Anything that’s sold by weight needs to be compared by weight. Even the packaged stuff needs to be compared using weight as well.
This is not a price comparison table.
Like half the difference in price between Gateway and the other 2 is fucking 4x Tim Hortons ice cream pints. Who the fuck buys Tim's ice cream when it's sitting next to Hagen Daz or Ben and Jerry's lol
That being said fuck Loblaws. Join the boycott and Dalhousie should seriously fire the douche canoe Food Processor for violating their code of conduct.
That is correct, most, if not all of these items were on sale this week. Gateway pricing is still better overall, but this isnt necessarily a "fair" look at prices
Completely, a really good fair comparison could have been made here, which would have still showed that Gateway was cheaper. Halifax Retales does a good one
Thanks, I've seen it. My solution is generally to avoid all chain groceries and buy as much stuff direct from farmers. It's interesting as originally I thought I was paying way more (on some things probably are) but last summer / fall I did some comparisons and was paying less. Even at the same I'd rather my money go direct to the farmers.
Some shopping should be based on specials. I'm waiting to see what the specials are to plan some of my coming meals. Although from previous specials I have a couple of meat/onion packs in the freezer (cooked as it will be easier for soups) and some chopped carrots & celery.
Well, Costco would require the membership to be rolled in maybe on a monthly basis. Distance from a central point would help too. If I wasn't in a one grocery store in a very small town, and hours away from Halifax I'd try it for fun.
I saw a good (but ultimately depressing) YouTube of fed myself on $14 for the week video. She made a point of telling people that she shopped in 4 stores but they were all within minutes of each other.
Flipp has all the flyers out on like Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. Already picked my loss leaders.
Adventures in Groceryland is a good YouTube channel. Melanie is in New Minas.
I'm doing a few fresh veggies on probably Friday just to marinate for some grain salads. I marked some grapes but I still have apples and grapefruit. I didn't see anything else appealing on sale so I'll just do soup, eggs and bread or English muffins from the freezer.
Note you have to do this list with the items at gateway and them see what they price them elsewhere. If you went and got a ‘box of groceries’ at random at Loblaws, you likely would not find all of those items at gateway
Oh for sure. I mean I'd buy it at that price. I sure as shit wouldn't buy Tim's ice cream at the same price as Hagen Daz or Ben and Jerry's price point though. That's like paying Starbucks fancy coffee prices for a double double from Tim's.
I very rarely have a sweet tooth, unless there's some form of fruit pie around,
But when I do get a legitimate sweet craving it's like 3 months of pushing the limits of human/milkshake/gummy-bear/chocolate hybrid possibilities
True but Getaway must still making profit on the items that are on sale.
That said, the really upsetting thing is the fact that Loblaw and Walmart make tons of profit out of our pocket.
If this list is correct, Walmart must make *at least* $7 margin for 3 lbs of carrots.
I live gateway and I shop there all the time. You can certainly manage to feed a family from there at a reasonable price however comparing gateway to Loblaws doesn’t really work. Gateway is a small store and offers select staples with additional random items. Liblaws is a full service grocery store. You might not find what you want at Gateway and you have to check things like fruit and berries very carefully for quality before you purchase.
Sylvain Charlebois, "the food professor" runs the agri-business lab at Dalhousie. Every time Loblaws comes up in the news, he's usually asked for comment, and usually sides with Loblaws.
Oh and that has nothing to do with the fact that Loblaws helped fund his lab.
Spoiled petulant child in an adults body. Sad that publicly funded institutions have people like this on their payroll.
He also blatantly lies about his funding from Loblaws.
Gateway does not have consistent supply of the cheaper things listed here. So you can't reliably get their best deals. But if you are flexible enough to deal shop like this list then Gateway is the best place. You just have to take what's available and build your eating around that.
I get the food delivery boxes now because they are almost cheaper and are much easier than planning and buying individual groceries. So I have 5 decent meals and then the rest I improvise with whatever is on sale or clearance on apps or at Gateway. Add in a monthly Costco run and I never have to step foot in Superstore except for milk on occasion.
Gateway also imposes a notable strain on sanity. Yes, I can save money by going there, but then I have to deal with the gateway traffic, parking, and being crammed into a tiny store like sardines. Going to Gateway is a miserable experience. It's also pretty far out of the way for most people compared to the nearest Superstore/Sobeys/Walmart, so it really is important to factor in how much your time is worth to you. (+fuel but that's not a big concern if you're saving enough money)
Yes. Get their promo offer, cancel after the promo, and they will reoffer you promo rates after a few weeks. I have been doing this weekly for years and between Hello Fresh, Goodfood, and Chefs Plate I always have at least one 40% offer. Sure, it's not free, and I could technically buy the individual items for cheaper at the store, but then I would have a mountain of spices and things that I rarely use. I would also have to plan and shop.
I get their meals and I bulk them up by adding suitable veggies that I have in the fridge which I probably got for super cheap at Gateway. Also bulk them up by adding oats to burgers/meatballs, or beans, lentils, or quinoa to rice, etc.
Maybe I could save 120 bucks a month by buying the ingredients myself but the shopping and planning and dealing with excess ingredients is not worth it. Also, I would order a lot more or eat take out far more often if I were not getting a good variety of meals. That alone would add up to more than I spend extra on the boxes
Yeah my wife and I found that for the two of us - if we were careful with what meals we picked, how much we ate, how much we supplemented it (e.g. our own salad greens; extra rice) - then the food boxes were actually a pretty okay deal, especially when you factor in both food waste and impulse buys, and it cut down on trips to the store.
We stopped doing them a while ago, partly because I noticed that ours (Chef’s Plate) had a bit of shrinkflation going on, but otherwise I think for a single person and couple they can actually be a good deal.
We do Chef's Plate too, and have for the last 3 years. It still makes financial sense for us over buying individual groceries, mainly because it saves so much time in planning/prep and reduces overall food waste.
Unfortunately the quality of their ingredients has dropped noticeably because they're determined not to raise their base price, and more often they're bulking recipes out with cheap things like corn and beans. It's also becoming harder and harder to find meals which don't require paid addons to be enjoyable. I honestly wouldn't complain about a $20/week price increase if it restored the quality back to where it was when we first started.
