The Current - Canada's soaring beef prices

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

An Alberta cattle producer has been steering his herd through years of drought and says it feels pretty good to have more 'jingle in his jeans' right now with record high beef prices. And a Winnipeg butcher says in spite of eye popping beef prices, his customers so far are still willing to fork over big bucks for the right cut. We speak with Sylvain Charlebois, a professor and senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, and a visiting scholar at McGill University about what’s fueling Canada’s soaring beef prices — and how that can change.

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of The Debaters, the show where we answer your most burning questions, like, do candles deserve more appreciation? Canada's best comedians wax on about it in this week's new episode, so listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. As anyone planning a roast beef dinner this holiday season will know, the meat may hopefully be tender, but the price tag can be tough to swallow. Beef prices have been hitting record highs, climbing more than 17% over the last year. There are a number of factors for the sticker shock at the meat counter. We begin this morning at the source, with the ranchers.

They are having a profitable year, but they're also making some tough choices. Our producer, Alison Dempster, caught up with one farmer in southern Alberta. There you go. Gates closed. My name is Greg Hawkewood. I live in the Madden area, which is northwest of Calgary, and we're ranchers out here, and we run 250 head of commercial beef cattle. The size of your herd, how has it changed in recent years? We used to be around that 280, 290, and we've been slowly declining because of the situation that we're in with the, with,

drought. We definitely need moisture, especially snow. Usually if we get the big snows in March, something, they're wet and heavy, it helps kind of replenish, but we need a lot of it because the soil is so dry and the dugouts and the sluze and all the riparian areas are dry. We're standing in our bread heifer pen, and they'll start calving here in the 1st of March. This is where we keep them and give them a little extra feed so we can get a little more, little more grow on them. And they're standing here looking at us, eating their feet out of their trough, and they're full and got nothing to talk about. How would you describe the market right now? That's a very good question.

We hear on the news and everybody how expensive beef is in the stores. Well, the reason that came about was it's all started about five years ago when we got a drought that came into Alberta, southern Saskatchewan. And with that drought, as things progressed, the grasslands and everything couldn't produce like they normally do. So the ranchers and the farmers had to downsize. if you overgraze and when it does come back the moisture

it takes years to get that land back into production properly so we downsize cut your herds down just so that it stays sustainable with the grass what's it like to be making these decisions it's difficult

because we're a way of life we're proud of how we raise their cattle and what we do and it's a tough decision to to downsize because because we've worked we've put years and years into these animals and and then you got to sell them off yeah it's a sad thing but but it's just a necessity that we have to do also in that time the prices started getting higher because of supply and demand because the cow herd was being sold off and and and As it got going here in the last two years, the beef industry, a lot of the older ranchers, they saw an opportunity.

Maybe it's time to get out because of the beef prices. They've never had such high prices. So they've sold off their herds. So it's a tough situation. But on the other hand, with the price of calves and cows have gone up the way they have, this is the most profit we've ever made ever ever so it's a kind of nice the skies at the coffee shop or whatever we've got a little extra jingle in our jeans so it's kind of nice it's it's kind of nice but but as consumers i can see where they're disappointed too but but two is they got to remember everything all their prices went up well so do ours we still

got to go to the same grocery stores we still got to buy the same fuel fertilizers all our inputs machinery and have gone way up. So actually in the end, we've done really well this year, but we still got all the major costs of our inputs to produce the feed to grow these cattle. Greg Hawkewood ranches and farms in Rockview County north of Calgary. After the ranch, the next stop is naturally the butcher shop. And despite the high prices, Maya Fontaine has her eye on a special cut of sirloin. I was actually looking at that one.

It looks quite tempting. Yeah, it's very lovely. This one is a top sterling is $62. I mean, I haven't noticed a big difference between what I'm paying here and then what I'm paying at a big box grocery store. It's high everywhere. Sean Miller is the owner and operator

of Miller's Meets, a family butcher shop in Winnipeg. He is shocked at the prices these days, but happy that customers are still coming through his door. The changes I've seen over the last five years, in the beef industry have been pretty drastic. Obviously, the price has gone up substantially. A ribeye years ago used to be around $10 a steak, and now we're sitting at anywhere from 20 to 30, depending on the grade.

Even some of the off cuts that used to be cheap are no longer cheap. Chuck roast, short ribs, tritips, flank steaks, skirt steaks, all those things used to be trim, and now they're actually. actual cuts that people are wanting and they're demanding a big dollar amount from them. It is a little shocking. I will say, however, that a lot of people aren't shying away from buying beef, though. We're still seeing a strong demand for it. Sovan Charlebois is a professor and senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dauhausi University,

also a visiting scholar at McGill University in Montreal. Savan, good morning. Good morning, Matt. Why are beef prices so high? I think you got a piece of the story with your few guests already. I mean, if you go back to 2014, we've gone through this phase before. In 2014, there was a drought making fee costs higher, and there was a bit of a sell-off at the time. But cattle producers did reinvest in their herds, thinking that the economy was there.

You need a strong economy to see more consumers. buying beef, it's a premium product, but also they felt more confident about the future in general and costs to produce were somewhat predictable. This time around it's different. Why? Well, the drought actually impacted most of the continent and the problems are also in the U.S., not just in Canada. I mean, prices are way up in the U.S. as well. And so now, as your rancher did say a lot of people are just exiting, they're cashing out because prices are good, and they've gone through a lot with Mad Cow and everything else. If you want to hear daily news that doesn't hurt your soul and might even be good for your soul,

check out as it happens. I'm Chris Howdy. And I'm Ilkozal. Every day we reach people at the center of the most extraordinary stories, like the doctor who restored a patient's eyesight with a tooth. Or a musician in an orchestra that plays instruments made out of vegetables. Take the scenic route through the day's news with as it happens, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. And so if they cash out, I mean, it takes a long time, right, for cattle production to be ramped back up. It's not as though you can flick a switch and suddenly you have more cattle on the feedlot. It's a two-year cycle, Matt.

