Ahead of Canada Day, Canadians are looking for ways to support homegrown businesses. That mindset is increasingly influencing what ends up in their shopping carts.
Healthy Planet, a Canadian-owned retailer with 44 stores across Ontario and nationwide e-commerce shipping, is seeing continued demand for Canadian-owned products across the health food, natural grocery, clean beauty and vitamin/supplement categories.
“Canadians are becoming more intentional about the brands they support,” said Muhammad Mohamedy, General Manager of Healthy Planet. “Since our inception, Healthy Planet has been a strong supporter of Canadian brands and businesses-to the point where today, one out of every two brands we carry are Canadian.
“This hyper-local focus aligns perfectly with a broader shift in consumer behavior, as we’re seeing shoppers ask more questions about where products come from and make purchasing decisions based on values, transparency and a desire to support Canadian businesses.”
One year after launching its #HealthyCanadianSwap initiative, Healthy Planet said the interest in buying Canadian has evolved from a short-term reaction into a longer-term shopping habit, with consumers actively seeking out local alternatives and paying closer attention to where products are made.
Healthy Planet said it continues to support Canadian brands through targeted initiatives which includes dedicated online shopping filters, a Canadian products section on its website and in-store maple leaf shelf tags that help customers quickly identify Canadian-owned businesses or made-in-Canada products.
The product categories seeing the strongest demand for Canadian-owned brands is most pronounced in supplements, said Mohamedy.
“In several aisles Canadian-owned brands are nearly the entire shelf – roughly 98% of our magnesium sales and 97% of our vitamin sales are Canadian-owned, with joint care, omega and protein not far behind. Sports nutrition is the fastest-growing of all, with Canadian-made protein and pre/post-workout products outpacing their categories,” he said.
“A striking way to see it: Canadian-owned brands are only about a quarter of the roughly 2,200 brands we carry, but they drive about two-thirds of our sales – they punch well above their weight. And it’s broadening into natural and specialty food, where dairy, frozen and snacks now run majority-Canadian too.”
“Where a strong Canadian-made option exists, our shoppers are choosing it, and the supplement aisle is where that’s most complete,” added Ashish Khera, Head of Marketing, Healthy Planet.
Over the past year, Canadian-owned brands have taken a larger and notably broader share of the basket – the preference that used to live mostly in supplements has been spreading into food,” said Mohamedy.
“It reads less like a one-time patriotic moment and more like our shoppers steadily building Canadian-made into their regular routine, consistent with the wider ‘buy Canadian’ sentiment retailers across the country have reported.”
In health and wellness, origin and ownership map directly onto what shoppers already care about – ingredient transparency, trust, and supporting local makers, explained Mohamedy.
“Often the Canadian-owned brand is also the one being most open about how a product is made, so ‘buy Canadian’ and ‘buy the product I trust’ increasingly point to the same item on the shelf. We can’t quantify motivation from sales data, but the behaviour is consistent with people weighing where a product comes from and who’s behind it.
“This is where a retailer earns its keep. We carry close to 600 Canadian-owned brands, many of them small and emerging, and our job is to make them findable – curating shelf space, tagging Canadian-owned products clearly, and training staff to point shoppers to a strong local option. Our data also shows where the work isn’t done: Canadian-owned brands are still only about 4% of our cosmetics sales and 9% of baby, simply because credible local options are thinner there. That’s exactly where retailers and Canadian makers can partner to give shoppers a real choice.”
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