# Best-Before Dates, Soda and Canadian Food Prices: What the Rules Require, What Longer Dates Would Save, and What Is Driving Grocery Prices
Research document · Canopticon · published 2026-10-19
Canonical: https://canopticon.com/p/best-before-dates-soda-and-canadian-food-prices-what-the-rules-require-what-longer-dates-would-save-and-what-is-driving-
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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# Best-Before Dates, Soda and Canadian Food Prices: What the Rules Require, What Longer Dates Would Save, and What Is Driving Grocery Prices

## TL;DR

Canadian law does not require a best-before date on soda. Federal rules only require date labels on prepackaged foods that keep 90 days or less, so the one-year date on a 2L Pepsi is the manufacturer's own quality claim, not a regulation. Selling past that date is legal [1][2][3]. A rule adding a year to soda would therefore mostly override companies' own carbonation and sweetener limits. My rough estimate is that it would save at most about a cent per dollar of soda sold, and probably much less [9][10][13]. Date labels matter far more for perishables: Second Harvest attributes 23% of Canada's avoidable food waste between processor and purchase to best-before dates [15]. Even so, less waste lowers shelf prices only if competition forces the savings through. The 2020–2026 run-up in grocery prices (+33.0% since September 2020 [26]) came mainly from cost shocks: the pandemic and war, then a weak dollar, tariffs, weather-hit coffee and cocoa, and drought-driven beef. The levers with the best evidence behind them are tariff design, competition, and energy and import costs, not date labels [21][24].

## Key Findings

- Date labels are mandatory only on prepackaged foods with a durable life of 90 days or less. Foods that keep longer, including most canned and dry goods, carry dates voluntarily. Regulations do not set the durable life of any food; the manufacturer or retailer decides it [1][2][3].
- Selling food past its best-before date is legal in Canada. Only a short list of products (infant formula, human milk fortifiers, meal replacements, nutritional supplements, formulated liquid diets and very-low-energy-diet foods) carry true expiration dates that bar sale afterward [1][2].
- Changing a date in a way that makes the label false or misleading is prohibited. A mandated extra year that ran past the point where a product appreciably deteriorates would collide with this rule [1][2].
- Small soda bottles carry shorter dates for a physical reason. Gas-barrier losses matter more as the package gets smaller, and much of a small bottle's shelf-life loss happens at the cap and neck [4]. Diet sodas also lose aspartame (and so sweetness) with time and heat [5][6].
- Soda is a direct-store-delivery category: the supplier's route staff stock the shelf, rotate stock, pull near- or past-date items and credit the store [7][8]. The cost of out-of-date soda falls mainly on the bottler and is built into the wholesale price.
- Old US industry benchmarks put all unsaleables (damaged, expired and seasonal goods together) at about 1% of manufacturers' sales for warehouse-delivered goods. Those surveys excluded direct-store-delivery categories like soda [9][10][11].
- At-home carbonated soft drink sales in Canada are about US$2.72bn a year, per a Statista market model [13]. If date-driven losses were 0.25–1% of that, the national total would be roughly C$9–37 million a year, and a one-year extension would recover only part of it (my estimate; see §3).
- Second Harvest's 2024 update estimates that over 46% of food in Canada is wasted and 41% of that is avoidable, worth $58 billion. It attributes 23% of avoidable waste from processor to purchase to best-before dates. Loblaw funded the report [15].
- In the UK, WRAP found that selling five common produce items loose and without best-before dates could save about 100,000 tonnes of household food waste a year. Retailers such as Co-op and Waitrose then dropped dates on hundreds of lines [17][18][19][20]. In Canada, fresh produce is already exempt from date labelling, so grocers could do the same without any change in law [3].
- Grocery prices have risen about 22% since 2022, against 13% for other consumer prices. The Bank of Canada traces 2025's re-acceleration mainly to import costs: a weaker dollar, tariffs, and weather-hit coffee (+31%) and confectionery (+14%). Beef (+17% in December 2025) reflected drought and feed costs. Cost shocks take six to nine months to reach shelves [21][22].
- Grocery inflation has since cooled to 1.7% in September 2026, its smallest yearly gain since May 2024. Gasoline, though, was up 27.8% year over year, which is a cost that feeds into food [26][27][23].
- Bank of Canada staff estimate Canada's 2025 counter-tariffs raised consumer prices by 1.56 percentage points before September 2025 and 0.72 after. Counter-tariff packages covering the same value of imports could have cut that price effect three to seven times [24].

