As I mentioned, this is a struggle between the suppliers and their customers—clients—over passing along costs. Certainly reducing the oligopolistic power the big groceries chains have is important. However, I don't think we should overly fetishize competition as the means of doing so, because grocers face suppliers who are often massive transnational corporations.
We saw a very public example of this in the fight between Frito-Lay and Loblaws. Loblaws was able to push back against a price increase that Frito-Lay wanted to impose on it in part because it is such a big player.
What the final outcome of all of that is we don't really know. I don't want to necessarily say that Loblaws was kind of the valour on the side of Canadians in this fight. However, it does speak to the fact that you do sometimes need to be big to stand up to other players that are big.
If we need to have some of our grocery chains to be big to push back against big suppliers, then they need to be regulated. We can't expect market competition forces to do the things that economists tell us they will do.