A supermarket is a self-service shop offering a wide variety of food, beverages and household products, organized into sections. Strictly speaking, a supermarket is larger and has a wider selection than earlier grocery stores, but is smaller and more limited in the range of merchandise than a hypermarket or big-box market. In everyday American English usage, however, "grocery store" is often casually used as a synonym for "supermarket". The supermarket store format first appeared around 1930 in the United States as the culmination of almost two decades of retail innovations, and began to spread to other countries after extensive worldwide publicity in 1956.
A grocery store (AE), grocery shop (BE) or simply grocery is a retail store that primarily retails a general range of food products, which may be fresh or packaged. In everyday U.S. usage, however, "grocery store" is a synonym for supermarket, and is not used to refer to other types of stores that sell groceries. In the UK, shops that sell food are distinguished as grocers or grocery shops
Loblaws Inc. is a Canadian supermarket chain with stores located in the province of Ontario, and in Alberta and British Columbia under the Loblaws CityMarket banner. Headquartered in Brampton, Ontario, Loblaws is a subsidiary of Loblaw Companies Limited, Canada's largest food distributor.
Metro Inc. is a Canadian supermarket chain operating in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. The company is based in Montreal, Quebec, with head office at 11011 Boulevard Maurice-Duplessis. Metro is the third-largest grocer in Canada, after Loblaw Companies Limited and Sobeys.
Loblaw Companies Limited is a Canadian retailer encompassing corporate and franchise supermarkets operating under 22 regional and market-segment banners, as well as pharmacies, banking and apparel. Loblaw operates a private label program that includes grocery and household items, clothing, baby products, pharmaceuticals, cellular phones, general merchandise and financial services. Loblaw is the largest Canadian food retailer, and its brands include President's Choice, No Name and Joe Fresh. It is controlled by George Weston Limited, a holding company controlled by the Weston family; Galen G. Weston is the chair of the Loblaw board of directors, as well as chair of the board of directors and CEO of Canada-based holding company George Weston.
Sobeys Inc. is a national supermarket chain in Canada with over 1,500 stores operating under a variety of banners. Headquartered in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, it operates stores in all ten provinces and accumulated sales of more than C$25.1 billion in the fiscal 2019 operating year. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Empire Company Limited, a Canadian business conglomerate.
Dominion was a national chain of supermarkets in Canada, which was known as the Dominion of Canada when the chain was founded. The chain was founded in 1919 in Ontario and was later acquired by the Argus Corporation. It was broken up in the mid-1980s, with key locations and the rights to the brand sold to The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P), which restricted the chain to the Greater Toronto Area. Stores elsewhere in Ontario were converted to the A&P banner, and others were sold to third parties. A&P's Canadian division was later acquired by Metro Inc., which rebranded the remaining Dominion stores to its namesake banner in 2008.
In non-Asian countries, an Asian supermarket largely describes a category of grocery stores that focuses and stocks items and products imported from countries located in the Far East.
Discount stores offer a retail format in which products are sold at prices that are in principle lower than an actual or supposed "full retail price". Discounters rely on bulk purchasing and efficient distribution to keep down costs.
IGA, Inc. is an international chain of grocery stores. Unlike chain stores IGA franchises are independently owned and operated. Many of these stores operate in small-town markets and belong to families that manage them. IGA was founded in the United States as the Independent Grocers Alliance in 1926. The headquarters is in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States.
Food Basics Ltd. is a Canadian supermarket chain owned by Metro Inc. The company operates 142 stores throughout Ontario.
The Oshawa Group was once a leading owner of supermarkets in Ontario, Canada. It was bought by Sobeys in 1998. The company was based in Etobicoke and traded on the Toronto and Montreal stock exchanges.
A big-box store, a hyperstore, a supercenter, a superstore, or a megastore is a physically large retail establishment, usually part of a chain of stores. The term sometimes also refers, by extension, to the company that operates the store. The term "big-box" references the typical appearance of buildings occupied by such stores.
Towers, operating as Bonimart in Quebec, was a Canadian discount department store chain owned by the Oshawa Group, a now-defunct grocery retailer and distributor.
Knob Hill Farms was a supermarket chain in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario, Canada that operated from 1953 to 2001 and was owned by businessman Steve Stavro. It began as a single produce store in the east end of Toronto in 1953 before growing into one of Canada's largest grocery chains, all with only 10 locations in and around Toronto. Knob Hill Farms was an early innovator in the field of "big box grocers" in the early 1960s, culminating in Knob Hill Farm's Cambridge location being the largest grocery store in the world at the time of its opening in 1991.
No Frills is a Canadian chain of discount supermarkets, owned by Loblaw Companies Limited, a subsidiary of George Weston Limited. There are over 200 franchise stores located in nine Canadian provinces.
FreshCo Ltd. is a Canadian chain of discount supermarkets owned by Sobeys. It was launched in March 2010. As of September 2023, there were 100 FreshCo stores.
Ultra Food & Drug was a supermarket and drug store chain in Ontario, Canada from the 1980s to 2008.
IGA is a group of independent grocers in Canada supplied by Sobeys, which franchises the name from IGA, Inc. Acquired by Sobeys as part of its purchase of the Oshawa Group Ltd., it now operates primarily in Quebec.