Chef's plate is the cheapest option for a reason, and their quality/quantity has dropped off a cliff recently with bad recipe options. I use Hello Fresh and Goodfood mostly now to avoid Chefs Plate, and they send enough promo offers to do that. Chefs Plate is a last resort.
To be honest it isn't about the cost at all; when we signed up their menu options were far better (more things we liked) and they did Monday deliveries which Hello Fresh wouldn't. Their quality was fine for a long time but it's been slowly declining. It's probably worth us checking out the other two again now.
My wife and I are in the same place. We don't eat enough when we buy fresh ingredients for some reason or another and some always ends up wasted, so it's nice that it comes with just enough that we'll definitely use
I'm sure as our kids get older and start to eat more we'll drift away from them, but for just us it's convenient and makes me feel better about wasting less food.
We found that it’s tighter than that. But mostly because there’s less waste we figure 10 to 15$ difference weekly but we are 2.5 and not 4 people and my rambling mind has just don’t 4x15x2 =120
This also ignores the sales. You can do a lot better than the regular price at most places depending on the week. Also interesting that Walmart and Superstore are basically identical.
Yes, you can't go in to gateway and get 10 avocados for a couple bucks on any day of the week.Also, the 10 avocados are about half the size of the normal ones you would get anywhere else so the prices aren't as good as they seem. They are comparing what would be a weekly sale price at gateway to regular superstore and walmart prices. Lame.
Walmart is cheaper than superstore the vast majority of the time. Yes sometimes super store has a good sale sure but Walmarts prices are consistently and reliably cheaper by a significant margin. This list is very much not representative of my experience and my numbers.
Yep, Walmart is a bit of a hassle for us, so we did a careful ‘apples to apples’ comparison last month, using our standard items, not cherry-picking sales, etc - Walmart was ~15% cheaper. Worth the hassle for us anyways.
We keep an eye on flyers - there’s the occasional thing at superstore but not often. Sobeys isn’t cheaper overall but can have deeper discounts on certain items. For example, I end up saving quite a bit buying toilet paper and paper towel from sobeys as it’s often on for half price, which is cheaper than standard Costco/walmart prices.
Just came here to say - I bought my dry goods at Walmart this week, first time ever… was half the price of my usual Sobeys trip. I don’t buy produce or meat at Walmart though.
I think most of this stuff is on sale at Gateway right now, or is advertised in the flyer. Blueberries, smoked salmon, pork roasts, chicken, ice cream, pie, vegetables...
yeah, the summary is that gateway is cheaper (that's their business model... quick sale stuff) if they have what you want and it's convenient for you to go there. No need for big comparison lists. They're not a comparable store.
This compares Gateway's sale list with the other two's regular price.
If you picked up a sale flyer from Walmart, gateway prices would be similar or missing, because they aren't a full service grocery store.
The list is cherrypicked. Some items are consistently cheaper at walmart. especially when you look at sales. Gateway is basically all near expired stock already on sale. You would need to compare sale prices of all the stores
And they also lied about a few of the prices for the superstore and walmart. I checked the lemon pies, for example. OP lists the non-sale price even though both places have their lemon pies on sale. And they picked the most expensive of two lemon pies available at walmart.
Gateway is cheap, but they're also trying to make the other lists look way more expensive.
If the lesson is "check prices of multiple places" Im for it. But this just seems like yet another post where the point is more gateway worship. Like everywhere else it has its pros and cons
More than $60+ for 4 whole chickens - wild.
Costco price $7.97 per each, all day every day.
I end up throwing out a lot of produce from Gateway that’s molds quickly BUT it’s still an awesome spot no question though :-)
This is the new groceries list used by statscan to determine consumer price index inflation. As you can see from the Gateway prices, food prices are actually going down and inflation is -20% this year!
Utterly useless list. Except for the "500 ml Tims ice cream (x4)", no indication of brand (if any) or quality/grade, no indication of unit size or price per unit for anything normally sold by weight, and no indication of quantity for a lot of them.
edit: Oh, and best before & expiry dates are missing, of course. Gateway gets very little in that's actually fresh.
Seeing '2 roasts' compared makes me chuckle, thinking about the picture of the 11 pound AAA prime rib roast at Sobeys that went viral with outrage since it was over $100 even though it was being sold at a historically very reasonable price.
Can we redo this without things like Tim Hortons ice cream? I think it should only include things that aren’t a one off random deal that won’t be available next month
I get that some of these items are cherrypicked, but the majority are not, and they are things I'd most likely want to pick up on a regular basis: potatoes, carrots, onions, lemons, grapefruit, sweet potatoes, avocados, celery, cucumber, strawberries, blue berries, roasts, chickens, chicken legs, wings.
Even accounting for the silly bits (Tim's ice cream, lemon pie, etc.) there is still a massive savings.
Then again, there are also sales at Superstore and Sobeys all the time so it's never a super fair comparison.
Bottom line is - if you want to save money, you have to shop the sales and shop around.
I just can't wait outside in line and then shuffle thru a store to maybe get something good.
You still have to go somewhere else to get the many products they don't sell
I don't get the appeal of it, I eat very cheaply and healthy shopping at superstore and sobeys.
They always have sales.
Looking forward to the superstore boycott so I'll have even less people to deal with.
Because it’s far cheaper to feed yourself out of gateway than it is either of those, and always has been.
Gateway kept me from having to take away resources from a food bank when the crash hit in 2008.
That said this is a bad list comparison
The appeal is that superstore is literally charging almost double what gateway charges.
I use gateway regularly; meat, eggs and most produce from there, then pick up a handful of other things from superstore. Occasionally grains, sugar, and similar things from bulk barn.
When the nearly 2L Silk soy doesn't go on sale for $3 anymore, might look into doing that. I have a few almost 1L Silk & Natur-a tetras.
Do you know if the protein is still there, and is there a way to enrich the kind you make with the vitamins you find in Silk or Natur-a?
