Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> Canada is also a highly multicultural country with 20% born elsewhere and a national grocer must target them to find success, Mr Singh said.

Then why doesn’t Canada have a huge network of ethnic grocery stores tailored to more frugal immigrant communities? I assume it does and the issue is one of consumer education.

They’re all over the US in every state with a decent immigrant population. Mexican, Persian, Armenian, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and so on - that’s just the ones off the top of my head that I shop at monthly.

Chicken is usually cheaper at Costco and milk/eggs/cheese at Trader Joes, but all other meat and produce is significantly cheaper, on the order of 2-3x lower than the price at Costco/TJs. Their produce varies more based on whats in season and what their suppliers have the most of, but they also have crazy deals every week. My favorite this year was rebranded Sumo mandarins that sold for $0.33/lb which everyone else was selling for $2-3/lb (I was eating 3 pounds a day for a month).

> Then why doesn’t Canada have a huge network of ethnic grocery stores tailored to more frugal immigrant communities? I assume it does and the issue is one of consumer education.

Two quick web searches reveal that Canada has about 1/10th the USA population at ~37m people as of 2021. Canada also has roughly 1.6% more landmass than the USA. I don’t think there’s the density to support your theory.

Most of the Canadian population lives in cities/suburbs, which are mostly on the east, not in the large wilderness parts.

I think this article illustrates it best: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/5/11584064/canada-population-map

That's 18 million people or half the population living within spitting distance of the US border and that doesn't even include British Columbia. The vast wilderness is largely unpopulated.

And where were these rebranded Sumo's? We only saw Sumo's this year for $4-5/lb nearly everywhere we looked. Were these rebranded things really Sumo's or did they just look like Sumo's.

I did see something that looked like a Sumo call a 'dekopon' citrus at major grocers on the east coast, but they were maybe $1/lb cheaper as best and not as good or large as one with a Sumo sticker. They were more tart and not as an intense flavor.

It's my understanding that the variety has existed for a long time in Japan and Sumo is just one specific branded citrus sub-variety from California.

They were rebranded as Satsumas but had no sticker, in Southern California at an Arabic grocer.

They were just as large, sweet, seedless, and easy to peel as the Sumos with identical appearance. This is the fourth or fifth year in a row that they've had them at a deep discount and I started eating them when Trader Joes first introduced them at $4/piece so there was definitely a delay before they appeared at other stores. Trader Joes tends to get them a few weeks earlier than the other store so I usually compare them every year.

I don't know if they're actually Sumos or not but they're just as sweet and identical in every other way. It might be a pretty obvious cross so once the farm that made and copyrighted the Sumo name, everyone else figured it out too but they can't sell it as Sumos because that's a registered trademark. I.e. these guys, which don't look like any other Satsuma I've ever seen or found online (real satsumas with stickers are in stock right now at one of my stores): https://paradisenursery.com/product/satsuma-mandarin-trees/

I didn't realize that Sumos were from California. The company that grows them could also just be dumping excess inventory in the local market without stickers to maintain their brand.

Sourcing regular fresh food staples to be competitive with the big chains is hard. You have to use the big chains sub companies as a supplier more often than not unless you partner with local farmers. Even small grocers I go to have a 'foodland' section for products they can't get local, or for cheaper versions of the locally farmed items.

Then you are a nuance of a trip if you can't carry the fresh food staples, especially outside a metro area.

We do in the major cities and they are slowly growing but our idiot government is letting the big guys buy them up when they become a serious competitor. The problem, as almost always, is the government not doing its job and breaking up/ not allowing acquisitions by these big guys.

There's a lot of ethnic grocers. Although Loblaws owns the largest chinese one

I understand that they are delicious but 3 pounds a day is a lot, throwup238.

> but 3 pounds a day is a lot

Not when you're known as "throwup".

There are tons of small-to-medium sized grocery stores with a strong ethnic focus and a focus on prices. You don't hear about them because they one-offs and not a national chain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com