a class action lawsuit prompted the Competition Bureau to investigate. Loblaws Companies, a parent company of George Weston Ltd., admitted to being part of a price-fixing scheme and will pay $404 million with the remaining $96 million of the judgement accounted for in a gift card program that Loblaws announced in 2017.

Meanwhile Canada Bread had pled guilty of four counts of price fixing. That company, though it has been in business since 1911 and sounds Canadian, is owned by Grupo Bimbo, the largest baking company in the world and distributes 1,000 products under 18 brands in Canada.

The company’s admission of wrongdoing resulted in the cancellation of federal contacts and some widespread anxiety about conspiracy, which they continue to deny, as do other defendants in the suit like Sobeys, Walmart Canada, Giant Tiger and Metro.
The prices of bread has contributed to the cost of groceries. Since 2014, the same period covered by the lawsuit, the cost of groceries for a Canadian family of four has doubled. In 2014 people spent $8,109 on groceries. In 2025 that same family needed $16,833 to eat.

Single parents, seniors and the vulnerable are put at risk. Food insecurity is at 22.9 per cent – nearly double 2014’s rate of 12 per cent. All this at a time when farmers find it harder to make a living and as farmland is paved over for the expansion of urban areas.

The fines to the large bakery companies seem large, but they’re a small fraction of the profits they make in a year. Meanwhile the profits continue, with little of them going to the farmer.◊