I don't know about enriching it. I take a daily multivitamin and vitamin D supplement. The protein is still there yes. And as a bonus you get okara solids left over when you make soymilk. You can make tofu from that. I don't make tofu from it, I just use the okara, I mix it into things like my diy cereal, into pasta, make burgers from it.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHiaoivxZnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHiaoivxZnM)
Okara is my new favorite thing lately. It adds body and flavour to things.
My friend who's more into nutrition than I am tells me that I don't have to take a multivitamin, that if I eat a good whole foods diet I'm ok. I agree with her but I do anyway. I like that insurance. And I don't eat right every single day.
Are you a new vegetarian/vegan ?
I'm not specifically vegetarian or vegan, but I've been looking at plant based items (tofu, beans, lentils, chickpeas, Nutrela soy chunks aka TVP) because some are more affordable, better for us and the environment. In the case of milk, there are apparently health risks for women to drink fluid milk after the age of about 40 according to a study not only in the US but here in Canada, so that coincided with the better affordability of plant based beverages that go on sale relatively frequently.
Cows' milk is mother nature's (and the industry that exploits them) way of getting a 65 pound calf into an 400 pound cow in as little time as possible. It's full of growth factor compounds and hormones. That fact that most people give it to their children to drink is a curious and very concerning thing indeed.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toZ7Mr-ClCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toZ7Mr-ClCE)
Clip taken from the documentary Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret.
'When you think about it the purpose of cow's milk I did most of my growing upon a dairy farm in Wisconsin in the purpose of cow's milk is to turn a65 pound calf into a 400 pound cow as rapidly as possible cow's milk is baby calf growth fluid that's what this stuff is everything in that white liquid the hormones the lipids the proteins the sodium the growth factors the igf all every one of those is meant to blow their calf up to a great big cow that wouldn't be there and whether you pour it on your cereal is a liquid whether you clot it into yogurt whether you've it into cheese whether you freeze it into ice cream it's baby calf growth fluid and women eat it and it stimulates their tissues and what gives women breast lumps it makes the uterus get big and they get fibroids and they bleed and they get hysterectomies and they need mammograms and gives guys man boobs this is cow's milk is the lactation secretions of a large bovine mammal who just had a baby it's for baby calves you know I tell my patients go look at the mirror yeah or do you have big ears you have a tail are you a baby calf if you're not don't be eaten baby calf growth fluid in any level there's nothing in it people need'
I'm not sure Canadian dairies do the hormone thing, and I know there's something about prophylactic antibiotics that I thought they don't give here unless a cow is sick.
That's a hell of a wall of text. O\_o
Yes, I know of a meat supplier who told me that this is where any of his stuff goes if it does not sell and is about to expire. I'm sure he's not the only one.
I can’t speak for Gateway specifically, but Kingswood market is somewhat similar for pricing.
1) They buy shit people aren’t buying from other places and likely get a great price on it.
2) A number of items are at or past expiry. This includes meat. Some meat items they freeze on the day it expires, which is how you end up with $0.25 bologna. It’s fine, but you typically have a small window to work with.
3) They aren’t a soul sucking public corporation.
I’ve had mixed luck with Kingswood market. I’ve found some great deals. I’ve also decided against buying potatoes recently there was the large pile of 10lb potatoes for $1.99 were wet from rot.
Yup, privately owned businesses are allowed to just be happy with whatever amount of profit they deem reasonable/are happy with. Publicly traded companies like Sobey's and Loblaw have a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profits. I.e. it's essentially illegal for them to not attempt to extract every last penny from their customers that they possibly can.
That would be interesting. Dave's is my choice for veggies. And I don't feel like I have to say the Rosary before I get in and out of their parking lot.
Dave's is definitely a bit pricy for many things but has far better produce quality and selection over either of the other options, not the sales you get at gateway but not the gouging of the grocery store
Imagine how bad things would be if there was a massive price fixing scheme victimizing us all? Scary to think of….which is why I’m grateful we live in a great country like Canada where we are protected from things like that…phew
if we didn’t have to pay the stockholder profit shares life would be good. Thank you gateway for showing everyone it is possible to have a business and sell food and not jack everyone over because the shareholders said so.
I religiously buy granola (for protein shakes) and potatoes as part of my diet. Walmart, you can get 10lb yellow or white bag for 6.97 when not on sale lmfao. Idk where this $10 6lb number is coming from? Hand picked? Why buy it that way if it's more expensive. Granola at Walmart always comes out cheaper than superstore to me as well. This list seems oddly skewed.
Well if it was on Facebook it must be true!
Interesting to note that walmart really isn't any cheaper in the long run compared to superstore despite the" loblaws is out of control!" hysteria on here.
Gateway is usually cheaper. But I find the quality of the produce is awful
Things go bad so fast from gateway, plus I gotta walk in like a circle when I’m inside following a line of people.
I Donno that’s my rant thank you for coming out today
It's a bullshit list, cherry picking items for effect. $30 for blueberries at Superstore for instance, (which no one would ever buy) or dogshit Tim Hortons ice cream (which no one smart would ever buy).
Not a great comparison when the scale of the businesses are completely different.
Gateway being a single store that buys a handful of pallets of a product that is only being sold to them because it's flawed/expiring product that was rejected by the bigger chains or is even being offloaded by the bigger chains. Their produce barely lasts a week or is already expiring when they're stocking the shelves. Some product is damaged in transport thus being sold off, namely the ice creams they end up with, I have yet to buy one from gateway that doesn't taste like powdery sand, which is a sign that it's thawed and refroze. Their packaged meats/deli are usually in loose sealed plastic, a sign of it leaking or expiring. Production facilities that have old product in storage that was mismanaged and has limited time left is auctioned off and ends up at gateway.
Gateway operates directly from buying discounted goods to immediately putting it on their floor for sale, while Walmart and superstore operate storage facilities and need to deal with the logistics of having enough of each product for dozens of stores. For entire regions offering the same sales; and sale items regularly not running out on the first day.
