As food prices keep climbing and grocery chains rake in record profits amid slim margins, it’s time to seriously consider a public alternative to the supermarket giants and dépanneurs: municipally owned grocery stores.
It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. In Madison, Wisconsin, a city-owned grocery store is in the works to serve an underserved neighbourhood after the last private grocer pulled out. Atlanta operates two public grocery outlets to tackle food deserts — where full grocers are distant and inaccessible for whole populations, typically due to community poverty and poor profit margins. Chicago is moving ahead with a city-run food market to help poorer residents afford groceries. These U.S. cities do not want to become supermarket empires, rather, they are responding to a market failure causing hunger and poverty. When concentrated corporate ownership meets declining margins and socioeconomic gaps, some neighbourhoods are left with no fresh food options at all.
In New York City, 2025 Democratic Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani is pushing for a public grocery store in every borough. It is a bold idea and campaign policy promise that has emerged in response to rising food insecurity among New Yorkers. The concept gained traction during Mamdani’s Democratic Mayoral Primary campaign, where food justice became one of several economic rallying cries alongside other affordability measures like rent control and free public transit.
Mamdani’s city-run public proposal does not claim to be a silver bullet, and when asked whether it is guaranteed to succeed, he is refreshingly honest: “that’s not the point.” It does not have to be a sure-fire success immediately to be worth trying. What does matter, however, is that it reflects a hunger for real alternatives to corporate profits amid high prices. People want real choice and the freedom to live without hunger, and that does not necessarily mean shelves stocked with 12 brands of sugary cereal owned by the same conglomerate. Instead, it can mean different economic models, different incentives, and a public option that puts people before profit by filling in the gaps where the market creates them. Canada could do more to actually give people that freedom.
So far, our food policy imagination has been largely confined to subsidies, zoning incentives, and casual price monitoring. We also tried the classic Canadian tactic of knocking on international doors and asking very, very nicely for prices to freeze or come down. Canadians can likely tell you whether they have felt the benefits of these current approaches. But what if we went further? What if we treated food access not just as a supply-chain challenge or a matter of affordability, but as infrastructure: as essential to community resilience as transit or libraries?
It might sound weird or radical, but we already operate city-owned systems to deliver essential services: clean water, public transit (to mixed results when they depend on other levels of government to fund), electricity, and garbage collection (in most cities). When we build infrastructure right, as we used to through crown entities and unionized labour, Canadians everywhere benefit, along with future Canadians to come. What makes food, arguably one of the most fundamental needs, any less deserving of that public-minded approach?
Imagine a publicly-run grocery store, administered like city public health services, stocked with healthy, minimally processed foods, priced transparently and sourced from Canadian producers. A kind of physical counterpart to Public Goods, the US-based membership-driven e-commerce brand that offers clean, eco-conscious household essentials at “at-cost” prices to members — this is a model worth emulating. That company thrives on a simple idea: keep things minimal, reduce marketing fluff, and pass savings on to consumers. Like a direct-to-consumer Costco, and it’s pretty cool. The Public Goods annual fee is $65 USD, which matches Costco’s Gold Star membership. For $5.42/month, Canadians could cover overhead for this alternative while accessing everyday items like soap, cereal, and toilet paper without manipulative markups.
Why couldn’t a Canadian municipality do something similar for groceries?
A “Public Goods, but public” store could act as a functional counterweight and price floor to the oligopoly that dominates our grocery sector. Loblaw, Empire, and Metro, Canada’s food retail giants, control more than 60% of Canada’s grocery market. And while they are pressured to talk the talk on affordability, the headlines keep telling another story: record profits, price-fixing scandals, and loyalty programs that harvest more data than they return in savings.
The result is a kind of food retail fatigue. Canadians are tired of being told that choice equals freedom when our “choices” often amount to fifteen kinds of ketchup owned by the same parent company. In grocery aisles across the country, brands that appear to compete — whether in condiments, cereal, or snacks — frequently trace back to a few multinationals like Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, and General Mills. ‘Freedom’ isn’t an endless choice of brand variety. It’s being able to afford ketchup in the first place.
The budgetary pressure on households is so acute that some Canadians are now financing their groceries. Walmart Canada and Amazon recently introduced ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ (BNPL) schemes for online grocery orders, joining a growing list of retailers offering short-term loans at checkout. On Reddit forums, Canadians are sharing stories of using installment plans to buy food, trying to stretch paycheques to meet the end of the month. When the cost of a grocery-run requires increasing debt, the market has already failed.
A municipally run grocery wouldn’t eliminate competition; it would expand it. Much like the existence of Saskatchewan’s provincial crown corporation telecom (Sasktel) helps the province enjoy the lowest telecom rates in Canada, a city-run grocer can help fill in the gaps in grocery services while introducing price competition based on serving people, not profit. It could potentially operate as a social enterprise, reinvesting profits into community programs or price stabilization funds. It could source from local farms and co-ops, support urban agriculture, and act as an anchor tenant in underserved neighbourhoods where commercial grocers have no incentive to go, or worse, have pulled out. This is a pitch for provinces, too: in Ontario we can build an ‘LCBO for groceries’ and use the publicly-owned Ontario Food Terminal to secure a publicly-owned food supply chain.
Critics may argue that it’s just not the government’s role to sell bananas. But the truth is, governments are already deeply involved in the food system in direct ways like public retailers for alcohol, supply chain terminals, and even the supply management system for milk and eggs and the former Canadian Wheat Board. But there is an even larger, indirect impact that warrants alternatives. The federal Nutrition North program subsidizes freight costs in remote communities. Provinces offer food literacy grants and regulate labelling. Municipalities approve land use, support community gardens, and run food banks through partnerships. A public grocery model simply takes that existing patchwork and gives it a front door with democratic oversight.
Of course, such a project would need thoughtful governance and clear boundaries. Not every city has the same need or capacity. But a pilot project in a food desert, perhaps in Toronto’s inner suburbs, or Winnipeg’s North End, could serve as a pilot if we can push past reluctance and try. It could also help push the private sector toward fairer pricing, better transparency, and more responsive service. In short: real competition.
We could introduce a parallel model that puts affordability and access ahead of margins. In an era of growing economic insecurity and collapsing trust, a city-run grocery store won’t fix everything. But it could nourish something we’re starved for: a little more stability, and a little more imagination.
