Ontario supermarket beer sales begin Tuesday

Six-packs of beer will be sold in the first Ontario supermarkets on Tuesday, but there will be no wine because those plans have not been finalized.

Thestar.com
Dec. 14, 2015
By Robert Benzie

Six-packs of beer will be sold in the first Ontario supermarkets on Tuesday, but wine sales are not yet ready to be uncorked.

Premier Kathleen Wynne is to buy suds at the Loblaws on Leslie St. near Eastern Ave. Tuesday morning for the benefit of media cameras.

Wynne’s symbolic purchase will partially realize a dream broached by former premier David Peterson in 1985 when he promised beer and wine in corner stores but failed to get the measure passed in the legislature.

Some 30 years later, however, selling wine in supermarkets remains a challenge in restrictive Ontario - even though neighbouring jurisdictions like Quebec and New York have long enjoyed liberalized liquor laws.

While Ed Clark, Wynne’s privatization czar, was able to develop the blueprint for selling beer in grocery stores, he and his team still need more time to complete a roadmap for wine sales.

Sources told the Star that Clark’s plan will not be completed until early in the new year.

“It’s a lot more complicated than beer,” said one insider, explaining that negotiating with the Beer Store, the private 448-store chain that had enjoyed a de facto monopoly since 1927, was more straightforward than dealing with the various interests in the global wine industry.

Clark’s work is tricky because there are existing privately owned wine kiosks now operating inside scores of supermarkets.

Those 268 licensees - the Wine Rack and the Wine Shop - enjoy “grandfathered” licences that are exempt from the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement.

They are permitted to sell quality VQA wine made here by a few wineries as well as foreign-blended bulk wine bottled in Ontario.

Those licences, however, could be at risk if more open sales are allowed. That could harm some domestic wine producers and grape growers.

Richard Linley, president of the Wine Council of Ontario, said the winemakers “are disappointed that yet another deadline for a plan to expand access to Ontario VQA wines will be missed.”

“We will continue to grow if the government gives Ontarians the chance to support their local wine industry in a modernized retail landscape - with shopping options that give customers more choice and convenience,” said Linley,

The provincially owned Liquor Control Board of Ontario has a monopoly on the sale of quality foreign wines at its 651 stores.

Tuesday’s beer announcement will be the most significant change to booze retailing here in generations.

It will herald that up to 60 locations will be authorized to sell six-packs within the next two weeks. Cases of 24 will continue to be sold only at the Beer Store, but 12-packs will be available at some LCBO outlets.

In the first wave, 25 outlets are in the Greater Toronto Area, 16 in southwestern Ontario, 13 in eastern Ontario, and six in the north.

Of the first 60 stores, 48 licences were auctioned off to large grocery chains while a dozen were reserved for small independent retailers.

By May 2017 there will be 150 Ontario supermarkets selling beer, eventually rising to a maximum 450 of the province’s 1,500 grocery stores.

Loblaws, Walmart, Sobeys, Metro, and independents including Farm Boy, Galleria Supermarket, Hanahreuem Mart, La Mantia’s Country Market, Longo’s, Michael-Angelos Market Place, Pino’s Get Fresh, and Starsky Fine Foods will eventually have beer on their shelves.

At least 20 per cent of that space is reserved for beers made by Ontario craft brewers and other small artisanal producers.

The changes are a direct result of series of stories by the Star’s Martin Regg Cohn, which probed the foreign-owned Beer Store’s stranglehold on the industry.