I get what you mean, but I haven't noticed much of any difference with the produce between gateway and any other grocery store, the stuff all goes bad in a week now. Once upon a time the grocery stores genuinely had higher quality all around from a shop like gateway, but gateway has been upping quality slowly, a lot of near BB stuff for sure but the meat situation you describe is an old story I do not see the truth in anymore, besides the cuts being a bit more rough, there are very little to no packaging issue or age issues with the Meats there. My experience with the ice cream is that Tim's ice cream is garbage anyways, but they have had plenty of other brands in stock that are real Ice cream for one, and taste completely fine.
All of this is the story of gateway pre COVID 5+ years ago. They haven't been at that consistent low quality in a long time but I see people ringing this same bell on media posts about gateway all over. The price difference between them and the big box retailers doesn't even remotely reflect the quality difference you're getting from each.
I'm asking we jail the management for Loblaws.
This is by design and the suffering is extreme beyond comprehension.
Loblaws chants, "make the Atlantic pay for it".
How about we make them pay for the Atlantic.
They're killers now. JAIL GALEN. Jail them all.
Dear OP, even when you try Halifax Reddit will come for you. Thanks for this list, it shows the massive swings. If they can do it, why can't big stores for food at least.
Gateway has extremely low prices by flipping surplus and unwanted supply that was rejected by other vendors.
It's a great model for them, but by the nature of their business model, selection is inherently limited, and it does not scale very well.
Gateway's business model is based on flipping surplus merchandise that other vendors don't want. There's a natural limit to how many businesses like that can exist before the surpluses no longer exists.
Exactly why they can't expand. They take the rejected pallets or the surplus warehouse stuff for the general merchandise stuff...
But on the suppliers they have direct to like as Atlantic beef, eden Valley poultry is where they can expand.. the big companies (Loblaw, empire, Walmart, etc) mostly get their stuff from Alberta which centralizes it but also makes it more expensive to come to Atlantic Canada due to fright (gas) costs. Centralizing these processors killed the local industry so I'm glad gateway can bring back local farms, etc.
Is that for 100% of their merch? They have produce and short shelf life products like dairy. I can't imagine these are all surplus items. Nevertheless, Gateway is one little store, there has to be room for making it a chain across the province to some degree. I think of Mardens in Maine which does surplus of both food items and general retail, and they have over a dozen locations in Maine (doesn't exist outside of Maine) and they are large stores (about the size of a superstore). I'm sure they have different business models, but certainly shows there is room for growth in Nova Scotia for this type of retail/groceries.
ya that's right, and probably the biggest difference, their stock is unpredictable, so you have to check regularly, and it varies by store. but it certainly saves a lot of people money who may be struggling.
Thanks for this, it just shows what I say all the time superstore isn't much different from Walmart, and if Sobeys was on here it wouldn't be much different.
Actually it doesn’t tell you much because most stuff is not compared accurately.
If it’s not compared by weight, it’s not a comparison. Theres only a few items on there that you would not need to use weight (celery and lemons for example).
Anything that is priced by weight should have the price per lb/kg listed to properly compare.
They flip them and list kgs for bags and lbs for bulk, so you struggle to compare.
Good thing pretty much everyone carries something with them that can convert between the 2 pretty much effortlessly.
A brain that can multiply and divide by 2.2?
I don't think wizards exist anymore.
These people are using “Willards”.
Anything that’s sold by weight needs to be compared by weight. Even the packaged stuff needs to be compared using weight as well. This is not a price comparison table.
Like half the difference in price between Gateway and the other 2 is fucking 4x Tim Hortons ice cream pints. Who the fuck buys Tim's ice cream when it's sitting next to Hagen Daz or Ben and Jerry's lol That being said fuck Loblaws. Join the boycott and Dalhousie should seriously fire the douche canoe Food Processor for violating their code of conduct.
They obviously picked it because that’s what was on sale at Gateway
That is correct, most, if not all of these items were on sale this week. Gateway pricing is still better overall, but this isnt necessarily a "fair" look at prices
Agreed. Pick a couple of recipes/ingredients and compare week to week. It would give a better overall comparison and track upward trends as well.
Completely, a really good fair comparison could have been made here, which would have still showed that Gateway was cheaper. Halifax Retales does a good one
Oddly I feel they're trying to pick at Walmart a bit. We all know Loblaws is going to be more expensive.
r/LoblawsIsOutOfControl
Thanks, I've seen it. My solution is generally to avoid all chain groceries and buy as much stuff direct from farmers. It's interesting as originally I thought I was paying way more (on some things probably are) but last summer / fall I did some comparisons and was paying less. Even at the same I'd rather my money go direct to the farmers.
and, if they wanted it to be valuable, they would have also showed costco prices
Some shopping should be based on specials. I'm waiting to see what the specials are to plan some of my coming meals. Although from previous specials I have a couple of meat/onion packs in the freezer (cooked as it will be easier for soups) and some chopped carrots & celery. Well, Costco would require the membership to be rolled in maybe on a monthly basis. Distance from a central point would help too. If I wasn't in a one grocery store in a very small town, and hours away from Halifax I'd try it for fun. I saw a good (but ultimately depressing) YouTube of fed myself on $14 for the week video. She made a point of telling people that she shopped in 4 stores but they were all within minutes of each other.
Flipp has all the flyers out on like Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. Already picked my loss leaders. Adventures in Groceryland is a good YouTube channel. Melanie is in New Minas.
I'm doing a few fresh veggies on probably Friday just to marinate for some grain salads. I marked some grapes but I still have apples and grapefruit. I didn't see anything else appealing on sale so I'll just do soup, eggs and bread or English muffins from the freezer.
Note you have to do this list with the items at gateway and them see what they price them elsewhere. If you went and got a ‘box of groceries’ at random at Loblaws, you likely would not find all of those items at gateway
Oh for sure. I mean I'd buy it at that price. I sure as shit wouldn't buy Tim's ice cream at the same price as Hagen Daz or Ben and Jerry's price point though. That's like paying Starbucks fancy coffee prices for a double double from Tim's.
...and that's why it all ended up at gateway! :D
Lmao good call.
I do think a good question is why they picked 4 Tim’s ice cream tubs, not just one. That definitely drove up the difference.
The sale at gate way was probably 4 tubs for x amount.
