Welcome to aubaine.ca!
Welcome to aubaine.ca!
Welcome to aubaine.ca!
By the aubaine.ca team · editorial direction: Marcel Dupont, founder · methodology
30 Jul 2026
You walk out of the grocery store convinced you paid more than last week, but you can't quite say why. Same items, same store, and yet the bill keeps creeping up. It's a feeling plenty of Quebec households know, from Rimouski to Gatineau, and it's hard to verify without a method. The fix is simpler than you'd think: build your own fixed basket and track its price, week after week, like a personal little index.
You don't need to be an accountant or even like numbers. A notebook, a pencil, about fifteen well-chosen items and a few minutes after each grocery run are enough. Two or three months in, you'll have something nobody else can hand you: the real curve of your food costs, not a national average that looks like nobody's actual life.
Food inflation statistics give you the big picture. Useful for understanding the trend, useless for deciding what to buy next Thursday. Your basket contains exactly what you eat: the bread your kids will actually accept, the coffee brand you refuse to swap out, the cheese that ends up in lunch boxes. If the price of those specific items goes up, your budget goes up, no matter what the average says.
A homemade price log works first and foremost as an alarm. When an item on your list moves three weeks in a row in the same direction, you spot it right away. That gives you time to react: switch to the store brand, buy the bigger format, wait for the next sale cycle, or simply drop the item from your routine. Without a log, the increase settles in and you get used to it without ever having decided to.
"Metro is more expensive" is an impression. "My 15-item basket costs me this much at one store and that much at the other" is a decision. In 2026, the Coops study ranks Maxi as the cheapest grocery store in Québec, ahead of Walmart and Super C. The gap between Maxi, in first place, and Metro, in fifth, works out to roughly $25 a week, or about $1,302 a year. That's a hefty order of magnitude, but it reflects an average basket calculated by researchers, not yours. Your own log will tell you whether the gap, for your products, is bigger or smaller.
Tracking a basket over time has a pleasant side effect: it makes your wins visible. When you see your index drop by a few dollars because you planned your meals around the sales, you want to keep going. Families who build their menu from the weekly flyers save $100 to $150 a month. That's not nothing: it's a hydro bill, or a good chunk of the kids' activity budget.
This is the most important step. A poorly built basket gives you numbers you can't use, because you're no longer comparing the same thing from one week to the next.
Aim for 12 to 20 items. Fewer than 12 and your index gets jumpy: a single product on special sends the total tumbling and you think prices are dropping across the board. More than 20 and you'll quit after three weeks because the log becomes a chore. Pick items you buy almost every week, year-round, and that you don't easily swap out.
A balanced basket usually covers these product families:
Two tips. First, include at least two items that are very promotion-sensitive (chicken, cheese) and two that rarely go on sale (flour, toilet paper). That way you'll see the difference between a real price movement and a simple sale cycle. Second, keep seasonal fruit and vegetables out of the fixed basket: Île d'Orléans strawberries in July and January strawberries have nothing in common, and comparing them makes no sense.
Write the exact format next to each item, and stick to it without exception. A 4 L milk, a 675 g loaf, a 340 g bag of coffee, a 750 g tub of yogurt. If you log a different format one week, your curve stops meaning anything. Note the brand too when it matters: national brand or store brand, those are two distinct baskets. Nothing stops you from keeping two columns, one for national brands and one for the store-brand equivalents — Sans Nom, Compliments, Irresistibles, Great Value. The gap between those two columns is often the most profitable discovery of the whole exercise.
Add three or four items that are anything but statistical and entirely personal: the cereal box your teenager demolishes, the cat food, the apple juice from the corner dep. Those items are often what explains the difference between your bill and your neighbour's. A Sherbrooke household going through two bags of dog food a month doesn't have the same index as a couple with no pets in Lévis.
There are two workable rhythms, and only one bad choice: the irregular one, the one that produces three entries in January and nothing until the fall.
In Québec, most flyers change on Thursday. So that's the natural day for your log. Two ways to do it: either you note the shelf prices while you're doing your groceries, or you pull them from the flyer and the banners' websites without leaving the house. The second method is faster, but be careful: the flyer only shows items on promotion. For the rest, you need the regular price — the one that moves quietly.
Note the price you paid and the regular price when the two differ. That double column is what reveals the real trends: an item can look stable because it's on special one week out of three, while its regular price slowly climbs.
Let's be honest: keeping a weekly log for a full year takes discipline. A monthly log, always at the same point in the month and always at the same store, gives you a curve that's nearly as useful. Pick the first Saturday of the month, for example. Twelve data points a year are plenty to detect an underlying increase, and you'll still feel like doing it in December.
Prices can vary from one location to another within the same banner, depending on the region and the store format. If you log one month in Trois-Rivières and the next in Montréal, you're measuring geography, not time. Lock in your reference store, and if you want to compare banners, make that a separate exercise, done the same day. The list of merchants helps you see what's around you before choosing your comparison points.
This is where the fixed basket really shines. Shrinkflation is when the contents of a package get smaller without the price going down. The tag shows the same amount, the box looks the same on the shelf, but there's less inside. Without a log, nobody notices.
Stop tracking the package price. Track the price per 100 g, per 100 ml or per unit. The math is simple: divide the posted price by the number of grams or millilitres, then multiply by 100. You get a figure that's comparable over time, no matter what the manufacturer does with the packaging. Plenty of shelf tags already show that unit price in small print under the main label — get in the habit of reading it, it's the most honest line in the store.
