Canadians trust food companies to provide supplies more than they trust their fellow Canadians not to hoard them, according to a recent poll.

The poll of 10,005 Canadians, by Dalhousie University, found that only 17.4% said they believed that the food industry would fail to deliver enough food in the future. In addition, 72.2% of Canadians have confidence in the safety of food products. However, only 38.4% said they trust their fellow consumers not to engage in the panic buying that characterized the early stages of the pandemic.

“Uncertainty is a powerful sentiment and it gets people to do things that they don’t plan to do,” Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, told the National Post. “And that’s what happened last spring.”

Charlebois suggested that post-pandemic, the industry should concentrate on combating food fraud, which he calls an underreported problem in Canada, and on developing healthier products.