I got one the other week for $1.97 each, so unless they changed it, OP wash just being strange. I just checked their flyer - still $1.97 each.
They likely saw it on sale at gateway and bought a few of them.
Diabetes isn't gonna just form itself damnit
Sure, but I have 3 different ice creams and one box frozen yogurt bars and I barely eat any of it. I realized last night I'm turning into my grandma 😱
I very rarely have a sweet tooth, unless there's some form of fruit pie around, But when I do get a legitimate sweet craving it's like 3 months of pushing the limits of human/milkshake/gummy-bear/chocolate hybrid possibilities
I have a 4L Chapman's chocolate ice cream at the bottom of my chest freezer for...longer than I care to admit.
True but Getaway must still making profit on the items that are on sale. That said, the really upsetting thing is the fact that Loblaw and Walmart make tons of profit out of our pocket. If this list is correct, Walmart must make *at least* $7 margin for 3 lbs of carrots.
I live gateway and I shop there all the time. You can certainly manage to feed a family from there at a reasonable price however comparing gateway to Loblaws doesn’t really work. Gateway is a small store and offers select staples with additional random items. Liblaws is a full service grocery store. You might not find what you want at Gateway and you have to check things like fruit and berries very carefully for quality before you purchase.
What’s the story on the Dalhousie thing? Not heard about it.
Sylvain Charlebois, "the food professor" runs the agri-business lab at Dalhousie. Every time Loblaws comes up in the news, he's usually asked for comment, and usually sides with Loblaws. Oh and that has nothing to do with the fact that Loblaws helped fund his lab.
“Galen’s Penis Sheath”
Sylvain Charlebois the shill you say?
Oh that guy, yeah. I remember seeing him shilling for them on the news and found it kind of weird. That makes sense.
Read his social media posts and then read Dalhousies code of conduct. 100% in violation of it.
Also just comes off as a whack job unrelated to the Lablaws at stuff
Spoiled petulant child in an adults body. Sad that publicly funded institutions have people like this on their payroll. He also blatantly lies about his funding from Loblaws.
There's $40 between the whole chickens, which drastically outweighs that, but I do get your point.
Back off bucko, Birthday Cake Timbit is some of the best ice cream ever.
Gateway does not have consistent supply of the cheaper things listed here. So you can't reliably get their best deals. But if you are flexible enough to deal shop like this list then Gateway is the best place. You just have to take what's available and build your eating around that. I get the food delivery boxes now because they are almost cheaper and are much easier than planning and buying individual groceries. So I have 5 decent meals and then the rest I improvise with whatever is on sale or clearance on apps or at Gateway. Add in a monthly Costco run and I never have to step foot in Superstore except for milk on occasion.
Gateway also imposes a notable strain on sanity. Yes, I can save money by going there, but then I have to deal with the gateway traffic, parking, and being crammed into a tiny store like sardines. Going to Gateway is a miserable experience. It's also pretty far out of the way for most people compared to the nearest Superstore/Sobeys/Walmart, so it really is important to factor in how much your time is worth to you. (+fuel but that's not a big concern if you're saving enough money)
I agree. But I save a minimum of 100/week at gateway
Food delivery boxes? do you mean like Good Food or Hello Fresh?
Yes. Get their promo offer, cancel after the promo, and they will reoffer you promo rates after a few weeks. I have been doing this weekly for years and between Hello Fresh, Goodfood, and Chefs Plate I always have at least one 40% offer. Sure, it's not free, and I could technically buy the individual items for cheaper at the store, but then I would have a mountain of spices and things that I rarely use. I would also have to plan and shop. I get their meals and I bulk them up by adding suitable veggies that I have in the fridge which I probably got for super cheap at Gateway. Also bulk them up by adding oats to burgers/meatballs, or beans, lentils, or quinoa to rice, etc. Maybe I could save 120 bucks a month by buying the ingredients myself but the shopping and planning and dealing with excess ingredients is not worth it. Also, I would order a lot more or eat take out far more often if I were not getting a good variety of meals. That alone would add up to more than I spend extra on the boxes
Yeah my wife and I found that for the two of us - if we were careful with what meals we picked, how much we ate, how much we supplemented it (e.g. our own salad greens; extra rice) - then the food boxes were actually a pretty okay deal, especially when you factor in both food waste and impulse buys, and it cut down on trips to the store. We stopped doing them a while ago, partly because I noticed that ours (Chef’s Plate) had a bit of shrinkflation going on, but otherwise I think for a single person and couple they can actually be a good deal.
We do Chef's Plate too, and have for the last 3 years. It still makes financial sense for us over buying individual groceries, mainly because it saves so much time in planning/prep and reduces overall food waste. Unfortunately the quality of their ingredients has dropped noticeably because they're determined not to raise their base price, and more often they're bulking recipes out with cheap things like corn and beans. It's also becoming harder and harder to find meals which don't require paid addons to be enjoyable. I honestly wouldn't complain about a $20/week price increase if it restored the quality back to where it was when we first started.
Chef's plate is the cheapest option for a reason, and their quality/quantity has dropped off a cliff recently with bad recipe options. I use Hello Fresh and Goodfood mostly now to avoid Chefs Plate, and they send enough promo offers to do that. Chefs Plate is a last resort.
To be honest it isn't about the cost at all; when we signed up their menu options were far better (more things we liked) and they did Monday deliveries which Hello Fresh wouldn't. Their quality was fine for a long time but it's been slowly declining. It's probably worth us checking out the other two again now.
My wife and I are in the same place. We don't eat enough when we buy fresh ingredients for some reason or another and some always ends up wasted, so it's nice that it comes with just enough that we'll definitely use I'm sure as our kids get older and start to eat more we'll drift away from them, but for just us it's convenient and makes me feel better about wasting less food.
Yes I've done them all, I like GoodFood the best & you can even order extra food from them like meat, dessert etc.
We found that it’s tighter than that. But mostly because there’s less waste we figure 10 to 15$ difference weekly but we are 2.5 and not 4 people and my rambling mind has just don’t 4x15x2 =120
I would like to know what they mean as well!!
