What Does Buying Canadian Really Mean?

Earlier this year, as the US began levying tariffs against Canada, I found myself standing in the grocery store with a predicament. A potato chip predicament. My preferred method of coping with the stress of our politically-turbulent times — to seek out a salty little treat — had become more complicated as I, like many Canadians, tried to follow the Buy Canadian movement. Stuck in the snack aisle, I squinted at the fine print on the chip bags, trying to determine where they were from. Despite the maple leaves adorning many bags, boasting of Canadian-grown potatoes, most of the brands on the shelves were American. Beside me, a stranger was having a similar problem: she lamented that she just needed something to dip into salsa, but it was impossible to find Canadian corn chips. I asked a helpful store worker if they carried Old Dutch chips — someone had told me they were Canadian. The store did not carry them at the time, but a week later there was a small display of Old Dutch in that very same aisle. “Success!” I texted my sister, pleased that my chip quest was coming to an end, only for her to inform me that although the bag listed a headquarters in Manitoba, its parent company was American.

You’d think it would be easier to find Canadian chips. After all, the potato chip is a simple food: at its core, it is potato, salt, and oil, and Canada is a significant producer of all three of these ingredients. In theory, you could make them by hand, with ingredients from Canadian sources, but wouldn’t that negate the potato chip’s role as the ultimate lazy snack food?

According to Lays’ summer ad campaign, the solution is simple. “Many Canadians don’t know these Lays chips are made in Canada,” says the farmer in the commercial, standing in a wide sunny field. A subtitle tells us it’s Chris Perry, a “Real Canadian potato farmer,” who continues, “I’ll betcha the farm they are.” The official webpage for the ad campaign sets up a similar challenge: “Don’t believe Lay’s potato chips are made from Canadian potatoes? We’ll ‘Betcha the Farm’ they are.” These statements, however, misconstrue the argument. The Buy Canadian movement taught Canadians the difference between “product of Canada” and “made in Canada,” with the latter used for products that undergo a “substantial transformation” in Canada, but do not need to solely be made here, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). Regardless, the Buy Canadian movement’s issue with a product like Lays chips is not only about where the potatoes are grown, but also who owns the company, and where consumers’ money ultimately goes. Canadian farmers may grow the potatoes, but Lays is owned by PepsiCo, an American company and the second-largest food conglomerate in the world.

Lays’ “Betcha the Farm” campaign attempts to obscure this by co-opting the image of Canadian farmers and the language of the Buy Canadian movement for marketing purposes. The campaign’s website emphasizes that the Perry family has been “tending to the land” for “generations.” The description of the Québécois farmer in their French ad, Martin Goyet, makes the intent even clearer, stating “his farm has become part of PepsiCo’s deep agricultural roots in the region.” PepsiCo is exploiting the image of these farming families as producers, tying their product to an idea of (literal) roots in Canadian soil, despite the fact that the company who owns the product and the means of its production, and ultimately profits the most from our purchases, is not Canadian. PepsiCo emphasizes their partnership with “local farmers,” but consumers must ask themselves, local to whom? Local to Canadian consumers perhaps, but not local to the company, which is headquartered in (the aptly-named) Purchase, New York.

By leveraging the iconography of the Canadian farmer for marketing, Lays also presents a very narrow definition of Canadianness, one that leans towards the worrying emergence of a nationalistic reinterpretation of the Buy Canadian movement. With its repetition of “betcha” in a thick Canadian accent that sounds straight out of the show Letterkenny, and its emphasis on a big white family’s generational attachment to the land through mass agricultural cultivation, the ad gestures towards the rural imagery of Canadian settler-colonialism.

Lays is hardly alone in this capitalistic co-opting of the Buy Canadian movement. Heinz ketchup, owned by the Kraft Heinz Company, another massive American food conglomerate, has a remarkably similar commercial about the Canadian origin of their tomatoes. Grocers like Loblaws, Sobeys, and Metro have also exploited the movement for marketing. According to a CBC investigation, these companies have recently come under fire from the CFIA for frequently mislabelling their products as Canadian. Customers trying to buy Canadian in earnest are frequently misled by little red maple leaves on price tags where they just don’t belong. And while these grocers are Canadian companies, this marketing ploy presents a further conundrum: is it really in the spirit of the Buy Canadian movement to buy from Canadian companies like Loblaws that have a history of exploiting Canadian workers and consumers? Not long ago, these grocers were caught fixing the price of bread, and were boycotted for cutting pandemic pay for their essential workers. An expansive definition of the Buy Canadian movement’s tenets should consider whether the companies we buy from truly support the best interests of the Canadian people, not just Canadian corporations.
The ideal version of the Buy Canadian movement should be about connecting with our community. It’s bonding with a stranger in the snack aisle over an effort to make a change through our purchasing power. It’s the joy of discovering your new favourite snack from a local company you’d never heard of before. Small Canadian potato chip companies are now taking up more and more space on the shelves; companies like Hardbite from Surrey, BC; Humble Chips from Guelph, ON; Covered Bridge from Hartland, NB; and Spudniks from Woodbridge, ON. The staff of TheDecom Post tested chips from each of these truly local brands, and, after a contentious vote, declared Hardbite our favourite for its depth of flavour and superior crunch. To snack may not be a radical act, but as we gathered around the chip bowl, debating the merits of kettle cooking and sea salt usage, these salty little treats brought us together just as the Buy Canadian movement intended.