Canada

It's almost like food is something everyone needs and has to buy no matter the cost, so there's no incentive for grocery stores to reduce their profit margins.

I suspect the prices will, ironically, allow new players to enter the market and undercut.

I have farmers in my family. They talk about the pieces they got last year (high) versus this year (much lower). In fact, it's leading to some unethical optimization problems...

Crop insurance payouts are based on last year's price. For some farmers, they would earn more this year if they sabotaged their own crops and took the insurance payout based on last year's prices.

My family rejects it, cause ethics is a thing. But I suspect some farmers will just see dollars and will artificially constrain their supply. And the rest of the farmers will have their insurance rates increase.

The problem with groceries is that the raw product is largely bought on futures contracts, so you're paying last year's price. Last year was inflated due to fertilizer issues and general concern around the Ukraine conflict. The raw product price is now down ~50% since last year, but it will take until next year to see that show up in the store.

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but no, no greedflation here

I wonder if it's because of what they are including in their percentages. Like, if meat, cheese, eggs, and produce skyrocketed, but a ton of processed garbage didn't, then it'll make the numbers look lower than it is in practice.

Yeah, the grocery bill has been insane this past year.

Look up "Community Supported Agriculture" or CSAs. You typically buy a "share" at the start of the growing season and pick up a bunch of fresh, locally-grown, seasonal produce each week, or every-other week.

For some industries you can't do this because of regulatory capture.

For example dairy. Dairy farmers are not allowed to sell to anyone except the cooperative, who does all the processing and then sells to stores. Since the dairy cartel is in bed with the grocery cartel, good luck breaking in.

Also fo meat, any meat sold in Canada must be inspected at a federal abbatoire. Guess who owns the abbatoires? The big guys, and they're not going to sell to you because the beef cartel is in bed with the grocery cartel.

The Lufa model needs to spread across the country. They have a handful of urban greenhouses in Montreal, so a lot of the produce I buy is actually grown in the city, and everything else that they can't grow themselves is procured directly from the producers/farms, not from a re-seller.

(although, fuck their labour practices, I very much wish they had competition in the city so they would be pressured to clean up their act in that regard, I hate that I feel like I have to compromise my values in some way in order to buy local and direct)

That doesn't scale, and it's sometimes even illegal. We /used/ to deal with market failure and make sure basic services were met by creating crown corporations. Imagine that the Westons had to compete with a public company that got basic food goods from the farms to stores at industrial scale and at break-even costs. Heck, it could even lose money in remote areas where people can't currently access healthy food as the healthcare savings would be a great investment. It wouldn't have to be fancy, and it wouldn't have to include anything highly processed -just basic, healthy grocery goods that meet our needs. The capitalists would do fine, but would have to either actually be more efficient than the publicly owned system, or rely on premium goods for their profits (which they already mostly do anyway).

There needs to be services that directly connect farmers with consumers.

There are many.

given that many people use another middleman (Instacart, etc.) to actually get their groceries.

I have done some consulting for a business that is trying to be much like Instacart for farm-to-consumer transactions. They have a strong niche customer base of those with a certain conviction, but I don't see it ever being something the masses will use. I think you might be underplaying the service a grocery store does provide.

I have no idea how to reach out to farmers

Well, I'm one. You have my ear.

I'm probably not the kind of farmer you need, though. I want to dump all of my product, which could be enough to feed hundreds of thousands of people or more (and my farm is small!), off at harvest and move on. You need mass distribution to be able to absorb that.

The farmers you find at farmers markets would be a better fit, I imagine. If you are serious about this, go there and talk to them. They're usually friendly and interested in this type of thing. If you can help them better connect with the customer, they will be listening.