It’s been an education.
On the positive side, I never realized how many products are actually manufactured in Canada. There’s a Canadian option for nearly everything I see at the supermarket. Toothpaste is an odd exception. Some items read “Made in Canada using domestic and imported ingredients”. They don’t specify beyond that where they were imported from, which is a bit annoying.
One thing that really pisses me off is canned soup. Apparently, Campbells went around at some point and bought up nearly all the independent canneries, replacing them with a few giant ones in the US. Even Habitant, which I had always thought of as a Canadian brand, is under the Campbells umbrella at this point. But Canada (specifically Quebec) is the primary aluminum producer for North America by a good margin, which means a 50% tariff ding for every can produced. This affects American and Canadian consumers alike. Canned soup is supposed to be affordable, dammit!
Well, it turns out there is one cannery left in my area: Sprague. They’re a bit of a boutique brand, so not necessarily cheaper, but at least they’re not tariff-inflated and they make a good product. Their soups generally don’t contain outrageous amounts of sodium like most of Campbells offerings, and all their cans have pull tops which is a nice touch. I’m giving them a lot of business now and hope they can expand to fill the void of Canadian producers.
Well I can say “Lake America” is not going down well with indigenous in my area…or anyone, really. The guy just doesn’t know when to stop.