## Details

### 1. What Canadian and Ontario rules actually require

The rules live in section B.01.007 of the federal *Food and Drug Regulations* (FDR). A prepackaged product with a durable life of 90 days or less that is packaged away from the store must show its durable-life date (the best-before date) and storage instructions if it needs something other than room temperature. If it is packaged in the store, it can show a packaged-on date plus its durable life instead [3]. Durable life is defined as the period during which a product, stored properly, keeps its normal wholesomeness, palatability, nutritional value and claimed qualities "without any appreciable deterioration" [1].

The CFIA's industry guidance is explicit that above the 90-day line the date is optional. Foods with a shelf life over 90 days, such as cereals and cured sausages, need neither a best-before date nor storage instructions; if a company chooses to add a date, it must use the prescribed format [1]. The consumer page puts it more plainly: "Foods with an anticipated shelf life greater than 90 days are not required to be labelled with a best before date or storage information, as they are generally considered to be shelf stable." [2] Bottled soda, which keeps for many months, sits on the voluntary side of that line. So the date you saw on Pepsi at the store was PepsiCo's (or its bottler's) choice, made in the format the regulation prescribes for any date a company opts to print.

Who sets the length? "The durable life of products or categories is not prescribed in regulation." [1] The manufacturer or retailer determines it, based on how long the unopened product keeps its quality given how it is made, packaged and stored [2]. The CFIA also notes: "A durable life date is not an indicator of food safety, neither before nor after the date." [1] The government sets no length for any product, soda included. That is the first problem with the add-a-year idea: there is no regulatory number to extend.

Selling past the date is legal. In the CFIA's words: "It's not illegal to sell food past its best before date." [2] The real prohibition covers expiration dates, which apply only to formulated liquid diets, very-low-energy-diet foods, meal replacements, nutritional supplements, infant formula and human milk fortifiers. For those, "it is prohibited to sell any one of these foods after the expiration date declared on the label has passed." [1] Fresh fruit and vegetables, individual restaurant portions, commissary vending items and donuts are exempt from date labelling altogether [3].

There is one legal limit on moving dates. CFIA guidance says changes to durable-life information that make a label false or misleading are prohibited under subsection 5(1) of the *Food and Drugs Act*. It is illegal for manufacturers or retailers to change a best-before date if the result is false or misleading [1][2]. Any rule forcing a longer date onto a product that does appreciably deteriorate (flat soda, faded diet sweetness) would have to square with that.

**Ontario.** In this pass I found no Ontario rule on date marking; the date rules discussed above are federal. Ontario does have a statute limiting donors' liability for donated food, the *Donation of Food Act, 1994*, which bears on the food-bank side of your experience. I could not read its text in this pass, so its exact terms are listed under Open questions. A province that wanted fewer date-driven discards would mostly be working on retail practice and donation, not on what the label says (inference).

### 2. Why soda carries the dates it does, and why the small bottles left sooner

Soda in plastic bottles loses quality in two well-documented ways.

**Carbonation loss.** PET bottles are slightly permeable to carbon dioxide, and some gas also escapes around the closure. A Coca-Cola-assigned patent on closures for small carbonated packages lists the factors that set package shelf life: bottle and closure permeation, bottle creep, PET sorption, and loss through and around the closure seals. It states that with small packages, oxygen and carbon dioxide barrier properties matter more as the package volume decreases, and that much of the shelf-life loss happens at the closure and neck. It also notes problems beyond what the higher surface-area-to-volume ratio alone would predict [4]. This matches your observation that the smaller bottles were pulled more often. They really do go flat faster, so they carry shorter dates.

**Sweetener loss in diet drinks.** Aspartame breaks down in liquid over time, faster at higher temperatures and lower pH, and the result is lost sweetness. In a five-month study of aspartame-sweetened orange soft drinks stored at 20, 30 and 40°C at three pH levels, stability fell as temperature rose. It was lowest at pH 2.75 and 40°C and highest at pH 4.57 and 20°C [5]. A smaller study of Pepsi Light and Coca-Cola Zero sold in Libya measured aspartame losses of 4.6% and 13.2% (Pepsi Light) and 5.0% and 11.7% (Coke Zero) after two and four weeks in winter sun [6]. That paper was read only as an abstract and its conditions are harsh, so it shows the direction of the effect rather than Canadian shelf conditions. These mechanisms explain why diet sodas typically carry shorter dates than regular ones. I could not verify PepsiCo Canada's actual shelf-life policy by product and size in this pass.

