Data catalog

One panel.
Four ways to work with it.

Four datasets come off one weekly collection run: an aggregate price index, the item-level panel underneath it, the pack-size changes that panel reveals, and the coverage matrix that tells you where the numbers exist. Each is documented below the way a data buyer needs it — unit of observation, coverage, history, cadence, lag, delivery and licence. The published index begins July 2026: this is a young, high-frequency panel, not a long back-history, and we price and describe it accordingly.

Explore the datasets CSV archive →

Weekly collectionDocumented fieldsLicensed access

13cities, coast to coast

21index banners

146index stores

50basket items

9categories

These figures describe the historical index panel, which excludes Walmart and Costco; Giant Tiger carries only part of the basket. Any separately verified Walmart observations in the per-item dataset carry their own collection dates and coverage and do not change that index history. Prices are read from publicly accessible retailer websites — online list prices, which can differ from the shelf. See the full coverage matrix →

The datasets

1. Canadian Grocery Price Index (CGPI)

Subscriber licence

The published headline series and every cut beneath it, plus the dollar cost of a fixed 50-item basket. The headline and the nine category sub-indices are ONE estimator, so the headline can be rebuilt from the categories exactly: a direct fixed-base matched-model Jevons versus the week of 2026-07-13 = 100, with price relatives formed within a single store, so category levels are comparable with each other.

Unit of observation: One row per week × city × banner × category, plus the aggregate rows where any of those dimensions is NULL.
Coverage: Historical index: 13 cities · 21 banners · 146 stores · 50-item basket · 9 categories. Walmart and Costco are outside this index; Giant Tiger is partial.
History: Weekly from July 2026 (methodology v2). Roughly seven to eight weekly points deep as of this quarter. We publish week-over-week and since-inception change only — there is no year-over-year figure anywhere on this site, because the record cannot yet support one.
Cadence & lag: Collected every Thursday 08:00 UTC with an automatic Friday catch-up; weeks end Sunday. JSON is available same week. The CSV pack is monthly on a 14-day delay.
Delivery: JSON via /api/public/index with your API key. Monthly CSV pack below. A citable page per series at /series/<id>.
Licence: Subscriber licence. Attribution required when cited. No redistribution, resale or public republication of the underlying data.
Key fields: date, city, retailer, category, index_value, basket_cost_cad, pct_change_wow, item_count, total_items — defined field by field in the data dictionary.

Open the JSON Index subscription options Methodology

2. Basket-level price panel

Commercial licence

Observed prices for basket items at tracked banners and cities, week by week. The index panel and any separately verified Walmart observations retain their distinct coverage. Regular and sale prices are carried alongside the effective price actually charged, where the chain publishes them. Promotional capture varies by chain and is documented in the methodology.

Unit of observation: One row per canonical product × banner × city × observation.
Coverage: Observations cover the tracked stores and cities present in each collection. Walmart appears only where separately verified observations are published, with their own dates and coverage; Costco is not covered. Each observation carries its store’s city and province and links to one of the 50 canonical basket products.
History: Weekly. Observations are append-only and run back through the pilot collection that preceded the July 2026 index inception; only July 2026 onward is quality-gated for publication. Because the index is recomputed from the full observation history, a correction propagates through the whole record instead of leaving a step in the series.
Cadence & lag: Weekly, same week — licensees do not wait out the 14-day delay that applies to the monthly CSV packs.
Delivery: JSON via /api/v1/prices with a bearer key; up to 10,000 rows per request with offset paging, filterable by product_id, city, banner and date range. Bulk historical extracts on request.
Licence: Commercial licence only. Not covered by Subscriber licence, and not redistributable.
Key fields: observed_at, regular_price, sale_price, effective_price, unit_price, package_size, in_stock, is_on_sale, plus canonical product linkage (product_id, name, category, subcategory, basket weight, brand, store-brand flag) and store geography. The store-brand flag is three-state: it identifies private label on about 75% of rows and is null, meaning unknown, on the rest.

Licence the panel API documentation

3. Shrinkflation / size-change events

Commercial licence · public summary free

Pack-size reductions detected by comparing a retailer product's package size across consecutive weeks, then testing whether its unit price moved the way a genuine shrink implies. Events that fail that mirror test are graded down rather than dropped, so you can see the evidence instead of trusting a label.

Unit of observation: One row per detected size-change event: retailer product × change date.
Coverage: The same panel, restricted to products whose package size parses cleanly and whose listing persists across weeks. Confidence is graded high / medium / low from how closely the unit-price rise mirrors the size cut.
History: Weekly since the panel began. Expect thin counts by construction: a young panel has had few opportunities to observe a size change, and we would rather report a short, clean event list than pad it with suspect swaps.
Cadence & lag: Recomputed weekly alongside the price run; the API defaults to a 90-day event window.
Delivery: JSON via /api/v1/shrinkflation with a bearer key, filterable by banner, date range and minimum confidence. A free, human-readable summary lives at /shrinkflation.
Licence: Commercial licence for the event feed. The published summary page is free to read and cite with attribution.
Key fields: pct_size_change, pct_unit_price_change, confidence, and a flag of ok, suspect_unit_mismatch, suspect_swap or suspect_tiny, alongside the product, banner and dates.