Compared to pork or chicken, the production cycle for chickens is basically eight, nine weeks, and for pork, it's three to four months. So they do have that luxury of, they're able to bounce back and recover much more quickly. With cattle, when you're in some sort of an inventory problem, if you're experiencing some inventory problems, you're in for a while. You're going to be experiencing these problems for a while. What impact does that have on food inflation month to month? I mean, we're talking specifically about beef prices and we'll come back to that in a moment. But if you take a look at, as I said, the sticker shock that people feel, when they look at the grocery bill.

What is the impact of this on the larger story of food inflation? It's significant. If you go back to Monday's numbers with statistics Canada, so we were being told that the food inflation rate in grocery stores is at 4.7%. If you take out meat, you go down to 2.8%. So it's big. It's quite significant. And so obviously the problem with beef is affecting meat counter-economics altogether because you see people are spooked by higher beef prices, so they're pivoting and they're going for chicken or pork, but guess what's going on right now?

There's pressure on those two other items of the meat trifecta. And so prices for chicken and pork are also rising as a result of what's going on with beef. Would, and we see this in the United States conversations around this, would importing more beef help bring the prices down? Absolutely. And this is probably the most surprising thing to me with what's going on with beef prices. In the U.S. where beef prices have been skyrocketing, not as much as here in Canada, but they've been skyrocketing and Americans have been quite vocal. The president, President Trump, actually launched an investigation. into meat packing. And meat packing in the U.S. is controlled by four companies. And also, he's

allowing more beef from Argentina and I believe Brazil as well to ease the pressure. In Canada, Ottawa has been mum, hasn't said a word about what's going on. And so we have two packers in Canada, GBS and Cargill, two of four to own private companies. Nobody really knows what's going on there. nobody's asking to look into margins and things like that. So I do question why Ottawa is not saying anything. And there is a committee, an advisory committee, advising global affairs into imports, allowing more imports for beef. And they haven't met since 2015. Are you surprised, I mean, we heard from that butcher there that the prices are high, but he says people are still coming through the door.

Are you surprised that demand for this, what's become now in many ways a luxury, item has remained fairly steady? I'm not surprised. I mean, Canada is known to be not addicted to beef, but we love beef. I mean, it's based on our numbers. So every six months, we publish the Canadian Food Settlement Index. So we look at dietary lifestyles, protein-based dietary lifestyles. And Canada is not, we're not seeing more Canadians turning into

vegans or vegetarians as a result of this. They're just consuming less. They're still buying beef, but they're buying less in volume. We also have this obsession with protein, right, where people are trying to get as much protein as possible. And some of that, I mean, you see social media does influence people, influencers on social media talking about eating more ground beef, for example. Oh, it's a big deal.

So when you go to a grocery store, it's basically 35, 40% of your budget. It's spent on protein. And that's why you're starting to see more products with extra protein. There are a lot more protein-fortified products out there. Even Pop-Tarts have more protein these days and coffee. So you can see that people are, we have a lot of protein orphans out there looking for their protein fix beyond the meat counter. So you don't believe that this is going to, I mean, not just steer people towards vegetables, authoritarianism or veganism, but would it, if the beef prices are high, it seemed like a few years

ago we were talking about the rise of what people called fake meat, meat substitutes, this isn't going to lead to a spike in kind of plant-based meat alternatives? I would say, I mean, people are buying less and they're exploring other options. And I would include, of course, the most popular vegetable protein sources out there would be tofu, hummus, things like that, lentils, chickpeas. Yes, people are exploring. Not necessarily the hybrids, like the, you just mentioned fake meat, but the products that are, the analogs that we call them at the grocery store, they're there to build bridges between diets if you're hosting.

And if you don't have time to prepare your own vegan or vegetarian food, it's there. But sales have been sluggish. People are more focused on other things. So it's quite interesting. Let me just ask you just the last couple of minutes. this is people are getting into the period of the year now where ideally they're going to have a lot of people over maybe you're cooking a lot of food and you're wondering how much you're going to be spending they're wondering whether these prices are going to come down when could we see prices come down or at the very least not rise as quickly as they are right now on the path we're on right now i i certainly don't see how beef prices will will drop before mid year 2027 that's a In Canada's food price report that we release on December 4th, that's our prediction. And meat prices will continue to become a problem.

And because of higher beef prices, all meat components at the meat counter are becoming more expensive, which is why I think Ottawa should look into this matter as quickly as possible as what we're seeing in the U.S. And what would just, in the last minute that we have, what would you want Ottawa to do? You said that these are structural issues and you said you've written that they are politically uncomfortable to fix, but you can't ignore them anymore. That's correct. So I would do two things. Well, actually, I would do three things.

One, I would investigate into meatpacking in Canada. So looking at GBS and Cargill. Two, I would look at the TRQ advisory committee that has not met since 2015. I would basically ask why aren't we meeting? Why are we looking at beef imports a little bit more carefully? And three, I would call the chicken farmers of Canada and ask them, why aren't we producing more chicken in Canada? Whole chicken prices have gone up 27% this year. With supply management, that's uniscusable.

We should actually see more stable prices regardless of what's going on with demand. So they've actually missed nine cycles. So for a year and a half, Matt, they haven't produced enough chicken for Canadians. So I would ask that question to chicken farms of Canada. Sylvan Charlebaugh, good to speak with you as always. Happy holidays, and thank you very much. Happy holidays, see you too. Sovonne Charlebois, a professor and senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University,

also a visiting scholar at McGill University in Montreal. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC. c.ca slash podcasts.