Track prices for No Name frozen mixed vegetables.
A standard retail frozen mixed vegetable bag is typically a four-way blend of peas, sweet corn, diced carrots, and cut green beans. Each component is grown, harvested, and processed on its own schedule, and the bag exists as a downstream blending decision rather than a single agricultural product. This matters for cost: the price of the finished SKU is a weighted average of four input streams, each with its own farmgate cycle, freight footprint, and trade exposure. A processor running short on green beans in a poor Wisconsin or Michigan pack year cannot easily substitute another vegetable without changing the spec, so blends are vulnerable to the worst-performing component in any given year, and shrink in any one component pulls cost up across the whole SKU.
Component yields per acre also vary widely, which means the bag's cost is not split evenly across the four vegetables. Carrots and corn deliver high tonnage per acre and tend to be the cheapest contributors; green beans are lower-yielding and historically the most expensive part of the mix. Procurement teams managing private-label specs adjust ratio and tolerance bands within the spec to manage cost without changing the label.
The four core components are sourced from a mix of Canadian and U.S. growing regions. Field peas for processing are concentrated in the Canadian Prairies — Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta — and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho), with Wisconsin and Minnesota also significant. Sweet corn for freezing is heavily concentrated in Wisconsin and Minnesota, with additional supply from Washington, Idaho, Quebec, and Ontario. Carrots for processing come from Ontario, Quebec, and Washington state, with California carrots feeding the broader North American market. Green beans for the freezer are grown predominantly in Wisconsin, with Michigan and New York also material.
Canadian-grown peas, carrots, and corn supply a meaningful share of the volume packed in Canada, but a typical blend pulled together for the retail Canadian market will contain U.S.-origin material in at least one component, particularly green beans. This cross-border dependency is the single biggest structural exposure of the category to trade policy.
Frozen vegetable processing in Canada is highly consolidated. Nortera Foods (the North American frozen and canned vegetable business carved out of Bonduelle in 2024 and sold to a Quebec-led consortium including Fonds de solidarité FTQ and CDPQ) is the largest pure-play vegetable processor in Canada, operating plants in Quebec, Ontario, and the U.S. Midwest. Nortera supplies private label blends to Canadian grocery retailers and is the structural anchor of domestic supply.
In the U.S., Conagra Brands (Birds Eye), B&G Foods (Green Giant), Seneca Foods, and Lakeside Foods dominate frozen vegetable processing. These plants are the source of a substantial share of components — particularly corn and beans — that move into Canadian retail bags, either as finished product or as bulk ingredient blended at a Canadian co-pack site.
The No Name retail private label is a Loblaw control brand and is co-packed by third-party processors under private-label spec. Loblaw does not disclose specific co-packer relationships at the SKU level, but the category economics mean the blender for any Canadian-market bag is almost always one of the consolidated processors named above.
Frozen vegetables are a seasonal-pack, year-round-drawdown category. Each component is harvested over a narrow window — peas in early summer, corn in late summer, beans through summer into early fall, carrots through fall — and processed within hours of harvest into Individually Quick Frozen (IQF) form to lock in texture and colour. The IQF step is energy- and capital-intensive, and plants run at high utilization through the pack window before going quiet.
Once frozen, components are stored in bulk at -18°C and pulled, blended, and bagged on a rolling basis through the year. This means retail bag cost in any given month is determined by pack-season decisions made six to twelve months earlier — acreage commitments, contract pricing with growers, and inventory positions taken at the end of pack. Cost shocks from a poor pack year do not show at retail immediately; they propagate through the following twelve months as inventory turns over.
Packaging is a non-trivial share of the finished cost. The standard 2 kg consumer bag is a multi-layer printed polyethylene structure, and packaging cost per kilogram on a retail-ready bag is materially higher than on industrial cartons. Resin prices and printing costs flow directly into shelf cost.
Frozen vegetables must be held at -18°C from the freezer at the processing plant through every storage, transit, and store-level handling step. Edmonton is an inland market with no direct port, served from the south by trucking out of Calgary and from the east via the trans-Canada corridor. Loblaw operates a major western Canadian distribution network anchored in Calgary, with refrigerated and frozen flow into Real Canadian Superstore and No Frills locations in Edmonton.
Cold storage in the Edmonton area is consolidated among a small number of operators, with Lineage Logistics holding three facilities in the region, and shorter-haul reefer trucking is supplied by a mix of regional carriers. Refrigerated trucking rates in Alberta carry a premium over dry-van rates for the same lane, driven by reefer driver scarcity, fuel for refrigeration units, and the cost of equipment maintenance. Driver shortages and reefer capacity tightness have been a persistent feature of the Canadian cold-chain market and add to landed cost in inland markets like Edmonton.
Cross-border vegetable flows between Canada and the U.S. were directly exposed to the 2025 tariff cycle. Effective March 4, 2025, Canada imposed 25 percent counter-tariffs on roughly $30 billion of U.S. goods in response to U.S. tariff measures, with frozen vegetables among the products on the Canadian list during that period. Effective September 1, 2025, Canada removed most of those counter-tariffs in recognition of the U.S. allowing most Canadian goods tariff-free entry under CUSMA, retaining tariffs only on steel, aluminum, and automobiles. Frozen vegetables therefore returned to largely tariff-free movement under CUSMA compliance.
The window between March and September 2025 nonetheless created two durable effects on the category. First, importers carrying U.S.-origin component inventory through that window absorbed real tariff cost that flowed through to subsequent retail prices on a lag. Second, the episode reinforced procurement appetite for Canadian-grown components and for diversification of co-pack supply to Canadian sites — a trend that does not fully reverse when the immediate tariff is lifted, because contracted acreage and plant-allocation decisions take seasons to retune.
The CUSMA mid-2026 review is the next material trade policy variable for the category. The agreement currently keeps fresh and frozen vegetables tariff-free between the three signatories, but the review introduces a band of uncertainty that procurement must price in when committing to multi-year contracts.
No Name is the discount control brand of Loblaw Companies Limited, deliberately positioned at the value end of the private-label spectrum and a structural floor for grocery pricing in categories where it competes. In frozen vegetables, the No Name SKU sits below President's Choice (Loblaw's premium control brand) and well below national brands such as Green Giant and Birds Eye, with the price gap typically in the range of 20 to 40 percent versus the national brand on a per-100g basis.
Private label frozen vegetables in Canada have grown share through 2024 and 2025 as food inflation pushed shoppers toward value tiers. For the retailer, the No Name bag is a high-velocity SKU that anchors the category and protects share of basket against discount competitors. For the consumer, it is one of the most price-transparent items in the freezer aisle, which constrains the retailer's ability to raise shelf price even as upstream cost rises — margin on the SKU therefore compresses or expands with input cost, more than shelf price moves.
The combination of cross-border component dependency, energy- and packaging-cost exposure on the processing side, and reefer freight premiums into Edmonton create a baseline of upward pressure on landed cost. Offsetting this, Canadian pea and carrot supply is structurally stable, Nortera's domestic processing base provides insulation against the worst-case cross-border scenarios, and the value-tier positioning of No Name caps the rate at which cost can be passed through to the shelf. Near-term shelf pricing is therefore most sensitive to (1) pack-year yields in Wisconsin and Minnesota for green beans and corn, (2) the trajectory of CUSMA review discussions through mid-2026, and (3) reefer freight rates on the Calgary-to-Edmonton corridor.