Are tariffs raising grocery prices in Canada? Here is what the flyers actually show.

What is actually tariffed at the grocery store right now?

On August 22, 2026 the United States put a 50% tariff on about C$27.6 billion of Canadian goods, mostly dairy ingredients, honey, alcohol and autos. Canada answered on September 8 with counter-tariffs on the same value of US goods at 15%, 25% and 50%. The official list runs to 629 tariff codes. Here is every food item on it.

Not on the list: meat, poultry, seafood, fresh fruit and vegetables, fruit juice, peanut butter, coffee, tea, rice, pasta, cooking oil, sugar, pet food, and every prepared food outside the baking mixes above. Also untouched on the Canadian side: butter, fluid milk, yogurt and ice cream. If a product is Canadian-made, the counter-tariff cannot apply to it at all.

Is cheese more expensive since September 8?

We track the same cheese items at the same chains week after week. For each one, we take its median flyer price in the eight weeks before the tariff and its median price since, then report the median of those per-item changes. That is the method the Bank of Canada used to measure the 2025 tariffs, at flyer resolution. Cheese is the tariffed item; milk, butter, yogurt and eggs are the controls, because they are dairy too and none of them is tariffed.

2 weeks after the tariff, cheese is -0.5% and milk is 0.0%. A tariffed product moving the same as an untariffed one is what "no effect yet" looks like in data. If cheese pulls away from milk in the coming weeks, this table will show it before any news story does.

There is a structural reason to expect the cheese effect to stay small. The US shipped about 52 million pounds of cheese to Canada in 2025 against roughly 520,000 tonnes produced here, so US cheese is under 5% of supply even before counting imports from Europe. In our own flyer data, only 6.7% of cheese listings carry a US-parent brand name, and that is an upper bound, because Kraft and Philadelphia products are largely made in Canada. The tariff lands on a few specific SKUs, not on "cheese."

Why do the headlines sound so much worse than this?

Four reasons, and it is worth knowing all of them so you can read the next story properly.

1. Most tariff-and-groceries coverage is about 2025. From March 4 to September 1, 2025, Canada tariffed orange juice, peanut butter, coffee, beer and some 200 other US food products. Loblaw put a "T" on more than 6,000 items. That wave was real, measurable, and over; the tariffs were removed on September 1, 2025 and prices fell back within about three months. The 2026 list is a different, much narrower thing, and stories that recycle last year's item lists are describing tariffs that no longer exist.

2. The scary lists were written before the real list came out. In late August, before Ottawa published its schedule, forecasts circulated naming orange juice, pasta, poultry, oils, soups and sauces as "at risk" and put a figure of up to $200 a year on households. None of those items made the final list. The same analyst now calls the 2026 measures "more surgical" with a peak effect of about 0.3 points on grocery inflation, around April 2027, and labels that a scenario rather than a forecast. That correction got a fraction of the attention the warning did.

3. Averages lie about tariffs. Look at the chart below. Before any tariff existed, the weekly median flyer price of cheese swung 40% between its cheapest and dearest week, purely because one week's flyers lead with 2-for-$10 and the next week's lead with $6.99 blocks. Milk swung 25%. Any story that compares an average price this week to an average price last month will find a "tariff effect" in either direction, guaranteed. That is why this page matches the same item at the same store instead.

4. The label itself raises the price. The Bank of Canada's study of the 2025 tariffs found that products carrying a visible "Tariffed" sticker rose more than tariffed products without one. Telling shoppers a price was going up made it go up further. Loblaw brought the T symbol back on August 26, 2026, promising increases "penny for penny"; it is worth remembering that the sticker is a pricing signal as much as a disclosure.

What did the 2025 tariffs actually do to prices?

This is the only hard evidence on how Canadian retailers pass tariffs through, and it comes from daily prices on more than 110,000 products at seven large retailers between October 2024 and February 2026.

