About & methodology

What this is

foodowners maps who ultimately owns the grocery stores around you. Most of the grocery market sits with a handful of companies; this site traces each storefront up its ownership chain — the banner on the sign → the operating company → its parents → the ultimate owner — and maps where those stores actually are. Coverage is Canada-wide.

It does not pronounce verdicts — it maps ownership and cites where each link comes from, so you can see the structure and judge for yourself.

How ownership is traced

Each store links to its banner (the brand on the sign), which belongs to an operating company, which rolls up through any parents to an ultimate owner. Owner pages also list a company's holdings beyond grocery — pharmacy, real estate, loyalty programs and the like — and independently owned stores are grouped as independents rather than forced under a parent.

A co-owned venture — a shared loyalty program, say — is recorded as a holding of each company that has a stake in it. Holding a stake in something jointly does not mean one of those companies owns the others.

How stores are identified

Store locations begin from OpenStreetMap shop tags, but that tagging is uneven — real grocers get filed as convenience stores or cafés, and some are missing entirely. So locations are cross-checked against a higher-priority source wherever one exists: municipal business-licence open data, a city's own record of what each storefront is licensed to operate as. When the sources disagree, the more authoritative one wins:

1. Business licence — authoritative. A storefront licensed in a city's grocery class — for example the City of Vancouver's “Grocery Store” category, which corresponds to the federal industry code NAICS 445110 (grocery retailers) — is taken as a grocer. A pharmacy (NAICS 446110), gas bar, or convenience licence is treated as evidence a place is not a grocer — which is why a drug store like London Drugs isn't on the map.
2. OpenStreetMap tags. The base layer everywhere, and the fallback wherever licence data doesn't reach.

A few honesty notes. Licence data is municipal and fragmented — there is no national registry — so it reaches only the cities whose open data actually distinguishes a grocery store: so far Vancouver, Burnaby, Montréal, Mississauga and Brampton. Most cities either don't publish business licences or lump grocers in with all other retail, so coverage there falls back to OpenStreetMap. Even where data exists, broad “retail food dealer” classes mix grocers with convenience stores, gas bars and smoke shops, so only the specific grocery class is trusted and the rest is filtered by name; federal CFIA food licences aren't used at all, because retailers selling directly to shoppers are exempt from them. And matching one dataset's pins to another's is fuzzy work — every reconciliation is reviewed by a person before anything on the map changes.

Sourcing standard

Every owner, banner, and holding carries at least one source and a verification date. Ownership links are stated plainly — who owns or operates what, and since when — and anything uncertain or contested is noted rather than asserted. Where sources disagree, that's recorded too.

Source quality hierarchy (cited as high as available): primary/official filings, court and regulator documents, and company statements; then established news organisations; then trade/academic sources; then advocacy/NGO sources (whose perspective is attributed).

Licensing & attribution

Store locations are derived from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). Use of this data carries a share-alike obligation. The basemap is rendered from Protomaps tiles. Store verification also draws on municipal business-licence open data — such as the City of Vancouver's, used under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver.

This site is informational and a work in progress, and welcomes corrections.

Work in progress & feedback

This is an independent side project and very much a work in progress — ownership changes hands, stores open and close, and some of the data was assembled by automated research, so errors will slip through. If something looks wrong, outdated, or missing, please report it. Every submission is read by a human; acting on one means editing the underlying data and redeploying — nothing changes automatically.

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