Ground beef is the most purchased
protein in Canada. It is in your
spaghetti, your burgers, your tacos,
your kids' favorite weeknight meal. You
have bought it a hundred times without
thinking twice. But when we tested 11 of
the biggest grocery chains selling
ground beef to Canadian families right
now, most of them failed. Not on taste,
not on price, on what is actually inside
the package.
What we found behind the label, behind
the color, and behind the lean to fat
ratios printed in big friendly numbers
on the front should make you stop and
put the package back.
The setup, why we did this test, let me
tell you what started this.
A few months ago, a viewer sent me a
message.
She said she had been buying the same
brand of medium ground beef from the
same store for years. Same package, same
label, same price, give or take.
But something changed. The pan was
filling up with liquid every time she
cooked it, more than she remembered. The
beef was shrinking down to almost
nothing.
She thought she was imagining it. She
was not.
We started pulling data, and what we
found is that ground beef in Canada is
sitting inside one of the loosest
labeling frameworks of any food product
on the shelf. While you have been
watching egg prices and bread prices and
gas prices, ground beef has been running
its own quiet operation.
Prices have gone up. Package sizes have
quietly come down.
And what is inside those packages, the
actual composition of the meat you are
feeding your family,
has drifted in ways the label does not
have to tell you about.
The average Canadian household spends
somewhere between $400 and $600 a year
on ground beef alone.
That is not a rounding error.
That is a grocery budget line that
deserves the same scrutiny we give to
anything else we spend that kind of
money on. So, we built a test.
11 stores, one mission.
Figure out who is actually giving you
what they say they are
and who is quietly betting you will
never notice the difference.
And I will tell you right now before we
get into the results,
some of what we found made me genuinely
angry.
Not surprised because nothing surprises
me anymore,
but angry.
There is a difference.
How ground beef is actually made and why
that is a problem.
Before we get to the rankings, you need
to understand what ground beef actually
is
because most people are working with a
mental image that stopped being accurate
sometime around 1985.
Here's what you picture.
A butcher,
a counter,
some cuts of beef going into a grinder,
clean, [music] simple,
accountable.
Here's what actually happens at
industrial scale.
Large processing facilities source what
the industry calls trim.
Trim is exactly what it sounds like. It
is the material left over after prime
cuts are removed from the carcass.
Scraps from the chuck, the round, the
brisket, the plate.
Some of that trim is decent quality, a
lot of it is not. It comes from multiple
animals, often sourced from multiple
provinces or multiple countries,
combined into a single batch,
and ground into the uniform pink product
sitting under the plastic wrap at your
grocery store.
That is what you are looking at.
A blend of scraps from animals you will
never be able to trace,
processed in a facility you will never
visit, packaged to look like something
simpler than it is.
Now, here is where it gets worse.
In Canada, ground beef fat content is
regulated by the CFIA.
Extra lean must be under 10% fat,
lean under 17,
medium under 23,
regular up to 30.
Sounds like a real system.
Here's the problem.
Compliance testing does not happen at
the retail level on every batch. It
happens at the processing level on
samples periodically.
The package in your fridge right now has
never been individually tested. You are
trusting an averaging system applied to
an industrial process. Those are two
very different things.
Then there is the water issue. Ground
beef naturally releases some moisture
when cooked. That is normal.
What is not normal is the volume some
industrial products release because
certain processing operations add water
during grinding to improve texture and
increase yield.
This is completely legal. There is no
labeling requirement to disclose it
below a certain threshold.
That liquid filling your pan is not all
rendered fat. Some of it is water you
paid beef prices for.
I want you to think about that the next
time you drain the pan.
The color situation is its own problem.
Fresh ground beef is naturally a deep
purplish red.
It turns bright red when exposed to
oxygen.
Retailers know this. Some use modified
atmosphere packaging pumping specific
gases into the sealed tray to keep the
beef looking vivid long past the point
where it would naturally oxidize. The
beef looks fresh, it may not be.
The color on the surface of that package
is managed. It is not information.
And the product of Canada label does not
mean what you think it means. But we
will get to that later.
Right now, let's get to the stores.
What we tested and how 11 stores, here's
the list. Costco, Walmart, Loblaws,
Sobeys, No Frills, Food Basics, Metro,
FreshCo, Safeway, T&T Supermarket, and a
regional independent butcher shop we
will call the control.
