How Canadian supermarkets are different from U.S. ones

This story is part of a week-long series exploring how we as Canadians define "Canadian food," and how it has evolved in modern Canada.

We’ve all experienced it: the snack showdown in the grocery store checkout aisle. Junk food beams up at you in its brightly-coloured packaging and an impulse seizes you. It’s over. You buy a gargantuan bag of chips, a chocolate bar, and two bottles of soda. Authorities have documented the phenomenon in U.S. supermarkets, describing how a store’s exit area takes you on a temptation tour that’s designed to funnel you to a boulevard of bad food.

“Displaying food at checkout is a powerful form of marketing that induces people to purchase foods and beverages that they otherwise might not,” concluded the authors of Sugar Overload: Retail Checkout Promotes Obesity.

The 2014 report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) examined the prevalence of unhealthy items – sweets, gum, cookies, chips, and soda – at the checkout of hardware, toy, and bed and bath stores, as well as supermarkets. Eighty-six per cent of the non-food stores the CSPI surveyed carry food, beverage or both at checkout. And of those foods, 90 per cent are unhealthy.

The same can be found in Canada, too, as consumers can readily find candy, chips, and beverages in their paths, whether they’re shopping in Walmart, Costco or even Best Buy.

“I was just in a supercentre and the express aisle snaked through candy and all sorts of things before you could get through to the checkout,” said Robin Sherk, director of retail insights at Kantar Retail, a research, data, and consulting business (and unlike this reporter, who is frequently outwitted by Mars bars and other items in the checkout line, Sherk says she didn’t fall prey to the goodies).

The strategy, for most shoppers, is clearly effective. In North America, snack sales totaled US$124-billion as of March 2014, and growing at a rate of 2 per cent compared to the previous year, according to Nielsen’s Global Snack Food Sales Report.

But there is some good news. Canadian supermarkets and supercentres are differentiating themselves from those south of the border by reorganizing stores and boosting offerings of fresh produce. Furthermore, a number have deli counters in addition to bakeries and have started to sell a variety of freshly prepared hot and cold meals in dedicated take-out meal areas.

“If I was in the U.S. and had to project where this trend is going I’d look at some Canadian brands like Sobeys, Loblaws, and Metro as well as the discount grocer FreshCo,” said Kantar’s Sherk. “In the U.S., it’s really only showing a presence in the high-end stores like Whole Foods.”

Walmart Canada is relying on its new Supercentres to drive growth. By 2016, they will have a wider selection of perishables, fresh sandwiches and salads, with the intent of the stores being more upscale than what exists in the U.S.

In addition to the supermarket chains, discount grocers such as No Frills (Loblaw’s discount market) and FreshCo (Sobeys) are delivering a fresh assortment of produce to meet the needs of Canadians who have higher expectations than Americans, Sherk said.

“They are working on elevating their displays and offerings and you think, ‘Hey, I would want this,’ versus when you go to the discount locations in the U.S. like a Sav-A-Lot or a Family Dollar or Dollar General, it’s not quite there.”

The difference is that Canada has a large middle-class, Sherk said, whereas in the U.S., “it’s more bifurcated. You have people living paycheque-to-paycheque trying to get by. And they have a larger population of very affluent people.”

When a sizeable proportion of the population is financially constrained that alters what goes into the grocery basket, she added, and it makes a difference to what is offered at the grocery store.

A 2010 report from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada outlined public eating habits:

• Over the last 20 years, Canadians have added 10.9 per cent more vegetables (excluding potatoes) to their diets, particularly garlic, asparagus, cucumbers, cassava, eggplant, kohlrabi, and okra, reflecting the greater ethnic diversity of the population.

• Measured by weight, the average Canadian consumed approximately 36 kg more vegetables than meat, while Americans, on the other hand, consumed 16.7 kg more meat than they did vegetables.

You’ll see towers of fresh, locally grown and organic vegetables at Nature’s Emporium in Newmarket, Ont. It opened in 1993 as a bulk food store that also offered vitamins and supplements. In the early 2000s they expanded and began selling fresh produce and, shortly thereafter, added ready-to-go meals that had been prepared on-site. Today, their 15-person culinary team and head chef make fresh meals daily.

With supercentres and chain supermarkets expanding produce sections and selling ready-to-go meals – more than a decade after Nature’s Emporium began doing so – the company is sticking to its original mandate.

“We never thought too much about our position on the curve. We’ve just always responded to the grassroots needs of our customers who requested things like cold-pressed juice or any kind of fresh options,” said Ryan Dennis, Nature’s Emporium’s director of communications. “We serve our customers in the now, in real time.”

He feels the store will benefit from the changing landscape as nationwide supermarkets educate consumers about healthy living, organic foods, and non-GMO products. “As a next-step retailer we benefit from those businesses because they provide a gateway to us. It’s a natural progression.”

That’s not to say that big-box stores operating in Canada and the U.S., such as Walmart and Costco, don’t respond to the demands of their customers. They can and do customize their stores based on local tastes.

Costco’s regional buying structure helps its merchants select the right items for the area, Sherk said, so that it’s able to curate an assortment for its members.

Walmart tries to take into consideration the demographic profile and the characteristics they see in the market so they can tune accordingly. “They call it the ‘store of the community’,” said Sherk. “Store managers have some autonomy. For example, if they receive a lot of requests for bacon, they could expand their bacon section to ensure they are meeting demand.”

And if they start receiving requests for bushels of kale, perhaps you’ll see that in the checkout aisle someday.