The Decibel - Why chicken is so expensive right now

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

First, beef prices went sky-high. Now, the price of chicken is getting more expensive — and Canadian chicken production is struggling to keep up with demand. Between a protein craze driving up demand and a supply crunch affecting producers, the wholesale price of chicken has shot up 12 per cent since May, 2025. Kate Helmore is The Globe’s agriculture and food policy reporter. She joins us to explain what’s contributing to chicken’s dramatic rise, and when prices might start to level out. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Prices at the grocery store have been high for a while now. We've talked about the rising cost of beef on the show before. Now there's another protein staple of the Canadian diet that's getting more expensive. Chicken. Since last spring, the wholesale price of some chicken products is up around 12%. So today, Kate Hellmore, the Globe's agriculture reporter, is here. She'll talk about why the price of poultry is rising, and yes, it has something to do with the protein craze,

how the concept of supply management fits into this, and when the price might level out. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Kate, welcome back to The Deceble. Thanks for having me. So, Kate, I was recently at Costco, and I picked up a pack of chicken thighs, and it costs about $35 for about two kilograms,

and it kind of surprised me when I saw that, price. But can you give me a reality check? Like, how high are chicken prices right now compared to what we would normally expect? It's a good question. Okay, so I'll give you these numbers. So in April, the consumer price for fresh or frozen chicken rose 2.6% year over year. So it's compared to April the previous year. That was the first time that April was the first time since September 2025, that annual price hikes were lower than 5%. So the price of chicken has been steadily increasing. since September 2025. Okay, so that's probably why when I went to the store and I saw that price, I was just kind of like,

oh my gosh, it's much harder than I expected. Exactly, exactly. It kind of reached an inflection point for you where you were like, oh, wait, this is not what I was expecting. This is higher than I budgeted for in my Costco run. And I will say it's probably very shocking to me because I'm not the one that regularly does the groceries in my household. So when I saw the price, I was surprised.

So it's kind of part of it, right? Like price hikes are kind of insidious and gradual. And sometimes if you take a break from shopping, you go back, that's especially when you see the disparity, whereas if you go every single week, it just kind of gradually happens. Exactly. Is it the same across all cuts of chicken? Like, is dark meat up as much as white meat, for example? That's a good question. The cut that is up the most is breast, which is also typically the highest value of them. And then wings are somewhere in the middle, and then legs are up the least. They're also the cheapest cut of the chicken,

typically. How important is chicken to Canadians' diets? So when we're looking at the meat livestock sector, we have something called the protein trifecta. So you've got your beef, your chicken, and your pork. And chicken is the most consumed animal meat protein in Canada. In 2025, for example, the per capita disappearance, the consumption, was about 35.64 kilograms. So the average Canadian consumed about 35 kilograms of a chicken a year. And that's actually slightly higher than 2024. So we've seen those, that consumption go up.

Interesting. Okay. So that just gives us a sense of how important and how much Canadians consume per year here. So the big question why we have you on the show today is what are the reasons why? So just give us a list first and then we'll kind of go through them. So what are the reasons why the price is going up? Yeah. So it's actually a matter of both supply and demand factors, kind of all coming together at a head right now.

It's got lots of different things going on, such as GLP 1, so the EZMPICs. and what that's doing to consumer preferences. It's connected to beef prices as well. And then you've also got mixed into that supply management. So buckle up. It's going to get complicated. Okay, well, let's start with the, you said GLP-1s and OZMPIC and how that is impacting the price.

What's going on with that? Yes. Okay. So the GLP 1, so you're OZempics. For those who don't already know, their medication, you can take that suppresses appetite. And so what we found that it's having is kind of radical effect on how consumers eat. So just for some numbers, about three million Canadians are currently

on gLP ones of some kind. And so when you take a gLP one, it suppresses the appetite, limits how much you want to eat every day. And as you lose weight, you also lose muscle mass. And so what the recommendation is, is to eat a lot of protein. So the average recommendation is about 1 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram on your body. So you do the math yourself. So what we're seeing is protein maxing. People want to consume more protein. If you go to the grocery store now, even take away the animal protein side of things, just go to the checkout, look at what's on, you know, you know, with a stands there. And what you'll see is it used to just be chocolate bars and it was just chocolate and now it's like chocolate plus protein. Everything has protein now.