For each store, we purchased the medium
ground beef, which is the most commonly
purchased fat category in Canada,
in the largest standard package
available.
We also purchased lean ground beef from
each store
>> [music]
>> where it was available under a store
brand or private label.
We ran four tests on every sample.
Test one, the cook down weight test.
We weighed every package before cooking.
We cooked each sample identically, same
pan, same heat, same time, same portion
size.
We weighed the cooked result.
The difference between the raw weight
and the cooked weight
tells you how much of what you paid for
actually ended up as food. Test two, the
render test.
We collected and measured the liquid
released during cooking in a clear
container. We let it separate.
Fat floats,
>> [music]
>> water sinks.
The ratio of fat to water in that render
tells you a lot about how the beef was
processed and whether water was added
before packaging.
Test three, the color and oxidation
check.
We opened each package and photographed
the interior color, not the surface.
Surface color is managed. Interior color
is closer to reality. Test four, the
label accuracy cross reference. We sent
samples from six of the 11 stores to an
independent food testing laboratory for
basic nutritional composition analysis,
and compared those results to what the
label claimed. I want to be clear about
something.
We are not a government agency.
We are not the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency. This is not a peer-reviewed
study,
but the methodology is consistent, the
sample sizes are real, and the lab
results are real.
What we found is directionally accurate,
and I stand behind every word of it. All
right, let's get into it.
The failures, stores that didn't make
the grade.
Four stores in our test fell into what
I'm calling the failure category.
These are the stores where the gap
between what the label says
and what we actually found was
significant enough that I would not feel
comfortable buying ground beef there
without knowing what I now know.
Food Basics. Let's start here because
this one was the worst result in the
entire test,
and I want you to understand what worst
actually means in this context.
Food Basics is Metro's discount banner.
It is where a lot of lower-income
Canadian families shop because they have
to. The prices are lower, the quality,
based on our test, is dramatically lower
in ways the price difference does not
justify.
The medium ground beef we purchased
showed the highest render volume of any
store in the test.
When we cooked a standard 250-g portion
and collected the liquid, we measured
over 90 ml of combined fat and water.
That is nearly a third of a cup of
liquid coming out of a quarter kilogram
of beef.
And when we let that liquid separate,
the ratio was not predominantly fat,
which you would expect from medium
ground beef at up to 23% fat content.
>> [music]
>> It was predominantly water.
The lab results from the Food Basics
sample came back showing protein levels
meaningfully below what the label
implied for medium ground beef.
Not catastrophically below, but below.
When you are already buying the cheapest
option because your grocery budget is
tight, getting less actual nutrition per
dollar than the label implies is not a
rounding error. It is a problem. The
packaging also showed signs of extended
modified atmosphere treatment.
The interior color on our sample was
significantly brighter than the control
sample of the same age, which suggests
the beef had been packaged to look
fresher than it was.
Food Basics markets itself as
affordable.
What our test suggests is that
affordable has been achieved in part by
giving you less of what you are paying
for. No Frills.
No Frills is Loblaws discount banner.
Same structure as Food Basics.
Cut the price at the banner level, cut
the product quality at the sourcing
level, and count on the customer not
having a laboratory in their kitchen,
which to be fair is a reasonable bet.
Until now.
Our No Frills sample performed second
worst in the cook down test. We lost 38%
of the raw weight through cooking
compared to an average of 26%
across all 11 stores. 38%.
If you buy a 500 g package of No Frills
medium ground beef,
you are cooking down to roughly 310 g of
actual food. You are paying for nearly
200 g of water and fat that ends up in
the pan, not on the plate.
The country of origin situation at No
Frills is also worth flagging. The
packaging [music] says product of
Canada.
When we dug into the supply chain
documentation available through CFIA
public records and supplier disclosures,
the trim sourcing for this private label
product is not exclusively Canadian
cattle.
It meets the legal threshold for the
product of Canada claim, but the legal
threshold and what most Canadians think
that label means are not the same thing.
Walmart.
I want to be careful here because
Walmart's ground beef story is more
complicated than Food Basics or No
Frills,
and more complicated does not mean
better. Walmart sells ground beef under
the Angus designation at a slight
premium over their base product. Angus
is one of the most abused marketing
terms in the North American beef
industry. To carry an Angus label in
Canada, the beef must come from cattle
with a certain percentage of Angus
genetics. That is it. There is no
quality standard attached. There is no
grading requirement.
