Consumers Starting To See Dairy Prices Increase

Last fall, the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) recommended an increase of at least 8.4% on the price of milk paid to producers.

For butter, the increase will exceed 12%.

This is the largest increase announced by the CDC in more than 50 years, almost double the previous record.

Sylvain Charlebois is a Food Professor at Dalhousie University.

"We have started to see increases of anywhere between 5 to 15 per cent, depending on where you live. That's for fluid milk prices," he said. "We are expecting dairy products to follow suit in weeks to come. Bottom line is that the dairy section of the grocery store will become more expensive, unfortunately, for most Canadians."

Charlebois has concerns with how the process unfolded.

"The Canadian Dairy Commission every year will survey over 200 dairy farmers and will ask them about the cost to produce milk essentially and that's how they come up with the recommendation. To have access to that data has been impossible. We don't know how the sample design actually works. How it impacts the evaluation of costs. We don't know where these farms are coming from unfortunately. The transparency of the system itself is questionable at best."