Everything is adding protein in. Even things that had protein in it, they're advertising that there's protein in it. For example, cottage cheese. That's that's a number that you see. There's this many grams of protein in there. Yeah. Oh, like milk products, right? You're seeing like protein plus cartons of milk because everyone is trying to... Yogurt. Everyone is trying to consume as much protein as possible. That is the consumer trend right now. A little bit of is probably like a little bit of a fad as dietary trends always are. But there is some long-term kind of shifts happening because this pretty revolutionary drug is hitting the marketplace. So it's the GLP ones, but it's also, I think, like you said, it's a societal thing where the protein crazes everywhere. So, yeah, I mean, I've been influenced by people on instance.

and other social media's where it's just like you need more protein in your diet. And so that is also factoring into why people are eating more chicken. Totally. I mean, it's also probably tied into this like whole manospir moment that we're having right now, the hyper wellness, like all of this. There's so many things coming to head that is driving this protein demand. And if we zoom back and we look at chicken, it's also connected to another protein. Mm-hmm.

So the other protein we're talking about is beef. And we actually had a whole episode with you about the price of beef shooting up here. So there are supply issues with beef. That's because of record low cattle herd numbers, which has upped the price. So how does that affect the price of chicken? Absolutely. Okay, so we're seeing kind of a really low national herd as far as beef goes. We have a supply crunch.

Tune into that episode if you want to listen to it. It's a really fascinating story about what's going on there too. But what we see is that beef prices have climbed 23% above the five-year average. So quite a significant hike. Ground beef, for example, which is one of the more affordable parts of the beef, has climbed by 19%. And these prices aren't going to correct anytime soon, by the way. So again, tune to that previous episode, you understand the beef cycle. But that cattle cycle is about 10 to 15 years long.

So it's going to take a long time to rebuild that national herd, rebuild the supply. Historically, ground beef was cheaper than chicken. But since about mid-20204, that shifted. And so consumers, such as yourself, who are going to cost, And it's saying, okay, well, we need to get protein for the week, as seeing actually chickens a little bit more affordable right now than beef. We can't afford the beef, instead of reaching for the chicken instead. So you're also seeing this.

As prices have gone up for beef, then we're seeing an increase in demand for chicken. You know, more demand, higher prices, basic laws of supply and demand. And then another reason is right now we're in the thick of summer and it's barbecue season. So high demand for chicken and high demand for beef. We'll be right back. Okay, Kate, so we've established why the demand of chicken has gone up, the protein craze, there's the beef shortage, the people want more chicken. But you mentioned that there are supply issues with chicken right now as well. So why is there a supply crunch for chicken?

Okay, so on this point, we probably have to step back for a second and talk a little bit about something called supply management. Okay, so tell the people. Tell the people. So I've been on the show before talking about supply management. Typically, when we talk about supply management, we talk about dairy because of the highest, profile of supply management. But poultry is also supply managed alongside eggs. So what is supply management? Basically, it means that at a national level, we cap the production of chicken. And the idea is that the productions should match the demand, which creates a stable pricing structure,

which means the producers should always receive a price for their product that is above their cost of production. There's lots of philosophical reasons why we do this. We've been doing it since you know, the 1960s and 70s. The idea is that it keeps farmers in business. It's key to food security. And by keeping farmers into business, it keeps rural communities alive. Okay, so we'll park that. So supply of chicken in Canada is a controlled thing.

The chicken farmers of Canada, which is the national organizing body for this, hands out quotas on an eight-week basis, saying this is how much chicken you are allowed to produce. And it's handed down to each farmer. This is your number. So 10,000, whatever. it is, right? And so that's capped. Why eight weeks? It's the cycle. That's how long it takes to basically take a chick to turn it into a broiler hen,

which is what we slaughter and eat for meat. Okay. So basically every eight weeks, the chicken farmers of Canada goes to farmers and says this is the amount of chickens you can produce. Yeah, this is your quota. We call it the quota. So that makes sense to me. Sounds like the quota goes out every eight weeks. But then why didn't the chicken farmers of Canada, which is the board that controls the quota, just up the quota sooner? because I feel like the things we've mentioned here when it comes to demand, like the protein craze and the beef issues would be kind of a signal that there would be more demand for chicken. So why didn't they raise the quota? Chicken Farmers of Canada has been substantially increased in the quota.

In fact, from September to November, the marketing board set the quota at 8% above the base rate, so the normal level, which is the highest allocation in the organization's history, according to its 2025 annual report. So it has been increasing that quota, but it doesn't mean the farmers have been able to meet the quota. In fact, the farmers have been falling about 1 to 2% below the quota. They haven't actually been able to produce enough chickens per their allotment. And that's kind of got some stuff to do with some complicated things that have been happening as far as avian flu goes and the US. So we can kind of step into that. Yeah, explain that part. So how does the avian flu fit into this picture?