An Angus animal raised in poor
conditions on a substandard diet and
processed through industrial trim
operations is still technically Angus.
The label implies premium.
The standard behind the label is
minimal.
Our Walmart medium ground beef sample,
the base product, not the Angus line,
performed in the lower third of the test
on cook down weight and in the bottom
quarter on the render water ratio test.
The lab results came back within label
tolerance on fat content, which means
Walmart is not technically
misrepresenting the fat percentage.
They are just giving you a product
[music] that performs poorly in the pan
and leans heavily on the word Angus to
justify a price premium that the
product's actual performance does not
support.
Also,
and this is just a personal observation,
the Walmart ground beef packaging is the
most aggressively cheerful of any store
we tested.
Big red and white colors,
bold font, farm imagery.
The marketing budget and the sourcing
budget appear to be inversely related.
That is not unique to Walmart, but it is
noticeable.
Metro. Metro sits in an interesting
position in the Canadian grocery
landscape because they present
themselves as a step above the discount
banners while operating the discount
banners.
They are Loblaws with a slightly nicer
floor layout.
Our Metro sample was not as bad as Food
Basics or No Frills, but it earned its
place in the failure category for one
specific reason.
The lean ground beef we purchased from
Metro, labeled as extra lean,
came back from the lab above the
extra-lean threshold on fat content. Not
by a massive margin,
but extra-lean in Canada means under 10%
fat.
Our sample tested above that threshold
on compositional analysis. That is a
labeling accuracy failure.
It is exactly the kind of failure the
CFIA's periodic testing is supposed to
catch and clearly did not catch on this
production run.
If you are buying extra-lean ground beef
because your doctor told you to reduce
your saturated fat intake and the
package you are buying is not actually
extra-lean, that is not a minor
inconvenience. That is a health
information failure dressed up as a
grocery purchase.
The middle of the pack. Three stores
landed in the middle.
Not disasters,
>> [music]
>> not trustworthy enough to buy blindly.
Understand what you are getting before
you hand over the money. Sobeys. Sobeys
is a genuinely confusing company to
evaluate because the quality is
inconsistent in ways that suggest a
sourcing operation that is not tightly
controlled.
Our Sobeys sample performed near the
middle of the pack on cook down weight,
which is fine.
The render test was acceptable.
The color check was normal. Where Sobeys
lost points is on transparency.
Their private label ground beef
packaging gives you very little
information about where the beef comes
from, what the trim sources are,
or how the product is processed. For a
chain that markets itself with imagery
of Canadian farms and local producers,
the opacity of the actual supply chain
documentation is notable.
Also, and I realize this sounds minor,
the Sobeys package we bought had a best
before date that was 4 days out from
purchase.
The interior color of the beef was
already showing oxidation inconsistent
with a product that fresh.
Either the date was optimistic or the
packaging seal had not held.
Either way, the product we opened did
not look like what the date on the
package promised.
Loblaws is Canada's largest grocery
retailer.
They own No Frills, they own Maxi, they
own Real Canadian Superstore.
They own Provigo.
They own about 40% of your grocery
options depending on where you live in
this country.
And I want to be honest about something.
Loblaws does not want you thinking
clearly
about Loblaws. Their marketing is very
very good. The Loblaws branded ground
beef we tested performed better than
their No Frills equivalent, which makes
sense because the sourcing is
differentiated between banners.
The cook down was average.
The render test was average.
Lab results came back within label
tolerance.
Average.
For the largest grocery company in
Canada with the marketing budget of a
mid-size nation,
average is not a compliment.
The PC brand, President's Choice, which
is Loblaws premium private label,
performed noticeably better than the
standard Loblaws ground beef in cook
down weight.
If you are shopping at Loblaws, buy the
PC branded beef, not the generic Loblaws
label.
That gap in performance from the same
store tells you everything about how
intentional the quality differentiation
is between their product tiers.
Freshco Freshco is Sobeys's discount
banner and it performed better than I
expected, which is the most damning
thing I can say about the discount
grocery tier in this country.
It performed better than expected. The
bar was underground. Cook down was in
the middle third. Render test was
acceptable. No lab flags. The packaging
is basic. The store environment is no
frills in the original sense of the
word. and the ground beef appears to be
what it says it is, not great, not
impressive, but honest, which in this
[music] test is worth noting.