**What this means for the idea that they'd be good for years.** Safety is not the issue; the CFIA says dates are not safety indicators [1]. Nor is it obvious that the product is fine. The date marks the manufacturer's estimate of when carbonation or sweetness falls below its own standard. A regular-cola 2L kept cool may well be acceptable for months past the date. A small diet bottle stored warm may not be. The date is a quality and brand-protection threshold set by the company that bears the complaints (inference from [1][4][5]).

### 3. Who pays for out-of-date soda, and what a one-year extension would save

**The delivery model.** Soft drinks, beer, bread, snacks and some dairy are typically direct-store-delivery (DSD) categories. The supplier or its distributor delivers straight to the store instead of through the retailer's warehouse [8]. In many DSD models the route team stocks shelves, rotates older inventory and pulls damaged or expired items, and the route system records the credits [8]. A North Carolina State extension walkthrough of DSD to grocery stores describes the same steps from the store's receiving door: the vendor checks units remaining, their quality and their dates; past-date items are removed; and items near or past their best-by date go to the receiver and are credited toward the next delivery [7]. Retail contracts may instead use a guaranteed-sale arrangement (credit for qualifying unsold units) or a flat unsaleables allowance [8].

So when you saw 2L Pepsi pulled at a year and sent to a food bank, the loss most likely landed first on the bottler, through a credit or allowance. The store's loss was mainly labour and shelf space. Over time that cost is priced into what bottlers charge retailers. The idea that every business has to renew stock more often is true, but the renewal cost sits inside the soda price you pay, spread thinly (inference from [7][8]).

**How big are these losses?** The best public benchmarks are old and American. The FMI–GMA *Unsaleables Benchmark Reports* tracked damaged, expired and seasonal goods together as a share of manufacturers' sales:

| Report (year of data) | Average manufacturer unsaleables cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 report (2002) | 1.18% of sales (industry-weighted 0.99%); 1.31% for supermarkets alone | Warehouse-delivered goods only; excluded DSD, perishables, pharmacy [10] |
| 2004 report (2003) | 1.11%; $2.57 billion | Includes damaged, expired/out-of-date and seasonal goods [9] |
| 2005 report (2004) | 1.06% | Based on 50 manufacturers and 26 distributors [11] |

Two cautions apply. These figures include damage, which is often the largest part, so expired product alone is a subset. And they explicitly exclude DSD, so they do not cover soda [10]. Total store shrink, meaning every cause including theft, spoilage and damage, runs higher: a 2025 guest article on ReFED's site puts typical grocery shrink at 3% of sales or more, with perishables nearly two-thirds of it [12]. Shelf-stable drinks are low-shrink by comparison.

**An order-of-magnitude estimate (my calculation, not a measured figure).** Statista's market model puts at-home carbonated soft drink revenue in Canada (supermarkets, convenience stores and similar) at US$2.72bn in 2025 [13]. IBISWorld puts Canadian soda manufacturers' revenue at about $4.0bn in 2025, with Coca-Cola at $1,674.1m and PepsiCo Canada at $1,097.7m [14]. Both are proprietary models, not official statistics. Converting at roughly 1.37 CAD per USD (my assumption) gives about C$3.7bn of at-home retail soda sales. Then:

| Assumed share of soda sales lost to date-driven pulls | Annual loss, Canada | Per dollar of soda |
|---|---|---|
| 0.25% | ≈ C$9 million | ¼ cent |
| 0.5% | ≈ C$19 million | ½ cent |
| 1.0% (≈ the all-cause unsaleables rate for all packaged goods in the old benchmarks) | ≈ C$37 million | 1 cent |

A one-year extension would not capture even these amounts. Some product sits unsold for other reasons. Some pulled stock is already donated and eaten, so it isn't fully wasted. And a regular-turning SKU like 2L cola mostly sells long before its date. Realistic savings are a fraction of the table: likely well under a cent per dollar of soda. Nationally that is tens of millions of dollars at most, against a C$3.7bn category. The extension could also cost money if consumers bought flatter or less sweet product and switched brands. The bottlers, who bear the losses, have every incentive to set dates as long as their quality standards allow (inference).