A few concrete clues to watch for, straight from the aisles:
Record the format in your notebook, column by column. When you write the format down every single time, the change jumps out at you on its own. That's exactly why the identical-format rule is non-negotiable.
Three reasonable reactions. Compare with the store brand, whose format may not have changed. Check the large format, which often takes back the advantage on unit price. Or wait for the next promo cycle, keeping the item in your notebook to see whether the discount really offsets the reduction. A coupon combined with a special can bring the unit price back to its old level, but only if you know what that level was. Hence the notebook.
Once your basket is stable, the most profitable exercise is pricing it out at two or three different banners on the same day. You don't need to visit three stores: websites and flyers cover most items, and a food price comparison tool speeds things up a lot.
The 2026 data gives you a solid benchmark: shopping at Maxi, Super C or Walmart instead of Metro or IGA saves a typical Quebec family $40 to $80 a month. Over a year, the difference between first and fifth place reaches about $1,302. But an average gap isn't a prescription. If your basket includes a lot of specialty products, fine cheeses or specific cuts of meat, the gap may narrow. And you have to factor in travel: driving across town every week to save a few dollars doesn't always add up, especially in the regions where distances are real.
In 2026, IGA is rolling out its "Prix Club" program in Québec: Scène+ members get exclusive reduced prices every week. That kind of mechanism complicates comparisons, because the posted price is no longer the price paid. Your notebook therefore needs to distinguish three figures: the regular price, the public promo price and the member price. Otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges — and you risk concluding that a banner is more expensive when you simply hadn't activated the offer.
The tracked-basket principle works for anything bought in cycles. Appliances, for example, follow a known calendar: Boxing Day on December 26 remains the marquee day of the year for those discounts, and Corbeil also runs a "Boxing Day in July" with up to 50% off and free delivery starting at $799.99. More broadly, Black Friday 2025 landed on November 28, a handy marker for anticipating the year-end rhythm. If you note the price of a dishwasher or a TV three or four times a year, you'll be able to tell a genuine deal from a cosmetic discount. The featured deals then become far easier to judge.
Don't underestimate it. A double page per month, one line per item, one column per log. You leave it in the reusable bag and jot things down as you walk the aisles. Paper wins because it needs no battery and no signal, and because an empty column creates a small obligation that keeps the habit alive.
A free spreadsheet does the job. One line per item, one column per date, a "total" row at the bottom and a "unit price" line beside each item. After six entries you get a chart that speaks for itself, and you can calculate the percentage change between two dates. It's your personal index, with your own baseline.
Reebee and Flipp are the most-used flyer apps in Canada, and they save time when it comes to spotting the week's specials without touring a dozen websites. They don't replace your log, though: they mainly show what's on promotion, not how the regular price of your 15 items evolves. Use them for meal planning and keep your notebook for measurement. The two complement each other nicely: the flyer tells you what to buy this week, the basket tells you whether you're losing ground over the year.
After a dozen entries, you'll usually land on four findings. One or two items will have risen clearly more than the rest — those are your candidates for replacement. One or two will have lost content without changing price. You'll have identified the sale cycle for your most expensive items, which lets you stock up at the right moment instead of at random. And you'll have a number to set against the vague feeling that "everything costs more": maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but from now on you'll know.
That's the real value of the exercise. Not just saving a few dollars, but taking back control of the information. In a world where prices move every Thursday and formats quietly shrink, the best-equipped shopper isn't the one chasing specials — it's the one who knows what things actually cost.
Between 12 and 20 items is the comfortable zone. Below 12, a single special distorts your total and you think prices are falling across the board. Above 20, the log takes long enough that you'll quit after a few weeks, which is the worst possible outcome.
Ideally weekly, on Thursday, since that's the day most flyers change in Québec. That said, a monthly log — always at the same point in the month and at the same store — is still very useful and much easier to keep up. Consistency matters more than frequency.
Always write down the exact format in your notebook and track the price per 100 g, per 100 ml or per unit rather than the package price. When the unit price climbs while the posted price hasn't budged, the contents have shrunk. Labels reading "new packaging" or "new recipe," plus formats with unusual numbers, are other reliable signals.
According to the 2026 Coops study, Maxi is the cheapest grocery store in Québec, ahead of Walmart and Super C, and shopping at those banners rather than Metro or IGA represents savings of $40 to $80 a month for a typical family. The gap between first and fifth place reaches roughly $25 a week, or about $1,302 a year. You still have to subtract the cost and time of getting there, especially outside the big centres.
No, they can vary from store to store depending on the region and the size of the location. That's exactly why you should always log your basket at the same reference store. If you want to compare banners against each other, do it on the same day, otherwise you're measuring the calendar rather than the price gap.
Reebee and Flipp are the most-used flyer apps in Canada and are mainly good for quickly spotting the week's specials. They don't track how the regular price of your items evolves over time, though: for that, a notebook or a simple spreadsheet is still unbeatable. Also remember to check your loyalty programs, like IGA's "Prix Club" offered to Scène+ members in 2026, because the posted price isn't always the price paid anymore.
💛 Our promise: helping you save. Despite all the care we put into tracking prices, we simply cannot guarantee they are accurate at all times — they come from flyers and merchants and can change without notice. Every week, we work to give you a fair and reliable picture so you can follow your products, spot real discounts and buy at the right time, at the best price. At aubaine.ca, every dollar saved matters: our mission is to hunt down the best deals for you. Always confirm the final price in store or with the merchant.
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