Absolutely. Okay, so avian influenza, for those who don't know, is a disease that affects, you know, birds. It doesn't have a substantial impact on broiler chickens. So that's your kind of fattened, ready to go chickens. But it does have an effect on laying hens. And so if we look at the chicken production cycle, it all starts with an egg that is then fertilized, that is then turned into a chick. And then that chicken's fattened and turned a broiler hen. If you don't have your laying hens, you don't have your eggs, which means the entire production chain is slowed down.

And avian influenza had a really devastating impact in the US where we were seeing like enormous poultry farms, some with flocks of three million chickens having to coal their entire inventory. Right. So that effect is now trickling through because we import roughly 20% of the eggs that we need. We import from the US. And so there's a shortage of that very base fundamental. If this is like a car manufacturing, it's almost like we're missing like steel, right? And so it's like, well, how do you make the car if you don't have the fundamental ingredient needed to get to that final production stage? Okay, interesting.

So even though Canada has chicken farmers of Canada, we still rely on the US when it comes to laying hens and the fertilized eggs. Yes, we do. We do. There's no item that goes without trade entirely. So, yeah, we do rely on the US for a certain amount of this. and they've been seeing a shortage on that front, which is trickling down to us as well. And so we're not quite able to meet that production threshold. I understand also that there is an impact, something to do with chili.

Can you tell me about that part of the story? Right, yeah, we can seem out that way. Okay, so part of supply management, if we're going to control national production of something to try to keep prices at a slightly elevated or stable level, we can't also be importing those things willy-nilly from our trading partners. So we put restrictions on how much chicken we import from our trading partners. We mostly import chicken from the US and Mexico, but we have another trade agreement called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's basically our trade agreement that we have with the Pacific Nations. And so under that agreement, we do have a certain allotment if imports allowed. But typically none of those countries that were in that agreement were all that interested in sending chicken to Canada, right? Why is that? They just didn't seem to see us as a valuable export market. Maybe they just kind of had their own markets. They didn't really, they weren't export heavy. Lots of different reasons. Why? That changed. In 2023, Chile entered the CPTPP. And they now pretty much almost single-handedly feel that entire quota allotment. Chicken farmers of Canada weren't entirely

expecting that. They kind of had their production level set at a certain point under the assumption that they weren't really going to be getting many imports from new specific countries, right? And then that suddenly changed. And so they kept the quota flat. Chicken Farmers of Canada responded to the influx of Chilean chicken by holding domestic production steady. And the CFC didn't increase the quota until mid-2025. At this point, we're already seeing these demand signals. We're already seeing high prices for beef, or you're seeing high demand for chicken. And maybe the criticism of this, you know, chicken farmers at Canada in this moment would be you should have been reacting to this. You should have seen the writing on the wall and you should have been increasing the

national quota and therefore production in anticipation of this, rather than being on the back foot and now having to up production when we've already seen the high prices. So let me make sure I understand this correctly. So because they were getting these imporns from Chile and they had to make sure that that there wasn't too many chickens on the market, right? So we have a flat amount of chicken for the CFC, the chicken farmers of Canada, and then there's these numbers of chickens come from Chile, and therefore they weren't seeing the problems that were starting to happen. Yeah, the idea of supply management is to manage the supply, right?

If you have an oversupply of chicken, then that's going to depress prices. And the whole system is designed to make sure that doesn't really happen, right? That prices stay at a certain level so that farmers can, people making money, money that is above their costs of production. And so, yeah, they flattened the quota. No more production was kind of allowed until mid-20205. Right. And meanwhile, they should have potentially, at least the criticism is that they should have been

upping the production. What you'll say here is that some people will argue that supply management stabilizes prices, which is also good for the consumer. Supply management is a very political and tense subject. And so critics of it will say this is a case in point where the market did not respond to supply, the consumers did not benefit because of some artificial controls in there. And as a result, we're now paying for it because you prioritized keeping prices high for the farmer, not allowing the consumer to benefit from this increased trade that would have depressed our prices

and we would have seen lower chicken prices at the grocery store, maybe. Again, these are just arguments, two sides of a divide that are always going at each other, but that's kind of laying it out. I mean, on the flip side, I think I was reading something about how when it comes to supply management and the avian flu, that was a case where we kind of saw the price of chicken stable here in Canada versus in the U.S. where it was going up quite a bit. Absolutely. That's a really, really good point to make too, is that people, proponents of supply management will say that supply management ultimately, because it makes the business affordable for farmers, means we get to keep smaller farms in business. And if you're thinking about responsible animal husbandry and the fact that since we first start domesticating the animal, we've dealt with animal-borne diseases that can wipe out entire herds. The idea is don't put all your eggs in one basket. So having numerous farms more spread out that a smaller scale is better when it comes to disease control.