**Bottom line on soda:** the mechanism you noticed is real, but for soda it is small. And no Canadian rule forces it; the dates come from the manufacturer.

### 4. Date labels and waste more broadly: where the real money is

The case for date-label reform is much stronger for perishables, where dates are mandatory and turnover is fast.

**Canada's numbers.** Second Harvest's October 2024 update, *The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste*, was produced with Value Chain Management International and funded by Loblaw. It reports that over 46% of all food in Canada is wasted each year and 41% of that is avoidable, valued at $58 billion. It attributes 23% of avoidable food waste between processor and purchase to best-before dates [15]. VCMI surveyed more than 1,000 organizations across the food supply chain [16]. The 2019 edition had put total loss and waste near 60%, with recoverable waste worth $49.5 billion [16]. Three cautions: the figures are survey- and model-based; the $58 billion values food at supply-chain prices, not consumer savings; and the funder is a grocer. Still, it is the most comprehensive Canadian estimate and the only one that isolates date labels.

**Why waste does not map one-to-one onto prices.** A grocer's shrink matters most against its thin profit. The ReFED piece gives an example: for a $500 million retailer on 3% net margins, cutting shrink by 0.5 percentage points adds $2–3 million to the bottom line [12]. By my arithmetic that is roughly 13–20% of that retailer's profit. So waste reduction is very attractive to grocers. Whether shoppers see any of it as lower prices depends on whether competition forces it through. Canopticon's earlier brief *The Price Frontier* documents a grocery market where five chains hold 75% of sales. In that brief, the Competition Bureau's 2023 study found the sector less competitive than it could be, with gross margins up one to two percentage points since 2017. In a concentrated market, part of any saving can stay as margin (inference).

**The UK experiment.** In February 2022, WRAP (the UK waste charity) tested apples, bananas, broccoli, cucumbers and potatoes, packaged and loose, at different temperatures. It recommended removing best-before dates unless a date can be shown to reduce waste. It estimated that selling the five loose and without dates could save around 100,000 tonnes of household food waste a year [17][18]. Co-op dropped best-before dates on more than 150 fresh produce lines. It cited WRAP's estimate that removing them from potatoes, apples, cucumbers and broccoli could prevent about 50,000 tonnes of household waste a year, and its own testing showed quality lasting beyond the date [20]. Waitrose removed best-before dates from nearly 500 fresh products from September 2022 [19]. WRAP later said progress on removing dates had been good, but loose selling had lagged [18]. These are retailer-led changes, and the waste figures are modelled projections, not measured post-change outcomes.

**The Canadian implication.** Fresh produce is already exempt from date labelling in Canada [3], and dates on shelf-stable goods are voluntary [1]. A Canadian grocer could match the UK reforms tomorrow without a law change. That is a useful finding: the barrier is retailer and supplier practice, not regulation (inference from [1][3][17]).

### 5. Why food prices rose so much, 2020–2026

**The size of the rise.** Statistics Canada reports grocery prices up 33.0% since September 2020, even after a slowdown to 1.7% year over year in September 2026 [26]. In August 2026 they had risen 2.8%. That was the first month since July 2024 in which grocery prices rose more slowly than the overall CPI [25]. The Bank of Canada calculates grocery prices up about 22% since 2022, against about 13% for other consumer prices. Households spend around 11% of their budget on groceries [21]. For the lowest-income fifth of households, food and non-alcoholic drinks took about 27% of disposable income [22].

**2020–2023: the broad shock.** The record's earlier brief covers this period: pandemic supply-chain breakdowns, the war in Ukraine, climate-driven crop losses, and energy and input costs. It also notes the Centre for Future Work's estimate that carbon pricing added only about 0.15% to food inflation. The Bank of Canada's 2024 explainer describes the channels: diesel and gasoline for farm machinery, energy-intensive fertilizer, fuel for every truck, train and ship, plus labour costs, exchange rates and harvest size [23].