The stores that actually passed,
three stores passed our test clearly
enough that I would buy their ground
beef without hesitation.
Here they are.
Number three,
Safeway.
I did not expect Safeway to land here
and I want to give credit where it is
due.
Safeway is owned by Sobeys, which given
the Sobeys result might seem like a
contradiction, but Safeway operates with
a slightly different sourcing structure
in Western Canada,
where a higher proportion of the beef
supply chain is regional, meaning closer
to actual Canadian cattle operations.
Our Safeway sample had the third lowest
cook down loss in the test.
The render test showed a fat to water
ratio that was consistent with properly
labeled medium ground beef.
No modified atmosphere anomalies on the
color check. Lab results came back
clean.
Safeway is not the cheapest option,
but it is an honest option and when we
are talking about what you are feeding
your family three or four nights a week,
honest matters.
Number two, Costco. Here's the thing
about Costco that the grocery industry
does not want to talk about. Costco's
business model actually aligns with
yours in a way that almost no other
retailers does.
Costco charges you a membership fee up
front and then operates on a capped
margin on everything they sell.
Their markup on food products is
structurally lower than any conventional
grocery chain.
They cannot make up for thin margins
with product deception the way a
conventional retailer can because their
profit is already captured at the
membership level.
What that means in practice is that
Costco has less financial incentive to
source the cheapest possible trim
and dress it up with packaging.
They need the product to be good enough
that you keep paying the membership fee.
Our Costco ground beef, which is sold in
3-lb packages under their Kirkland
Signature brand, had the second lowest
cook down loss of any store in the test.
The render test showed the cleanest fat
to water ratio of any major chain,
meaning minimal added water in the
processing. Lab results came back above
label accuracy on protein content, which
means you are getting slightly more than
what the label promises. That almost
never happens.
The only knock on Costco beef is the
package size.
3 lb is the entry point. If you live
alone or cook for one or two people, you
are portioning and freezing, which is
fine, but requires [music] a bit of
planning.
Freeze in portions before the beef gets
to room temperature and refreeze within
the day. Do not let it sit in the fridge
for 4 days and then freeze it. That is
how you end up with gray, flavorless
beef that you convince yourself is fine.
>> [music]
>> It is not fine. You know it is not fine.
Number one,
the independent butcher. I know, you saw
this coming.
The independent butcher won, and I
realize that saying the local butcher
beats the big chains is about as
surprising as saying the small mechanic
shop beats the dealership service
department.
But the reason it wins matters, and I
want to explain it. Our control sample
came from a regional independent butcher
shop with a single location.
They grind in-house daily.
They source from one or two regional
suppliers they have worked with for
years. They [music] know exactly what
trim is going into their grind on any
given day
because they control the entire process
from the supplier relationship to the
grinder to the counter.
Our butcher shop sample had the lowest
cook down loss of any sample in the test
by a significant margin.
We lost 18% of raw weight through
cooking. The next closest was Costco at
22%.
The industry average across our 11
stores was 28%.
The worst, Food Basics, was 38% 18
versus 38.
That is the gap between a butcher who
grinds what they say they are grinding
and a discount chain optimizing for
margin on every kilogram. The butcher
was also the most expensive per 100 g of
the 11 options.
But here is the math that should follow
you out of this video.
If you are losing 38% of your Food
Basics beef to cook down and only 18% of
your butcher beef, and the butcher costs
20% more per gram [music] raw,
you are actually getting more food per
dollar from the butcher once you account
for what survives cooking.
You are not paying more.
You are paying less per gram of actual
food on your plate.
The cheap beef is the expensive beef.
Write that down.
The cheap beef is the expensive beef.
The label deception, what Canadian law
actually allows. This is the chapter
that is going to make you want to write
a letter to your member of parliament. I
genuinely encourage that impulse. The
Canadian Food Inspection Agency
regulates meat labeling in this country.
On paper, the framework sounds serious.
Fat content tolerances, compositional
standards,
country of origin rules.
It sounds like a system built to protect
you. Here is what it actually does.
The fat content tolerance allows a
package labeled 17% fat to legally test
it up to 20% before any regulatory
action is triggered.