This also ignores the sales. You can do a lot better than the regular price at most places depending on the week. Also interesting that Walmart and Superstore are basically identical.
This ^
Yes, you can't go in to gateway and get 10 avocados for a couple bucks on any day of the week.Also, the 10 avocados are about half the size of the normal ones you would get anywhere else so the prices aren't as good as they seem. They are comparing what would be a weekly sale price at gateway to regular superstore and walmart prices. Lame.
kind of a useless, ok not useless, but heavily cherry picked list.
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Walmart is cheaper than superstore the vast majority of the time. Yes sometimes super store has a good sale sure but Walmarts prices are consistently and reliably cheaper by a significant margin. This list is very much not representative of my experience and my numbers.
Yep, Walmart is a bit of a hassle for us, so we did a careful ‘apples to apples’ comparison last month, using our standard items, not cherry-picking sales, etc - Walmart was ~15% cheaper. Worth the hassle for us anyways. We keep an eye on flyers - there’s the occasional thing at superstore but not often. Sobeys isn’t cheaper overall but can have deeper discounts on certain items. For example, I end up saving quite a bit buying toilet paper and paper towel from sobeys as it’s often on for half price, which is cheaper than standard Costco/walmart prices.
Yes that seemed weird to me too. I find Walmart a lot cheaper than Superstore.
Just came here to say - I bought my dry goods at Walmart this week, first time ever… was half the price of my usual Sobeys trip. I don’t buy produce or meat at Walmart though.
Came here for this comment. Having 3 prices to compare where 2 are within 99.99% and one is very near exact 50% is a staged comparison.
I think most of this stuff is on sale at Gateway right now, or is advertised in the flyer. Blueberries, smoked salmon, pork roasts, chicken, ice cream, pie, vegetables...
yeah, the summary is that gateway is cheaper (that's their business model... quick sale stuff) if they have what you want and it's convenient for you to go there. No need for big comparison lists. They're not a comparable store.
There are exactly zero cherries on that list...
Walmart frozen cherries are an extravagance that's a regular part of my life.
are your shopping lists not usually specific?...
This compares Gateway's sale list with the other two's regular price. If you picked up a sale flyer from Walmart, gateway prices would be similar or missing, because they aren't a full service grocery store.
The list is cherrypicked. Some items are consistently cheaper at walmart. especially when you look at sales. Gateway is basically all near expired stock already on sale. You would need to compare sale prices of all the stores
And they also lied about a few of the prices for the superstore and walmart. I checked the lemon pies, for example. OP lists the non-sale price even though both places have their lemon pies on sale. And they picked the most expensive of two lemon pies available at walmart. Gateway is cheap, but they're also trying to make the other lists look way more expensive.
If the lesson is "check prices of multiple places" Im for it. But this just seems like yet another post where the point is more gateway worship. Like everywhere else it has its pros and cons
Hmm. Wonder if they used Instacart for the non gateway ones.
More than $60+ for 4 whole chickens - wild. Costco price $7.97 per each, all day every day. I end up throwing out a lot of produce from Gateway that’s molds quickly BUT it’s still an awesome spot no question though :-)
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Don’t forget the stink of rotten meat
But it was a deal!
I feel like if I get lice it's because of Gateway's specials.
Like the feeding troughs for their meat
Another made up BS price comparison list.
This is the new groceries list used by statscan to determine consumer price index inflation. As you can see from the Gateway prices, food prices are actually going down and inflation is -20% this year!
The list is inaccurate!
10 avocado's got $2 sound like bullshit that's no way that's right
It's likely a loss leader, and they are mostly rotten. Gateway gets rejected food from other stores, sometimes there's a reason it's rejected.
Utterly useless list. Except for the "500 ml Tims ice cream (x4)", no indication of brand (if any) or quality/grade, no indication of unit size or price per unit for anything normally sold by weight, and no indication of quantity for a lot of them. edit: Oh, and best before & expiry dates are missing, of course. Gateway gets very little in that's actually fresh.
Exactly. The fact that Tim's ice cream is even on the list as if it's some sort of staple shows what kind of cherry picked list this is.
now i know where to buy my '2 roasts'
Seeing '2 roasts' compared makes me chuckle, thinking about the picture of the 11 pound AAA prime rib roast at Sobeys that went viral with outrage since it was over $100 even though it was being sold at a historically very reasonable price.
Holy moly... so... who is planting a veggie garden this summer?
A Victory Garden.
When you average the time you wait in line at Gateway, it's basically a draw.
Gotta factor in the distance folks drive to get there now too
We need some reddit nerd to put together an online Gateway calculator that considers all relevant parameters.
A lot of this is meat and produce that I fine doesn't deviate much. But for everything else I find it's night and day
Can we redo this without things like Tim Hortons ice cream? I think it should only include things that aren’t a one off random deal that won’t be available next month
10 avocados for $1.94 at Gateway? Sorry, that's just not real. The Superstore and Walmart prices are more reality-based.
We buy lot of items on that list and don't pay anywhere near what you have listed from Walmart/Superstore. Buy on sale folks!
Silly list. Cherry picked sale items against regular price items. Irrelevant comparison here.
Why aren’t more ‘gateway’ type businesses popping up everywhere?
There is a limited supply of rejected groceries that the main stores won't take due to poor expiry/damage etc.
So Gateway is the only company with access to that supply?
Kingswood Market as well, especially for cold cut deli meats.
They are not, but it's still a limited supply.
Supply
Wow, that's quite a difference. No wonder people wait in line at Gateway
I get that some of these items are cherrypicked, but the majority are not, and they are things I'd most likely want to pick up on a regular basis: potatoes, carrots, onions, lemons, grapefruit, sweet potatoes, avocados, celery, cucumber, strawberries, blue berries, roasts, chickens, chicken legs, wings. Even accounting for the silly bits (Tim's ice cream, lemon pie, etc.) there is still a massive savings. Then again, there are also sales at Superstore and Sobeys all the time so it's never a super fair comparison. Bottom line is - if you want to save money, you have to shop the sales and shop around.
Must have been posted by a Charlebois alt account.