So instead of culling a flock of three million because the U.S. sector does not have supply management and it's hugely consolidated, we can face something like avian flu by culling much. smaller flocks. So that that's kind of a fundamental argument in favor. And yeah, when we look at the avian flu, we can say, hey, this is maybe an example of where supply management was good for us where it worked. If this is a supply management issue, does that mean that the increase in the price of chicken right now, at least, is a uniquely Canadian issue or are other countries seeing high chicken prices? There's a good question. Let's take a look at the U.S. A caveat to start off with. It's really hard when we compare ourselves to the US. They have cheaper cost of production across the board. I mean, just look at, you don't have to drive down to the US and see

the gas price, right, and to know that. But we do know the avian flu hit the US bad. We did to see high prices there for their eggs and their chicken meat as well. However, US production seems to have rebounded much faster than ours has been able to. Prices hit a high in mid-20205 and have since fallen and show every sign that they will continue falling, depend on demand. But US breasts and wings remain cheap compared to Canadian chicken, for example. So you can therefore make the case that actually the market has been able to correct itself. A free market in the US has been able to correct itself faster than Canada's more control, supplied managed market.

On the avian flu point, we have seen that it was disruptive to the food supply, both in the US and here in Canada. Are there solutions that could be worked into the food system to avoid this in the future? Yeah, I mean, we just spoke about proponents of supply management. We'll say this is one of our solutions, right, is we keep more smaller businesses in business, which spreads out our supply and therefore insulates us, right, from outbreaks. There's obviously also all the science and the medical stuff that goes on, the biosecurity things, the keeping farmers in business in general more geographically spread out. The CFIA's response to the outbreak, for example, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is the one that manages avian flu outbreaks.

So how quickly do we call? How quickly do we lock down? How traceable is our operations so that we do see there's an outbreak. We can see where that chicken came from and we can alert all the other farms and we can do widespread testing. These are things that already happen. They can always be improved upon. Avian flu isn't really going anywhere. This is something the industry is just faced as a reality.

is something they're going to be dealing with moving forward. Okay. So, Kate, beef is up, chicken is up. So where are the cheap proteins right now? Yeah, I don't want to sit back as the guest on this show and tell your listeners they just have to suck it up and I guess eat lentils, right? Because it does really suck. It sucks that we just seems to be everywhere we look, prices are on the up.

And just as a little caveat on this point, free prices aren't going to go down, not while there's still issues going on the straight. one third of the fertilizer that we use in this world goes through that channel. Straight of humus, yep. Yes, straight of humus. So, and those prices are going up and they're not going to go down in time soon. That's going to have trickle-down effects into food production, and therefore, we're paying at the grocery store checkout. We need to, as a nation, as policymakers, have serious conversations about how we insure food supply,

how we think about national security, how we buttress our trade routes and our trade infrastructure to make things move smoothly. competition questions such as the consolidation of the retail sector because again what the farmer is getting is not necessarily what the retailer charges you there can be a markup there right so there's all these different questions to have which are much more top down at a national level that I really that's what the reporting that we do here at the global mail right but as far as day to day stuff goes before we see seismic shifts and how we think about food in this country remember that not all cuts are created equal. So maybe you're a sucker for chicken breast, but remember the chicken legs are a little bit more affordable. Pork, for instance, so we add that protein trifecta. You've got

your chicken, your beef and your pork. Pork prices aren't as high up. And consumer preferences don't go to pork. It's the least preferred of the free proteins. The other thing that we'll see is that Canadians are very picky with the kind of meat and the kind of cuts that we consume. So we like the wings, the breast, we like the belly of the pork for the bacon. We like certain cuts of beef. We can expand our horizons. There's other countries. For example, we ship a ton of the cuts of meat that no one in Canada will consume. We ship it to Asia, such as, you know, the faces, the ears, the hooves. And then obviously, there's also non-animal based proteins. So you have your pulses, tofu, that kind of stuff. I mean, the big question then, and you've kind of laid out that we're going to continue to

see grocery prices remain high. But when it comes to chicken, let's bring it back to the chicken, how long will it take for the price of chicken to come down? I guess like will it be faster than what we're seeing with beef, which could take years to rebuild herds? It probably will be faster than beef. This cycle is a lot faster. It takes a lot less time to get a chicken from an egg to something on your plate than it does to get a cow from, you know, the belly of a mother cow or the way to a piece of steak. The cycle is not as long. Also, the issues are maybe not as systemic as they are in beef. And, you know, go listen to that episode if you need to hear that. But it's not going down anytime soon. They probably will come down from the 2026 highs is what analysts are

telling me. But I think I had one of them told me, don't expect chicken breast a free 99 on flies and grocery stores anytime soon. That's not happening. Oh, Kate, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was Kate Hellmore, the Globe's Agriculture Reporter. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, and Mahal Stein.

Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.