It should come as no surprise to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians that food prices here are higher than many other jurisdictions across the country.

Food has to be trucked in by crossing the Gulf, or flown in and distributed throughout a wide geographic region.

Not to mention Labrador, where grocery items are notoriously out of reach, fetching prices many times higher than those on the island. That’s a common occurrence in other parts of the north.

Sylvain Charlebois of the Agri-foods and analytics lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax says prices in Atlantic Canada are higher than in Ontario and Quebec, and they’re even higher in Newfoundland and Labrador.

That, says Charlebois, is due in part to the geographic isolation, but there are other contributing factors.

“There’s no investment, and there’s no competition either,” he said.