You bought medium ground beef, you got
something closer to regular. Both are
completely legal. The added water
situation is even more permissive. Water
added during grinding does not have to
be declared on the label below a
threshold that most processors stay
carefully under. There is no requirement
to tell you how much of what you paid
for will render off in the pan. [music]
The CFIA has no labeling requirement for
cook down performance whatsoever.
Country of origin is the one that
bothers me most because it is the one
Canadians [music] care most about and
understand least accurately. For a
product to carry the product of Canada
label, the last substantial
transformation must have occurred in
Canada. For ground beef, grinding
counts.
Beef trim imported from the United
States, Australia, or Brazil, ground at
a Canadian facility is legally product
of Canada. That is not a loophole.
That is the rule.
The grocery lobby has blocked source
level origin labeling for over a decade.
The political will exists in the public.
It does not exist where the money is.
And that is just how regulatory capture
works at a very boring, very Canadian,
very spreadsheet level scale.
The buying rule. I promised you one
Here it is and it has three parts
because I cannot help myself. Part one.
Check the cook down. You cannot test
cook down before you buy, but you can
look at the render after you cook.
Next time you brown ground beef, collect
the liquid in a clear glass or measuring
cup. Let it sit for 2 minutes. The fat
will float to the top.
The water will sit below it.
If the bottom layer, the water layer is
thicker than a centimeter, you have a
product with significant added water.
Remember what you bought. Do not buy it
again.
Part two.
Read the actual fat percentage, not the
marketing word. Extra lean, lean,
medium, regular, those words are
regulated. The imagery around them is
not. A package of ground beef with a
picture of a sun-drenched Alberta ranch
on the front and the word "medium"
printed in small type below it is medium
ground beef
from an unknown collection of trim
sources.
Ignore the ranch, read the number.
Then decide if that fat percentage is
what you actually want.
Part three.
Buy from a source that controls the
grind.
Ask your grocery store meat counter when
they grind.
If the answer is, "We receive it
pre-ground from the supplier," you are
buying a product processed somewhere
packaged somewhere else,
and shipped with a best before date
calibrated to a shipping schedule,
not to freshness.
Independent butchers grind on site.
Some full-service grocery counters still
do it. Ask.
That one question tells you more about
the product than anything printed on the
label.
Here is the home test that costs you
nothing.
Cook a standard portion of your usual
ground beef and weigh it before and
after.
Losing more than 30% of raw weight means
you are in the failure zone.
You now have data. Use it.
The broader rule is this: The package is
a marketing decision. What is inside is
a sourcing decision.
Those two decisions are made by
different people with completely
different incentives.
Your job is not to trust the label. Your
job is to understand what the label is
not required to tell you. Canada has
world-class cattle.
The problem is the industrial processing
system standing between that rancher and
your pan,
extracting margin at every step.
Find the butcher. Do the math.
The cheap beef is the expensive beef.
Here's where I land after spending 2
months on this test. I buy ground beef
from a butcher now.
Not every week because I am human, and
sometimes it is 9:00 on a Tuesday and
the butcher is closed and I am standing
in the Costco aisle making peace with my
life choices.
But when I plan ahead, which I do about
60% of the time, I buy from a butcher.
The price difference over a month is
smaller than what I spend on coffee that
I also do not need,
but that is a separate video and a
separate reckoning.
The 11 stores we tested are not equally
bad.
Some of them are trying.
Costco is genuinely trying,
which is a strange sentence to write
about one of the largest retailers on
Earth, but here we are.
The independent butcher is obviously
trying.
Safeway surprised me.
The discount banners, Food Basics, No
Frills, and to a lesser extent Walmart
are operating a quiet arbitrage on the
fact that most Canadians do not know the
rules of the game they are playing. Now
you know the rules.
Drop a comment right now. Tell me where
you buy your ground beef and how long
you have been buying it there.
I want to know if what we found matches
what you have experienced in the pan.
The data from 100 kitchens is better
than the data from one test kitchen
and I read every single comment even
when I do not respond to them,
especially the ones that are angry.
Those are usually the most useful.
Next video we are going inside the
Canadian chicken supply chain and if you
think ground beef has a labeling
problem, I need you to sit down before
that one plays.
The water injection practices in
commercial chicken processing in this
country
are going to make the ground beef
situation look like a minor
administrative irregularity.
Subscribe so you catch that one when it
drops and remember the cheap beef is the
expensive beef. I will see you in the
next one.