• Prices of tariffed goods rose gradually, not overnight, and peaked about 6% above comparable untariffed goods roughly three months in. Food and beverages ran closer to 8% at the summer peak.
• That is about one quarter of a 25% tariff reaching the shelf. Retailers, distributors and importers absorbed the rest. Loblaw said tariffs drove about 30% of its cost inflation in 2025 and that sales of T-labelled US items fell 15 to 20%, up to 50% where a Canadian alternative sat beside them.
• The effect on overall inflation was about 0.3 percentage points. Grocery inflation went from 2.8% when the tariffs were announced to a peak near 5% in December 2025, but most of that was beef, coffee and imported costs, not the tariffs.
• After the tariffs were removed on September 1, 2025, the reversal was nearly complete within three months for groceries. Little of the increase spilled onto untariffed substitutes.

Apply that to 2026: a 25% tariff on the under-5% of cheese that is American, passed through at a quarter, over three months. Even on the affected SKUs the expected shelf effect is single digits, and on the cheese aisle as a whole it rounds to nothing. This page exists to check whether reality agrees.

If it is not tariffs, why is my bill still going up?

Statistics Canada's August 2026 numbers are the clearest answer. Grocery prices rose 2.8% year over year, the slowest in a long while and, for the first time since July 2024, slower than overall inflation. Dairy rose 0.7%, with cheese and yogurt leading the slowdown. The pressure is elsewhere.

• Beef. Canada's cattle herd is the smallest since the late 1980s after nearly a decade of drought. Meat is up more than 40% since December 2019 and 9% since the end of 2024. No tariff is involved and none is coming off.
• Coffee. Brazil's arabica crop fell 18% in 2025 and Vietnam's fell 15%. Canadian coffee prices were up 26% year over year last October and 59% over six years. The good news: Brazil's 2026-27 crop is forecast up 17%, and coffee is on this page's tracker.
• Everything after the farm. Processing, labour and transport are about 90% of what you pay for food. Cost shocks take six to nine months to reach the shelf, which is why a calm tariff list and a rising bill can both be true at once.
• The dollar is not it either. The loonie is within a cent of where it was a year ago against the US dollar.

How do you tell a tariff price from a normal price swing?

• Read the origin, not the sticker. A Canadian-made product cannot carry a Canadian counter-tariff. Most cheese in most flyers is Canadian, store-brand or Saputo, Black Diamond and Armstrong.
• Check the category against the list. If it is not cheese, honey, molasses or a baking mix, the 2026 tariffs do not touch it. A dearer chicken breast is a chicken story.
• Compare the item to itself, not to the aisle. Every deal on CartIQ shows that product's price over recent weeks. A price that is high this week and was high in July is not a tariff.
• Use milk as your canary. It is supply-managed, almost entirely Canadian and untariffed. If milk and cheese move together, you are looking at flyer noise. If cheese pulls away on its own, that is a signal.
• Buy the Canadian one. For the handful of US cheese SKUs that are affected, the Canadian equivalent beside it usually already costs less, and the 2025 wave showed retailers stock more of it when shoppers switch.

How we measure this

CartIQ reads the flyer feeds of 32 Canadian grocery chains twice a week and stores every matching item with its price, chain, region and capture time. For this page the exposed group is cheese, the only tariffed staple we track; the controls are milk, butter, yogurt and eggs. For each item-and-chain pair that appears at least twice in the 8 weeks before September 8, 2026 and at least once after, we compare its median advertised price in the two windows. The headline figure is the median of those per-item changes. The chart uses plain weekly medians on purpose, to show how much they move on their own.

Limits, stated plainly. These are advertised flyer prices, not shelf prices, and sale prices understate inflation because chains cut margin to hold a price point. The since-tariff window is short and grows a week at a time; matched-item counts grow with it. Classified data begins 2026-05-29, so the pre-tariff baseline is 17 weeks at most. US-origin exposure is estimated from brand names, which overstates it. And the Bank of Canada found the 2025 effect took three months to peak, so an early "no change" is expected and not a conclusion; the conclusion is whatever this page says in December.

Data runs from 2026-05-29 to 2026-09-19, covering 17 weeks and 59,157 classified price records. Tariff facts are from the Department of Finance schedules, the Bank of Canada's staff working paper 2026-22, Statistics Canada's August 2026 CPI release, and RBC Economics.