All work

For the public

Canada Grocery & Pantry Index

Nearly a decade of Canadian grocery prices turned into clear item histories, monthly reports, and comparisons that make the cost of living easier to see.

Grocery inflation you can actually see

Canada Grocery & Pantry Index turns a government price table into a useful guide to the weekly shop. It follows 110 familiar groceries and household staples — from milk and eggs to coffee, produce, and personal-care items — so people can see what changed, by how much, and where.

The problem I wanted to solve

People feel rising food costs long before they open a spreadsheet about them. The official numbers are public, but thousands of rows do not explain which products moved this month, how one province compares with another, or whether a favourite item is outpacing grocery inflation. I designed an editorial experience that leads with those questions and keeps the methodology close when someone wants to look deeper.

What people can explore

  • A useful monthly snapshot. The main index highlights the biggest rises and falls, then lets people search, sort, or filter the full list by category, province, and time period.
  • A history for every item. Each product page offers ranges from one month to ten years, exact monthly values, highs and lows, data coverage, and a comparison with the grocery-price index.
  • Two kinds of comparison. People can compare any province and month with another point in the archive, or place up to four products side by side.
  • Reports instead of raw rows. The archive begins in January 2017 and turns every available month into a readable report with basket movement, standout items, and provincial context.
  • A personal route through the data. Favourites and basket tools make it easier to follow the products a household buys rather than the entire market.
  • Research-ready access. Clear source notes and downloadable CSV and Parquet datasets serve people who need the underlying numbers as well as the visual story.

Designing for the two-second takeaway

A chart succeeds when someone can glance at it and understand the direction before reading the detail. I used a strong editorial hierarchy, plain labels, restrained colour, and sensible defaults to make that first impression useful. The deeper statistics are still there, but they never compete with the main point.

Honest about what the numbers mean

These are monthly average retail prices, not today’s shelf prices at a particular store. Missing months remain missing rather than being filled with invented values, and the inflation comparison is clearly labelled as an index benchmark. Those explanations protect the reader from drawing a more precise conclusion than the data can support.

What the project demonstrates

The index is an example of turning specialist information into a public-facing product without watering it down. For clients with reports, research, or operational data that customers struggle to use, the same design approach can replace a spreadsheet-shaped experience with a clear story and an obvious next action.

Source and licence

Prices are adapted from Statistics Canada Table 18-10-0245-01 under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. The figures are monthly averages, and this independent product is not endorsed by Statistics Canada.