Illustration by Kat Frick Miller
Welcome to The Globe’s series, What’s in my cart?, where we ask Canadians how they stock their kitchens. Have your own personal grocery story? Share it here.
Alan Sim grocery shops for a family of 12. Feeding a dozen people – including a son, his girlfriend, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild – is a feat in itself, but on top of having many mouths to feed, Sim has also dealt with the challenge of grocery shopping in Canada’s Arctic for 30 years.
The 68-year-old lives in Cambridge Bay, a hamlet that is home to about 1,700 people, located on Victoria Island in Nunavut. The small enclave is a fly-in community, with no roads leading in or out, meaning that all groceries are either flown in or brought into the town by sea for sale at one of the two grocery stores: Arctic Co-op and the Northern Store.
Both grocery stores faced scrutiny late last year when residents in Nunavut and northern Labrador wrote to government officials and lamented their excessive prices. That’s even with initiatives such as Nutrition North Canada – a federal program that offers subsidies to grocery companies in remote Indigenous communities to offset the cost of transporting healthy foods. One video posted on TikTok last February showed prices on grocery items including $63.87 for a six-kilogram frozen turkey, $8 for a bag of frozen green beans and $35.49 per kilogram for boneless chicken breast.
As for Sim, who works for the weather station at the Cambridge Bay Regional Airport, he says he spends about $1,000 biweekly on groceries for his family, some of which is reimbursed through the Jordan’s Principle, a federal initiative that ensures First Nations children have access to services and needs, including up to $500 a month for healthy food. Sim, whose household is Inuit besides him, uses the subsidy to purchase the healthy staples his household enjoys: six-kilogram packages of ground beef, potatoes, fruits, healthy snacks, juices, vegetables and milk.
“It can be hard to feed 12 people, so we started creating a menu,” he says.
How I save money on groceries: Creating a menu of what we are going to eat for the next week or two helps us budget and shop around paydays for myself and my son. We also substitute frozen chicken for fresh, which saves around $10.
How I splurge on groceries: Chocolates and pop for my grandchildren are our splurge. Those items are not reimbursed through the Jordan’s Principle, so it comes straight out of my pocket. We also go through about four litres of milk in about two days, so we buy about 20 litres of milk every two weeks for the grandkids.
The hardest shopping habit to keep up: We have to be open to substitutes since there can be shortages on certain food items at our grocery stores, such as milk, produce and eggs. Usually it’s only a few days where there are shortages on certain items before we get a shipment. But we have to be open to alternatives.
How I’ve changed my eating habits recently: We’ve become flexible with our grocery shopping. There are certain items we go to the co-op for, where the house brand or generic grocery items are cheaper. For the kids, it looks just the same as the brand-name stuff.
Five items always in my cart:
- Milk – Beatrice – $6.05: We go through a lot of milk in the house. It can sometimes be a bit cheaper here in Nunavut because of our subsidy.
- Cereal – Co-op brand – $17: Co-op sells bags of cereal that are nearly a kilogram. We typically buy it once a week, since the kids enjoy it for breakfast.
- Ground beef – Northern Store – $20 to $30 for two kilograms: They have a good butcher at Northern grocery store. It’s high-quality ground beef, versus at Co-op, where most of the meat they sell is frozen.
- Chicken strips – Northern Store – $30 for a one-kilogram bag: These frozen chicken strips make a quick meal for the family, often with either a baked or mashed potato, some carrots, or maybe some brussels sprouts or turnips.
- Cream of chicken soup – Campbell’s Soup – $3.99: We enjoy soups in our house, and this is one of my favourites, as well as Campbell’s tomato soup.