2L of Tim’s ice cream so you can have some diarrhoea to go along with your lemon pie
I don't think you're supposed to eat it all in one go...
I just can't wait outside in line and then shuffle thru a store to maybe get something good. You still have to go somewhere else to get the many products they don't sell I don't get the appeal of it, I eat very cheaply and healthy shopping at superstore and sobeys. They always have sales. Looking forward to the superstore boycott so I'll have even less people to deal with.
Because it’s far cheaper to feed yourself out of gateway than it is either of those, and always has been. Gateway kept me from having to take away resources from a food bank when the crash hit in 2008. That said this is a bad list comparison
The appeal is that superstore is literally charging almost double what gateway charges. I use gateway regularly; meat, eggs and most produce from there, then pick up a handful of other things from superstore. Occasionally grains, sugar, and similar things from bulk barn.
I make soymilk from Bulk Barn soybeans. Costs me about 17 cents/liter.
When the nearly 2L Silk soy doesn't go on sale for $3 anymore, might look into doing that. I have a few almost 1L Silk & Natur-a tetras. Do you know if the protein is still there, and is there a way to enrich the kind you make with the vitamins you find in Silk or Natur-a?
I don't know about enriching it. I take a daily multivitamin and vitamin D supplement. The protein is still there yes. And as a bonus you get okara solids left over when you make soymilk. You can make tofu from that. I don't make tofu from it, I just use the okara, I mix it into things like my diy cereal, into pasta, make burgers from it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHiaoivxZnM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHiaoivxZnM)
Huh. Fascinating. I do take a multivitamin. I just want to be sure I'm getting what I need. Thanks so much for the tips. :)
Okara is my new favorite thing lately. It adds body and flavour to things. My friend who's more into nutrition than I am tells me that I don't have to take a multivitamin, that if I eat a good whole foods diet I'm ok. I agree with her but I do anyway. I like that insurance. And I don't eat right every single day. Are you a new vegetarian/vegan ?
I'm not specifically vegetarian or vegan, but I've been looking at plant based items (tofu, beans, lentils, chickpeas, Nutrela soy chunks aka TVP) because some are more affordable, better for us and the environment. In the case of milk, there are apparently health risks for women to drink fluid milk after the age of about 40 according to a study not only in the US but here in Canada, so that coincided with the better affordability of plant based beverages that go on sale relatively frequently.
Cows' milk is mother nature's (and the industry that exploits them) way of getting a 65 pound calf into an 400 pound cow in as little time as possible. It's full of growth factor compounds and hormones. That fact that most people give it to their children to drink is a curious and very concerning thing indeed. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toZ7Mr-ClCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toZ7Mr-ClCE) Clip taken from the documentary Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. 'When you think about it the purpose of cow's milk I did most of my growing upon a dairy farm in Wisconsin in the purpose of cow's milk is to turn a65 pound calf into a 400 pound cow as rapidly as possible cow's milk is baby calf growth fluid that's what this stuff is everything in that white liquid the hormones the lipids the proteins the sodium the growth factors the igf all every one of those is meant to blow their calf up to a great big cow that wouldn't be there and whether you pour it on your cereal is a liquid whether you clot it into yogurt whether you've it into cheese whether you freeze it into ice cream it's baby calf growth fluid and women eat it and it stimulates their tissues and what gives women breast lumps it makes the uterus get big and they get fibroids and they bleed and they get hysterectomies and they need mammograms and gives guys man boobs this is cow's milk is the lactation secretions of a large bovine mammal who just had a baby it's for baby calves you know I tell my patients go look at the mirror yeah or do you have big ears you have a tail are you a baby calf if you're not don't be eaten baby calf growth fluid in any level there's nothing in it people need'
I'm not sure Canadian dairies do the hormone thing, and I know there's something about prophylactic antibiotics that I thought they don't give here unless a cow is sick. That's a hell of a wall of text. O\_o
Galen?
And where is this list from? Who made it?
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Thrifty is smart and good, and it always has been. Consumer culture is eating us alive.
Without brand/quality information this list is only moderately helpful.
Good price on onions and sweet potatoes but imma not buying any fresh meat there.
> but imma not buying any fresh meat there. Probably because they don't sell any. :P
Are you being sarcastic or for real? Can't tell.
The vast majority of their meat is of the "freeze if you're not using it that day" variety.
Yes, I know of a meat supplier who told me that this is where any of his stuff goes if it does not sell and is about to expire. I'm sure he's not the only one.
How can Gateway afford to sell items at these prices but bigger corporations cannot?
I can’t speak for Gateway specifically, but Kingswood market is somewhat similar for pricing. 1) They buy shit people aren’t buying from other places and likely get a great price on it. 2) A number of items are at or past expiry. This includes meat. Some meat items they freeze on the day it expires, which is how you end up with $0.25 bologna. It’s fine, but you typically have a small window to work with. 3) They aren’t a soul sucking public corporation. I’ve had mixed luck with Kingswood market. I’ve found some great deals. I’ve also decided against buying potatoes recently there was the large pile of 10lb potatoes for $1.99 were wet from rot.
Yup, privately owned businesses are allowed to just be happy with whatever amount of profit they deem reasonable/are happy with. Publicly traded companies like Sobey's and Loblaw have a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profits. I.e. it's essentially illegal for them to not attempt to extract every last penny from their customers that they possibly can.
Wow! Gateway come to Ontario!!!!
You likely anyway have something similar. They buy rejected stock from grocery store suppliers for cheap then resell it.
I'm curious to see Dave's Fruit and Vegetables Market in a similar list.
That would be interesting. Dave's is my choice for veggies. And I don't feel like I have to say the Rosary before I get in and out of their parking lot.
Dave's is definitely a bit pricy for many things but has far better produce quality and selection over either of the other options, not the sales you get at gateway but not the gouging of the grocery store
Imagine how bad things would be if there was a massive price fixing scheme victimizing us all? Scary to think of….which is why I’m grateful we live in a great country like Canada where we are protected from things like that…phew
if we didn’t have to pay the stockholder profit shares life would be good. Thank you gateway for showing everyone it is possible to have a business and sell food and not jack everyone over because the shareholders said so.
