Our next speaker we have speaking doctor sylvain charlevois who is the senior director with the agri-food analytics lab at dalhousie university dr charlevoix is a professor in food distribution and policy in the faculties of management and agriculture at dalhousie in halifax he's known as the food professor his current research interests lies in the broad area of food distribution security and safety he is one of the world's most cited scholars in food supply chain management food value chains and traceability is testified on several occasions before parliamentary committees on booth policy related issues as an expert witness,
And has been asked to act as an advisor on food and agricultural policies in many canadian provinces and other countries and you likely have seen him uh his interviews either in the print media or possibly on radio or tv with that i'll welcome dr charlebois and he will be addressing evolving food trends and their impact on our agri-food sector well thank you very much ingrid obviously lots going on right now around the world and in canada when it comes to food consumption so uh i'll try i'll do my best to address most issues in the in the half hour or 45 minutes we have together so first of all thank you very much for inviting me uh i have a sweet spot in my heart for manitoba i used to live in saskatchewan for a while and i have some great friends in winnipeg being in halifax,
I have to tell you i i actually miss uh the winters in the prairies uh winters and halifax are weird they're uncommitted you get snow in the morning thunderstorms in the afternoon it's just weird so i want commitment so i i my parka is is in the closet and it always stays there all winter long here so i missed the the minus 20s and snow and it's great anyways i think i'll be back in winnipeg in february and i'm looking forward to it um so my talk today is very much about trends i mean what we do at the lab here is to understand what's going on what are the things that are pushing consumers to buy different things consume different things so we'll look at that,
I don't have any i don't have a deck ready for you i wanted to talk to you directly and and use some of the data that we have uh at the lab and by the way if you want anything at all uh any data that i'll be presenting talking about today can actually go on our website uh you just google agri food analytics lab at the house university and you can actually go on our website and get all of our reports uh for free they're both available in english and french all of them are available in both english and french so i encourage you to do that i also have a podcast called the food professor if you're if you if you enjoy podcasts well we have a podcast we've had it for about two years now and it's one of the top podcasts in food in canada,
Which is great it's called the food professor it's available on spotify apple google and simplecast as well so i encourage you to go on and we try different cleaning products we have guests from from all over the country all over the continent actually and we talk about food issues uh things that we're doing at the lab we talk about uh you know things the challenges that we're facing really uh as an industry and things that perhaps government should should be thinking about so we've had politicians and invited to our podcast as well uh so yeah like i said lots going on right now let's first talk about you know the big elephant in the room affecting pretty much everyone uh it's it's food inflation just this morning we saw stat scan come out for november,
So the food inflation rate if you didn't know is uh now at 4.7 so it's basically getting closer to 5 percent uh it is the highest point in six years so you can say what you want about stat scan but it is an indicator showing that really things are getting more expensive and when things get more expensive for the consumer obviously it will force people to behave differently they will make different choices as well they will prioritize certain things and we'll talk about how that can work but essentially when you have a society investing more on food obviously expectations will change and the way they perceive and prioritize food in their lives will change as well,
It's not necessarily for the worse it could actually be for the better so this could actually be an opportunity for the entire food industry from farm to fork i think you see um the way i see what's happening with food inflation right now is that we are we are departing an era of cheap food we actually kind of started that process about a decade ago after the uh the great financial crisis of 2008 2009 uh we saw a shift uh all of a sudden like for the longest time the average household in canada was spending about nine nine point two percent of of its budget on on food,
In america in the united states it's actually close to six percent so those are pretty low percentages historically in the 1970s it was actually close to 15 percent so you can see that really food has taken uh is not as significant financially in our lives than it used to be but i think things are starting to shift again towards uh not the 15 but we are expecting that percentage to increase a little bit similar to what we would see for example in uh in europe where percentages are actually close to 15 percent for example uh so that's really something that you want to keep in mind if you are in the food industry,
If you're producing food distribution food if you're a supplier well first of all i have to thank you very much for doing what right now in the industry but i must say i've been in awe with what I have seen across the country since the beginning of a pandemic miracle after miracle the industry has delivered making canada food secure which is really awesome however of course we can't really overlook issues like supply chains which has impacted the entire world labor which is impacting the entire world climate which is impacting the entire world i mean sherry's presentation was very much about how do you actually uh mitigate the effects of of mother nature and so on and so forth and all of these things are making the production of food way more complicated than just five or ten years ago and that's not gonna change it's only gonna continue,
So i am not sure canadians actually appreciate how complicated things have been or have become but it is what it is and and that's why i think when prices increase i'm not overly concerned about food inflation overall i think we need inflation obviously at five percent it's starting to reach a point where families will actually fall behind i'm more concerned about food affordability to be honest uh wages aren't there and in fact just to give you a piece of data according to the un canada was ranked 18th last year in 2020 when it comes to food affordability so we're not we're not first but we're not 150th but here's the problem we've actually gone down to 24th this year in 2021 and my guess looking at what's happening around the world we may actually see canada drop even further,
And people will know that people are noticing at the grocery store especially at the meat counter with proteins it's incredible i mean this year really the big story were proteins animal proteins next year it's going to be dairy and food service and food service is we are expecting restaurants to increase prices their input cost is going up labor cost is going up demand is actually kind of is going to be shifting unfortunately for food service but people are going to be spending more time at home we are looking at a more domesticated marketplace people will be living working from home in fact according to one of our studies which we released a few months ago 70 percent of the workforce in canada by the end of 2022,
Which is next year 70 of the workforce in canada will be working from home at least five days a month uh every month so think about your relationship with food when you're at home versus when you're at work think of the restaurants things of the coffees think of the commute you have more time to think you have more time to plan the way you consume will be different when you consume uh food will be also different the snacks everything so that shift that that towards domestication is really going to be redefining entire food market overall and i actually think that this could be a great opportunity and this is why we're starting to see the rise of ghost kitchens the rise of dark stores,
So you can see that everyone is looking at the supply chain very differently because it's more democratized consumers are online they're looking at food beyond the major grocers they're looking at food beyond the major chains they're actually looking at buying food from different places um with farmers i mean there's been some really interesting uh projects i spoke to some groups farmer groups and then and some of them are actually trying to set up a ghost kitchen to serve meals prepared on the farm delivered to city dwellers can you imagine in a ghost kitchen if you don't know what it is it's basically a box no pickup counter no dining hall you basically have uber eats skip going there to pick up meals and those meals are delivered to people's homes and they want to connect with farms because we've been talking about supply chains we've been talking about the well-being of farmers and processors and people are interested in knowing more about working conditions and so the pandemic really has not only made the supply chain more transparent.
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