**2025: the import-cost re-acceleration.** In February 2026, Bank of Canada economist Olga Bilyk published a decomposition of retail food prices, excluding volatile fruit and vegetables. It splits prices into direct imports, imported inputs, domestic goods, international shipping, energy, business services, wages, and profits and taxes, using Statistics Canada supply-chain data [21]. Her findings:

- Grocery inflation picked up in 2025, mainly because of cost pressures that began in late 2024 and worked through the supply chain. Compared with the pandemic shock, these pressures were narrower and more often tied to imported items. Food inflation hit 5% in December 2025, the highest since late 2023 [21].
- Imported-food prices began rising early in 2025, partly because of the Canadian dollar's significant fall in late 2024. By December 2025, coffee was 31% and confectionery 14% higher than a year earlier, both hit by weather-driven shortages and tariffs [21][22].
- Domestically, pressure was concentrated in live animals, amplified by drought and high feed costs. Beef was 17% higher in December 2025 than a year earlier [21].
- Cost pressures take six to nine months to fully reach grocery prices [21].
- As Bloomberg reported the research, food costs excluding fruit and vegetables rose 3.1% in 2025, and 2.7 points of that came from direct imports, imported inputs and international shipping [22]. Bloomberg also reported that food prices rose 6.2% from December 2024 to December 2025, the fastest pace in the G7. That figure is distorted by a base effect from the previous winter's GST holiday [22]. The 2.7-point split comes from the secondary report; I could not see the Bank's chart directly.

**2026: cooling groceries, rising fuel.** Through mid-2026, grocery inflation decelerated. In September, fresh vegetables (−2.9%) and sugar and confectionery (−2.7%) fell outright, and beef slowed to +8.7% from +11.0% [26]. Over the same months, gasoline rose 27.8% year over year in September (22.8% in August) [26]. A trade publication's summary of the release attributes this to crude oil at its highest since May 2026 amid conflict in the Middle East [27]. Dalhousie's *Canada's Food Price Report 2026* had forecast 4% to 6% food price growth in 2026 ($17,571.79 for a family of four, up to $994.63 more) [28]. The latest prints are running below that range.

**Inference:** fuel is one of the Bank's named channels for food costs [23], and its own lag estimate is six to nine months [21]. So a sustained 2026 fuel spike would most likely show up in grocery prices in 2027. Watch that more than date labels.

**Margins and concentration.** The Bank's decomposition attributes 2025's acceleration mostly to costs, not markups [21]. That does not settle whether Canada's concentrated grocery sector passes cost decreases through as quickly as increases. The record's earlier brief treats the greedflation thesis as contested, with sellers' inflation as its defensible version.

### 6. Which levers could actually lower food prices

Ranked by how strong the evidence is that they would move prices, with what this pass did and did not cover.

**1. Tariff design. Strong evidence and directly controllable.** Bank of Canada Staff Working Paper 2026-35 models how retaliatory tariffs amplify through production networks. Its estimate: Canada's 2025 counter-tariffs raised consumer prices by 1.56 percentage points before September 2025 and 0.72 after. Alternative packages covering the same import value could have reduced the aggregate price effect three to seven times [24]. In other words, retaliating on finished consumer goods rather than inputs that feed many supply chains would have hurt far less. The same paper estimates that a breakdown of the Canada–US–Mexico trade agreement, reverting to standard tariffs, would raise final-good prices by 0.64 points [24]. This is economy-wide, not food-specific, but food's dependence on imported inputs makes it exposed [21].

**2. Import and energy costs. The biggest driver, mostly outside direct control.** The 2025 acceleration was mostly about the exchange rate, imported inputs and world commodity shocks [21][22]. Government cannot set the dollar or the price of coffee. It can avoid adding costs at the border, and it can mind fuel costs in transport-heavy supply chains [23].

**3. Competition. Strong structural case, uncertain price effect.** This was not re-researched here; the record's earlier brief covers it (five chains, 75% of sales, margins up one to two points since 2017, the admitted 2001–2015 bread price-fixing cartel). Competition determines whether cost savings, including waste savings, reach shoppers (inference).

**4. Waste and date-label practice. Real, but mostly a waste lever, not a price lever.** Supported by Second Harvest's 23% figure and the UK experience [15][17]. The changes that would matter are mostly in retailer and supplier hands and need no law [1][3]:
- drop voluntary dates on produce and long-life goods, as UK chains did;
- sell near- or past-date product at a markdown instead of pulling it, which is legal [2];
- set pull policies and supplier credits so date-driven stock goes to markdown or donation rather than the dumpster.

Soda specifically: small, and no rule is the cause (§3).

**5. Not researched in this pass.** Supply management of dairy, poultry and eggs; interprovincial trade barriers in food; and income-side measures such as rebates and the GST credit. These are plausible further levers or partial offsets, but no evidence on them was gathered here, so I make no claim about their size.

