Butter, cheese are hot commodities on black market

British Columbia business owner Joe Chaput will spend $5,500 a month on security guards during the holiday season and plans on upgrading his store’s video camera system for around $5,000 more.

He’s not selling luxury brands or expensive jewels.

Chaput sells cheese, and at Christmas, cheese is a hot commodity.

He is the co-owner of specialty cheese store les amis du Fromage, with two locations in Vancouver.

While cheeselifting is rare in their Kitsilano store, the outlet in East Vancouver is hit in waves, with nothing happening for a month, then three of four people trying to steal their inventory within a week.

“Sometimes, you miss it. Sometimes, you catch it. The way shoplifters behave … they tend to gravitate toward expensive things,” said Chaput.

Expensive cheese is on shoplifters’ Christmas list, he said.

“They tend to do the classic examples of staying away from customer service and trying to go to a different part of the store so they can be left alone to steal.”

Chaput isn’t alone. Police say food-related crimes on are the rise in Canada and as prices climb for items such as cheese and butter, they become lucrative on the black market for organized crime groups, not to mention theft for local resale.

Sylvain Charlebois, the director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-food Analytics Lab, said a black market tends to emerge as soon as food prices surge.

“Organized crime will steal anything (if) they know they can sell it and so, they probably would have known who their clients are before even stealing anything at all, and that’s how a black market is organized,” said Charlebois.

He said he believes there are two categories of people shoplifting — those who do so out of desperation because they can’t afford the food, or organized criminals, profiting from sales on the black market.

Mounties in North Vancouver made cheesy headlines when they ran into a man with a cart of stolen cheese in the middle of the night in September.

The cheese, valued at $12,800, was from a nearby Whole Foods Store. While the cheese was recovered, it had to be disposed of because it hadn’t been refrigerated.

Const. Mansoor Sahak, with the North Vancouver RCMP, said officers believe cheese is targeted because it’s “profitable to resell.”

“If they are drug addicts, they will commit further crimes with that or feed their drug habits. It’s a vicious cycle,” said Sahak.

Sahak said meat is also a top target for grocery thieves, with store losses sometimes in the thousands.

“So, we’re not surprised that this happened,” said Sahak.

Police in Ontario have been chasing down slippery shoplifters going after butter.

Scott Tracey, a spokesman with Guelph Police Service, said there have been eight or nine butter thefts over the last year, including one theft last December worth $1,000.

In October, two men walked into a local grocer and filled their carts with cases of butter valued at $936, and four days later a Guelph grocer lost four cases valued at $958.

Tracey said he has looked at online marketplaces and found listings by people selling 20 or 30 pounds of butter at a time.

“Clearly, somebody didn’t accidentally buy 30 extra pounds of butter. So, they must have come from somewhere,” said Tracey, “I think at this point it appears to be the black market is where it’s headed.”

He said the thefts seem to be organized, with two or three people working together in each case.

Police in Brantford, Ont., are also investigating the theft of about $1,200 worth of butter from a store on Nov. 4.

Charlebois said retailers could invest in prevention technologies like electronic tags, but putting them on butter or cheese is rare.

He said up until recently grocery store theft has been a “taboo subject for many years.”

Stores didn’t wanted to talk about thefts because they didn’t want to alarm people but now they feel they need to build awareness about what is “becoming a huge problem,” said Charlebois.

Chaput, the cheese store owner, said he had been running the East Vancouver store for 15 years while managing the store in Kitsilano for 30 years, and he loves his customers.

“It’s really one of the best parts of our businesses, seeing familiar faces and making new customers. It’s why we come to work, really. Partly it’s the cheese, and partly it’s the people,” said Chaput.

He said his strategy to combat would-be thieves is to give them extra customer service to make it harder for them to steal.

He admits, however, that the shoplifting causes him stress.

“It’s challenging. You’re busy trying to run your business day to day and take care of customers and take care of employees. Having to deal with criminals, just kind of scratches away. It can be a bit exhausting,” said Chaput.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 15, 2024.