See the public summary Licence the feed

4. Banner × city coverage matrix

Subscriber licence

How much of the basket each banner × city cell actually priced in a given week, and therefore which cells published and which were suppressed. This is the dataset that lets you audit our numbers rather than take them on faith — it is deliberately free for exactly that reason.

Unit of observation: One row per banner × city × week (item_count of total_items).
Coverage: The historical index covers up to 21 banners × 13 cities. Banner lineups are genuinely regional, so a sparse row is usually geography rather than a collection failure. A cell publishes only above the 60% floor, and cannot win a cheapest-store call-out below 48 of 50 real prices.
History: Weekly from July 2026, matching the index it qualifies.
Cadence & lag: Weekly, published with the index run; the CSV slice ships in the monthly pack on the same 14-day delay.
Delivery: Rendered at /coverage; JSON via /api/public/index?level=banner, where item_count and total_items appear on every row; CSV in the coverage slice of the monthly pack.
Licence: Subscriber licence. Attribution required when cited; no redistribution or resale.
Key fields: date, city, retailer, item_count, total_items, and the derived above-/below-floor status.

Open the matrix Open the JSON

Monthly CSV pack

A monthly snapshot of the index in five flat files, published on a 14-day delay to licensed subscribers. For the live same-week series, use the /api/public/index endpoint instead; for the per-item panel, see pricing.

CSV downloads are included with a data subscription. Explore the plans or sign in to access your files.

Data dictionary — index rows

These are the columns you get from /api/public/index and from the CSV pack. The NULL semantics matter more than usual here: the dimension columns encode aggregation level by being empty, so filtering them out silently discards the national and all-banner series.

Field definitions and null semantics for GroceryPulse index rows.
Field	Type	Meaning	Null semantics
date	date (ISO)	Week-ending Sunday of the reporting week, bucketed in Canadian local time. One row per series per week.	Never null. Published rows are floored at 2026-07-19.
city	text	City the cell covers, e.g. Toronto, Montreal, Saskatoon.	NULL = national aggregate (all 13 cities).
retailer	text	Banner key the cell covers, e.g. metro, freshco, saveonfoods.	NULL = aggregate across every banner in that geography.
category	text	Basket category slug, e.g. dairy, produce, bakery.	NULL = all groceries (the headline, all-category series).
index_value	numeric	Headline rows (category NULL): direct fixed-base matched-model Jevons, on the same estimator as the category rows, versus the week of 2026-07-13 = 100, with price relatives formed within a single store.	Never null on a published row. Headline levels are NOT comparable across series; category levels ARE comparable with each other (change since July 2026).
basket_cost_cad	numeric	Dollar cost of the 50-item basket for this cell, using each item's most recent effective price (sale price when on sale). This is the metric that IS comparable across cities and banners.	Null where too few items priced to state a cost.
pct_change_wow	numeric	Percentage change in index_value versus the prior published week.	NULL on a series' first week — there is no prior week to link to.
item_count	integer	Basket items actually priced in this cell this week (real prices, not imputed).	Null only on legacy rows written before coverage stamping.
total_items	integer	Items in this cell's basket slice — 50 for an all-category cell, fewer for a single category. item_count / total_items is the coverage ratio the 60% publication floor is applied to.	Null only on legacy rows written before coverage stamping.

Two reading rules that catch most first-time users. Headline city and banner levels are rebased to 100 in each series' own entry week, so a city reading 103 and another reading 101 tells you nothing about which is more expensive: compare basket_cost_cad in dollars instead. Category sub-index levels are the exception. They are all measured against the week of 2026-07-13 = 100, so they can be compared with each other as change since July 2026. And there is no year-over-year column, because the published record starts in July 2026.

Licensing, stated plainly

The index and its CSV packs

Published under a Subscriber licence. You may chart it, quote it, model with it and publish your findings, provided you attribute GroceryPulse. What you may not do is redistribute or resell the underlying data — republishing the series as a dataset, or reselling it inside a product, needs a licence.

Attribution line: “Source: GroceryPulse Canadian Grocery Price Index.”

The per-item panel and event feed

The basket-level price panel and the shrinkflation event feed are commercial-licence only. They sit above the Subscriber licence, are not redistributable, and are served against a bearer key with per-seat terms. Evaluation extracts and trial keys are available — the panel is small enough that we would rather you test it on your own question than take our word for it.

The CGPI panel is shared with Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, and the index has been cited by CBC, National Post, the Winnipeg Free Press, TVA Nouvelles and Le Journal de Québec.

Evaluating the data?

Start with the methodology and the coverage matrix, which are both public: between them they answer most diligence questions without a call. If you need a city, banner or basket item we do not cover, or a historical extract, write to sales@grocerypulse.ca.

Pricing & licensing API documentation Coverage & data quality Methodology