AbstractThe article uses data on all the firms in sixteen Canadian food and beverage manufacturing industries to examine intra‐industry profitability differences. The skewedness of profit performance within industries is informative for the debate on whether interindustry profitability differences in price‐raising market power or in the incidence of unusually efficient firms in an industry. It is found that six of the industries appear to be quite competitive and that eight have some form of market power, usually accompanied, however, by efficiency differences as w