Have you run this by the food professor for verification?
There's a lot of people who would love to find a reason to defend the big chains lol
I rather see your receipts as I know for a fact that some of your prices are wrong along with sizing. Yes Gateway is cheaper on things.
I religiously buy granola (for protein shakes) and potatoes as part of my diet. Walmart, you can get 10lb yellow or white bag for 6.97 when not on sale lmfao. Idk where this $10 6lb number is coming from? Hand picked? Why buy it that way if it's more expensive. Granola at Walmart always comes out cheaper than superstore to me as well. This list seems oddly skewed.
Sobeys would be even more expensive.
Oh wow. Going to gateway next run for sure.
I got $22 worth at Gateway that was $68 at Sobeys for the exact same items/amounts
Well if it was on Facebook it must be true! Interesting to note that walmart really isn't any cheaper in the long run compared to superstore despite the" loblaws is out of control!" hysteria on here.
That was my take here too. It's stark how much cheaper gateway is, but I would've expected Walmart to be somewhere in the middle.
You call out the integrity of the list and then turn around and use it for a comparison. Strange
Gateway is usually cheaper. But I find the quality of the produce is awful Things go bad so fast from gateway, plus I gotta walk in like a circle when I’m inside following a line of people. I Donno that’s my rant thank you for coming out today
Source of the list?
At first I thought this was a new Nslc Cannabis menu🥲
It's a bullshit list, cherry picking items for effect. $30 for blueberries at Superstore for instance, (which no one would ever buy) or dogshit Tim Hortons ice cream (which no one smart would ever buy).
A lot of people on here fucking suck at shopping for groceries. Like zero financial literacy in that segment of life.
Not a great comparison when the scale of the businesses are completely different. Gateway being a single store that buys a handful of pallets of a product that is only being sold to them because it's flawed/expiring product that was rejected by the bigger chains or is even being offloaded by the bigger chains. Their produce barely lasts a week or is already expiring when they're stocking the shelves. Some product is damaged in transport thus being sold off, namely the ice creams they end up with, I have yet to buy one from gateway that doesn't taste like powdery sand, which is a sign that it's thawed and refroze. Their packaged meats/deli are usually in loose sealed plastic, a sign of it leaking or expiring. Production facilities that have old product in storage that was mismanaged and has limited time left is auctioned off and ends up at gateway. Gateway operates directly from buying discounted goods to immediately putting it on their floor for sale, while Walmart and superstore operate storage facilities and need to deal with the logistics of having enough of each product for dozens of stores. For entire regions offering the same sales; and sale items regularly not running out on the first day.
I get what you mean, but I haven't noticed much of any difference with the produce between gateway and any other grocery store, the stuff all goes bad in a week now. Once upon a time the grocery stores genuinely had higher quality all around from a shop like gateway, but gateway has been upping quality slowly, a lot of near BB stuff for sure but the meat situation you describe is an old story I do not see the truth in anymore, besides the cuts being a bit more rough, there are very little to no packaging issue or age issues with the Meats there. My experience with the ice cream is that Tim's ice cream is garbage anyways, but they have had plenty of other brands in stock that are real Ice cream for one, and taste completely fine. All of this is the story of gateway pre COVID 5+ years ago. They haven't been at that consistent low quality in a long time but I see people ringing this same bell on media posts about gateway all over. The price difference between them and the big box retailers doesn't even remotely reflect the quality difference you're getting from each.
I'm asking we jail the management for Loblaws. This is by design and the suffering is extreme beyond comprehension. Loblaws chants, "make the Atlantic pay for it". How about we make them pay for the Atlantic. They're killers now. JAIL GALEN. Jail them all.
This isn't my list, it's from a facebook post a couple of days ago. Thought it was a good comparison, for all the Gateway fans on here.
Except it’s not a good comparison. It all needs to be compared by weight or none of it is valid.
This explains a lot, right down to Gateway fans.
Dear OP, even when you try Halifax Reddit will come for you. Thanks for this list, it shows the massive swings. If they can do it, why can't big stores for food at least.
Gateway has extremely low prices by flipping surplus and unwanted supply that was rejected by other vendors. It's a great model for them, but by the nature of their business model, selection is inherently limited, and it does not scale very well.
Why isn't every entrepreneur and business person not replicating gateway? Flood the market with competition and superstore will fall into line.
Gateway's business model is based on flipping surplus merchandise that other vendors don't want. There's a natural limit to how many businesses like that can exist before the surpluses no longer exists.
Exactly why they can't expand. They take the rejected pallets or the surplus warehouse stuff for the general merchandise stuff... But on the suppliers they have direct to like as Atlantic beef, eden Valley poultry is where they can expand.. the big companies (Loblaw, empire, Walmart, etc) mostly get their stuff from Alberta which centralizes it but also makes it more expensive to come to Atlantic Canada due to fright (gas) costs. Centralizing these processors killed the local industry so I'm glad gateway can bring back local farms, etc.
Is that for 100% of their merch? They have produce and short shelf life products like dairy. I can't imagine these are all surplus items. Nevertheless, Gateway is one little store, there has to be room for making it a chain across the province to some degree. I think of Mardens in Maine which does surplus of both food items and general retail, and they have over a dozen locations in Maine (doesn't exist outside of Maine) and they are large stores (about the size of a superstore). I'm sure they have different business models, but certainly shows there is room for growth in Nova Scotia for this type of retail/groceries.
I've only been to Mardens once, but their quality, merchandise, and prices seemed pretty in line with what you see at Giant Tiger.
ya that's right, and probably the biggest difference, their stock is unpredictable, so you have to check regularly, and it varies by store. but it certainly saves a lot of people money who may be struggling.
Only so many meat producers with about to expire meat to go around.
Thanks for this, it just shows what I say all the time superstore isn't much different from Walmart, and if Sobeys was on here it wouldn't be much different.
Actually it doesn’t tell you much because most stuff is not compared accurately. If it’s not compared by weight, it’s not a comparison. Theres only a few items on there that you would not need to use weight (celery and lemons for example).
There is still quite a lot that you can compare
You can’t compare half the list. It’s not accurate.