Imagine this: you are wandering around the grocery store, trying to buy Canadian. That blueberry cardboard is not going, and that bread bar does not make the cut either. The juice I wanted to buy was made in Canada … using imported ingredients.
Wouldn’t it be great if your phone could tell you magically if the products you want to buy are Canadians or not? Well, now you can: thanks to intelligent entrepreneurs throughout the country who have created applications aimed at helping buyers identify the origin of daily basic products.
There is Shop Canadian, the creation of two software developers in Edmonton; Buy Beaver, who was dreamed by two businessmen from Montreal; Or scanada, created by a mother and a son in Calgary; and Maple Scan, a tool with AI made by a Calgary researcher. The four applications have a feature that allows buyers to scan the barcode of an article to determine how Canadian is.
“We saw many different lists of products that were shared in social networks.
Front burner21:15Buy Canadian, goodbye America?
Even with tariffs on US products mainly in pause for the rest of the month, many are still doing what can “buy Canadian” and change their purchase habits of anything done by Americans. But how do you do that to do that? And should it also extend to our digital and media habits? VASS BEDNAR, Executive Director of the Public Policies and Digital Society Program of the McMaster University of the University and author of The Big Fix: how companies capture the markets and damage Canadians, join us to cross the murky waters for a commercial war in a country that is so intertwined with its neighbor to the south. For front burner transcripts, visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts]
After a user scan the bar code of a product, the Buy Beaver application describes how the Canadian product is on a scale of one to five depending on several criteria: where is it done, where are the ingredients or materials from and Who is the owner of the brand.
“At this time, everything is driven by the community,” said Christopher Dip, the other cooperator of the application. “Then, if you can scan a product and say that it is not yet qualified, then you can qualify it and give your own information. And as more people vote, we hope that the scores will become increasingly precise.
“If the product is properly labeled, technically does not need our application. But you may need our application to know if the parent company is American or not. Some people could argue that even if it is a product of Canada and is compatible with Canadian works , if the profits date back to the USA, then that could be something to consider, “Dip added.
“But we only give that information to the community, and they can make a decision if they want to buy that product or not.”
Like DIP and Hamila, the creators of Shop Canadian, based in Edmonton, say they were inspired by a growing movement to buy Canadian, one that emerged in response to the tariff threats of the president of the United States against this country.
“We were in our kitchen, and I was trying to find out if what I was eating was Canadian and I had to jump through several hoops,” said William Boytinck, who developed the Canadian store with his commercial partner, Matthew Sudaby. “And finally the idea occurred to me.”
Applications to facilitate the purchase of Canadian products in the supermarket are found throughout the country with businessmen Crowdsourcing information about the origins of materials and ingredients.
The “wildest dream” of the duo was to maintain a few hundred dollars in Canada, but the application has exploded since then, and now depends on Crowdsourced’s information. Search in a database of codes of products registered in the company, and then shows the user if the brand that manufactured the product is registered in Canada, the United States or in other places.
There are still some problems to exercise, especially because high traffic leads to technical difficulties. In addition, Boytinck and Suddaby are trying to decide how purist will be the application to determine whether something is Canadian or not.
“If it is imported by a Canadian company and packaged in Canada, we sometimes recognize it as a Canadian,” Boytinck said.
Retailer audits demands from Canadian products
When the economy gets hard or the supply chain is interrupted, people pay more attention to where their money is going, said Michael Mulvey, an assistant marketing professor at the Telfer School of Administration of the University of Ottawa.
The “Buy Canadian” applications that have recently emerged are “a way to make a more educated consumer, a more demanding consumer,” he said, added that a crowdsourcing approach used by the tastes of Buy Beaver and Shop Canadian also helps the people to feel more committed in times of crisis.
Alexandre Hamila and Christopher Department speak with CBC News Network about their effort to help Canadians find products made locally. Correction: This video has been updated to remove images that show the incorrect application.
“Often, people feel a bit defenseless when everyone turns around it, and this is a way of taking measures and having a voice,” Mulvey said. “And I think that is something positive in democracy.”
There could be compensation between the preferred consumer product and the one that costs less buy, adds Mulvey. It is possible that people have to look at their wallets and decide if they want to pay the voluntary tax filed in front of them, and “there will be many people who cannot afford to participate at this time.”
1:01:53Your questions about how ‘Buy Canadian’
The threat of tariffs, and the possibility of a commercial war, have changed the way in which some Canadians spend their money, with many boycott products. But ‘buying Canadian’ is not as simple as it seems. To answer all your questions about how to buy Canadian, we had two guests who joined only the question. Vass Bednar is Executive Director of the Master’s Program in Public Policies at the McMaster University. Grant Packard is a marketing professor at the Shulich Business School of the University of York ‘.
Will brands and retailers take the track? At least, the demand for these tools could force companies to listen. Loblaws, for example, is already showing products made in Canada in stores, online and in flyers, said spokeswoman for the giant of giant, Catherine Thomas, to The Canadian Press.
And Pierre St-Laurent, director of Operations of Sobeys and Safeway, owner of the Empire, said that customers ask where the products come from. The shopkeeper is responding with more signage and information to help them make their selections.
“Retailers: if customers are customer demand to find Canadian products, which there seems to be, I think you are interested in helping them find those goods and helping their search processes,” Mulvey said.