## Beyond this question

- The soda idea is a good example of an intuition that is right about the mechanism and wrong about the target. Dates do drive discards and turnover costs, but for soda the dates are voluntary and set by the companies, the losses are small, and the bottler bears them. The same instinct pointed at perishables (dairy, bakery, meat, deli, prepared food), where dates are mandatory and shrink is concentrated [12][15], is worth far more.
- The regulation already allows most of what a reformer would want: past-date sale is legal, produce is exempt and shelf-stable dates are optional [1][2][3]. A policy push in Canada would look less like rewriting the FDR and more like pressing grocers to adopt UK-style practice, plus clear consumer messaging that a best-before date does not mean unsafe afterward.
- For lowering prices, the evidence points first to trade policy (which goods get counter-tariffs), energy costs and competition. Waste reduction is worth doing on its own merits. Whether it helps shoppers' wallets depends on competition.

## Open questions

- **Soda-specific date losses are unmeasured publicly.** I found no Canadian or recent North American figure for the share of soda pulled for date reasons. The FMI–GMA benchmarks are two decades old, combine damage with expiry, and exclude DSD [9][10][11]. Bottlers (Coca-Cola Canada Bottling, PepsiCo Canada) hold this data; it would take an access request or an interview.
- **Actual shelf-life policies.** I could not verify PepsiCo's or Coca-Cola's current Canadian dating by product (regular vs diet, 2L vs 500 mL vs cans), or how far ahead of the date DSD crews pull stock.
- **Ontario donation law.** The terms of Ontario's *Donation of Food Act, 1994* (liability protection for donors and distributors) were not read in this pass. Whether it covers past-date products, and whether grocers rely on it, needs checking.
- **Second Harvest's method.** The 23% best-before attribution comes from an industry survey plus modelling, funded by Loblaw [15][16]. No independent Canadian replication was found.
- **UK outcomes.** WRAP's figures for removing dates are projections [17][18]. I did not find a measured, after-the-fact estimate of the waste saved once Co-op and Waitrose dropped dates.
- **Pass-through.** Nobody has measured how much of a Canadian grocer's waste or shrink savings reaches shelf prices.
- **2027 risk.** Whether the 2026 fuel spike [26] feeds into 2027 grocery inflation on the Bank's six-to-nine-month lag [21] is a forecast, not a finding.
- **Method note.** Several sources (the Bank of Canada article, the 2026 CPI releases, Second Harvest, WRAP, the industry benchmarks, the patent and the aspartame studies) were read through extended search excerpts, because full-page fetching failed partway through this pass. The three government legal pages [1][2][3] were read in full. The Bank of Canada's Chart 1 cost shares and the full Second Harvest report should be read in full before anyone quotes figures from them beyond what is stated here.

