Justin Doria of Golden Star Burgers in Thornhill, Ont., has had a close relationship with his beef supplier for 40 years, but that hasn’t protected him from price hikes. He says he is paying about 15 per cent more for beef.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Nick Gasparro’s family has sliced and diced beef in a Bloor Street butcher’s shop in Toronto since 1958.
Forty minutes north in Thornhill, Ont., Justin Doria’s family has charred burgers in an old-school diner since 1964.
And more than 3,000 kilometres away, John Smith’s family has bred and grazed cattle on Alberta grasslands for three generations.
The butcher, the burger-flipper and the rancher all have a stake in what is becoming an increasingly tense moment in North American beef, and they all raise questions about what will come next.
The beef commodity price is at a record high, the national herd is at a record low, and at the end of the line sits the consumer, who this year paid near-record prices for a pound of beef.
A trade war casts a shadow over entwined Canada-U.S. supply chains – and a steakhouse staple
And these sky-high beef prices across North America have captured the attention of the White House. Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump told American ranchers to drop prices, threatening to quadruple Argentine imports. On Friday, he turned his ire to meat packers, accusing them of collusion and price fixing, and he ordered the Justice Department to investigate the largest ones on the continent.
But there are few villains in this story, which affects Canadians as much as it does Americans. The beef sectors in Canada and the U.S. are intricately interwoven, and the causes of high beef prices across the board are less nefarious than Mr. Trump suggests, but also perhaps more systemic and difficult to fix. North America’s legacy beef industry – and all the stakeholders along the value chain – are facing the consequences of a climate that is increasingly hostile to cattle ranching.
Eight years ago, the average Canadian could buy four pounds of beef for every hour worked. Today, they can only purchase around 3.2 pounds an hour.
Beef prices are currently 23 per cent above the five-year average, with ground beef climbing 19 per cent. Beef prices climbed 5.5 times higher than the average rate of food inflation between July, 2024, and July, 2025.
On the surface, this might look like good news for Alberta rancher John Smith. High consumer prices are underpinned by high commodity prices, which climbed 6 per cent between July and October, according to the Bank of Canada.
But Mr. Smith isn’t rolling in dough. He’s recouping losses from years of drought. This drought – which devastated ranchers in 2021, 2022 and 2023 – parched the pasture lands and destroyed hay yields. Mr. Smith couldn’t afford to feed his cows. He sold many for slaughter. And because everyone else had to do the same, beef prices were low. Not only did Mr. Smith have to part with some of the mother cows needed to birth and rear the next generation, he had to do it at low prices.
In 2019, Mr. Smith had 600 mother cows. Now he has 400.
And therein lies the fundamental problem, said Mike von Massow, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Guelph. In January, the total number of Canadian cattle and calves was 10.9 million, the lowest since 1988. It is a story of supply and demand, he said.
Nick Gasparro’s family has been operating a butcher shop in Toronto since 1958. He says he is paying anywhere from 15 per cent to 30 per cent more per cut.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Trump’s accusations that meat packing is a highly consolidated business across North America are true. In Canada specifically, four plants slaughter more than 90 per cent of the country’s beef. However, that has been the case for decades, said Prof. von Massow, and there’s no evidence these companies are fattening their margins. In fact, low supply means higher buying prices for packers.
But the costs are being passed down the chain, to butchers like Nick Gasparro of Vince Gasparro’s Meat Market. Mr. Gasparro is paying anywhere from 15 per cent to 30 per cent more per cut.
So far, Mr. Gasparro has managed to avoid passing these costs down to his customers, which are both household consumers and restaurants.
But beef is a loss leader right now and while that’s a price he’s willing to pay to keep customers coming in the door, he isn’t sure how much longer he can keep it up. Eventually he will have to pass the costs along. And he worries that his customers won’t come back.
“We’re an old shop,” he said. “We’ve been here for a long time, so we’re trying to bear the cost, but who knows?”
Justin Doria of Golden Star Burgers in Thornhill has had a close relationship with his beef supplier for 40 years. And that’s part of the burger joint’s success. The key is providing consistent, dependable high value to customers. But this decades-old relationship hasn’t protected Mr. Doria from price hikes. He’s paying around 15 per cent more for ground beef.
He is passing the cost along to consumers. For the most part, they haven’t complained too much. A 15-per-cent hike on a $10 burger isn’t too bad. And Mr. Doria will look for other places to cut prices.
“We’re still trying to give our customers value.”
Ultimately, the only thing that will meaningfully bring the price of beef down is rebuilding the national herd, Prof. von Massow said.
Protein craze is helping boost meat prices, whether you’re bulking or not
Opinion: Happy meat won’t save the world. It may even distract from the real issues
“Beef cows are the factory of the beef industry,” he said. “If you shut down a car plant and go down to one shift from two shifts, when demand comes back up, you just add another shift. But you can’t just add another cow.”
For Mr. Smith to return to his previous herd numbers, he would need at least seven years, he said. While selling 200 mother cows can happen with a phone call and a single truck delivery, the breeding, birthing and rearing to turn out a new mother cow takes three years, minimum. Raising 200 of them would take several years of no drought, cheap feed and high cattle prices. Mr. Smith isn’t betting on that happening. He thinks this turn of fortune with good prices (and hopefully good weather) will last five years, at most.
Mr. Smith also knows of a number of ranchers who sold their entire stock during the drought. Most won’t be able to get back into it, not while calf prices are this high.
Instead, he is focused on recouping losses and paying down debt while he still can.
“Really, we’re probably just trying to play catch up. ... I can’t dictate the market, so we just try to provide the best value for money. I want to supply an elite product to Canadian consumers.”