## Sources

1. [Date markings and storage instructions on food labels](https://inspection.canada.ca/en/food-labels/labelling/industry/date-markings-and-storage-instructions) — Canadian Food Inspection Agency, modified 2023-06-22
2. [Best before, expiration and more: Understanding the date labels on your food](https://inspection.canada.ca/en/food-labels/labelling/consumers/date-labels-food) — Canadian Food Inspection Agency, modified 2026-03-25
3. [Food and Drug Regulations (C.R.C., c. 870), s. B.01.007](https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/C.R.C.,_c._870/section-B.01.007.html) — Justice Laws Website, current to 2026-09-30
4. [US Patent 10,800,569: Closure and finish for small carbonated beverage packaging with enhanced shelf life properties](https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/10800569) — US Patent and Trademark Office
5. [Storage Stability of Aspartame in Orange Flavored Soft Drinks](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10942912.2011.565903) — International Journal of Food Properties (Taylor & Francis)
6. [Study of Thermal Degradation of Aspartame in Coca-Cola Zero and Pepsi Light Marketed in Libya](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295080396_Study_of_Thermal_Degradation_of_Aspartame_in_Coca-Cola_Zero_and_Pepsi_Light_Marketed_in_Libya) — ResearchGate (abstract)
7. [Process Walkthrough: Direct-Store Delivery (DSD) to Retail Grocery](https://www.cefs.ncsu.edu/ncgt/process-walkthrough-meat-dsd-to-retail.pdf) — NC State University, Center for Environmental Farming Systems
8. [Grocery Retail Lingo](https://umbrex.com/resources/industry-lingo/consumer-retail-lingo/grocery-retail-lingo/) — Umbrex (consultancy glossary; no stronger public source found for contract terms)
9. [CPG Industry Unsaleables Rate Declines from Record High in 2002](https://www.fmi.org/newsroom/news-archive/view/2004/07/20/cpg-industry-unsaleables-rate-declines-from-record-high-in-2002) — Food Marketing Institute, July 20, 2004
10. [Unsaleables Costs Up in GMA/FMI Study](https://www.supermarketnews.com/grocery-operations/unsaleables-costs-up-in-gma-fmi-study) — Supermarket News (on the 2003 Unsaleables Benchmark Report)
11. [Unsaleables Costs Decline for Second Straight Year](https://www.supermarketnews.com/grocery-operations/unsaleables-costs-decline-for-second-straight-year) — Supermarket News (on the 2005 Unsaleables Benchmark Report)
12. [Guest blog: The Low Hanging Fruit: Using Existing Data to Cut Spoilage Shrink Now at Grocery Retail](https://refed.org/articles/guest-blog-the-low-hanging-fruit-using-existing-data-to-cut-spoilage-shrink-now-at-grocery-retail/) — ReFED
13. [Carbonated Soft Drinks – Canada](https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/non-alcoholic-drinks/soft-drinks/carbonated-soft-drinks/canada) — Statista Market Insights (proprietary model)
14. [Soda Production in Canada – Market Research Report](https://www.ibisworld.com/canada/industry/soda-production/285/) — IBISWorld (proprietary estimate)
15. [New Report From Second Harvest Reveals Canada's $58 Billion Food Waste Problem](https://www.secondharvest.ca/post/new-report-from-second-harvest-reveals-canadas-58-billion-food-waste-problem) — Second Harvest, October 22, 2024
16. [Almost half of all food wasted in Canada is avoidable, new report suggests](https://www.cp24.com/news/canada/2024/10/22/almost-half-of-all-food-wasted-in-canada-is-avoidable-new-report-suggests/) — CP24, October 22, 2024; and [Posthaste: Nearly half of all Canada's food is wasted, report finds](https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/posthaste-nearly-half-canada-food-120106567.html) — Financial Post via Yahoo Finance, October 2024
17. [No plastic packaging – sell fresh uncut produce loose, says WRAP report](https://www.wrap.ngo/media-centre/press-releases/no-plastic-packaging-sell-fresh-uncut-produce-loose-says-wrap-report) — WRAP, February 23, 2022
18. [Loose fruit and veg](https://www.wrap.ngo/taking-action/food-drink/actions/action-on-food-waste/loose-fruit-veg) — WRAP
19. [Spoiler Alert! Best Before dates removed on nearly 500 Waitrose products](https://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/media-centre/latest-news/2022/14097) — John Lewis Partnership, 2022
20. [Co-op to scrap 'best before' dates on fruit and vegetables](https://www.newfoodmagazine.com/news/189863/co-op-to-scrap-best-before-dates-on-fruit-and-vegetables/) — New Food Magazine
21. [Understanding the resurgence of food inflation in 2025](https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2026/02/sparks-at-bank-article-2026-3/) — Bank of Canada (Olga Bilyk), February 2026
22. [Import costs driving Canadian food inflation, BOC research says](https://www.canadianmortgagetrends.com/2026/02/import-costs-driving-canadian-food-inflation-boc-research-says/) — Bloomberg via Canadian Mortgage Trends, February 2026
23. [What drives up the price of groceries](https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2024/07/what-drives-up-the-price-of-groceries/) — Bank of Canada, July 9, 2024
24. [The Production Network Amplification of Retaliatory Tariffs (Staff Working Paper 2026-35)](https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2026/10/staff-working-paper-2026-35/) — Bank of Canada, October 2026
25. [The Daily — Consumer Price Index, August 2026](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260914/dq260914a-eng.htm) — Statistics Canada, September 14, 2026
26. [The Daily — Consumer Price Index, September 2026](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/261019/dq261019a-eng.htm) — Statistics Canada, October 19, 2026
27. [Canada CPI revealed](https://www.wealthprofessional.ca/news/industry-news/canada-cpi-revealed/393806) — Wealth Professional, October 19, 2026
28. [Canada's Food Price Report 2026](https://www.dal.ca/sites/agri-food/research/canada-s-food-price-report-2026.html) — Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University, December 4, 2025