A discount grocery store owned by the people who shop in it. We're copying Aldi's playbook for keeping prices low, setting it up as a co-op so nobody can ever sell it or take the profits out, and building the whole thing in public. First store in Edmonton. The goal is a lot bigger than one store, and we'll get to that below.
Loblaw, Sobeys and Metro, plus Walmart and Costco, control about 80% of groceries in Canada. Food is up more than 40% since 2021. And switching to the cheap stores doesn't really change anything, because No Frills is Loblaw, Food Basics is Metro, and FreshCo is Sobeys. The money ends up in the same place.
A lot of us assumed Aldi or Lidl would show up eventually and force prices down like they did in the US and UK. They won't. Lidl actually started hiring people in Canada in 2017 and then cancelled the whole thing within a year. When the Competition Bureau asked foreign grocers about it, the short version of their answer was: your big chains are too dug in, not worth the fight.
So nobody's coming. If we want a real alternative, we have to build it ourselves.
Aldi stores are cheap because of how they're built, not because the owners are generous. About 1,500 products instead of 25,000. Mostly store brands. Small building, cheap rent, stuff sold straight out of the boxes it shipped in.
Every one of those choices shows up on the price tag, and it works whether you have one store or twelve thousand.
Self-checkout, software that predicts what to order, digital price tags, live inventory tracking. It means a shift needs 4-6 people instead of 15.
We want to be upfront about that trade: fewer jobs than a regular supermarket, but the people we do hire are local, paid above market, and the wage scale goes in the annual report where anyone can read it.
A regular supermarket is full of work you never see but always pay for. Someone unpacks every box and faces every can label-forward. Someone re-stickers whole aisles every week because of promo cycles and flyers. Someone runs the deli counter, the bakery, the butcher. Someone bags your groceries.
Every one of those steps is a person-hour, and every person-hour is in your bill.
It's a co-op under the Cooperatives Act. One member, one vote, whether you put in $25 or $10,000. Nobody can buy it, because there's nothing to buy, and no investor can take control, because votes don't scale with money.
Any surplus can legally only go three places: lower prices, money back to members, or the next store. It physically has no way to leave the country.
We film everything. Lease negotiations, supplier meetings, the screwups. And once the store opens, we publish a weekly price board: what we paid, what we charge, what the big chains charge for the same stuff.
They can't copy that one, because their business depends on you not seeing their math.
We want to say this before you donate, not after. One store can't get the same wholesale prices as a $60 billion company, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. We'll buy through the co-op wholesale network that already exists in Western Canada so we don't start from zero, but realistically, year one looks like roughly the same prices as the discount chains. What we can do from day one is show you everything: our cost, our price, their price, every week. As more members join, our buying power grows and the prices come down. You'll be able to watch it happen, or watch it fail, either way it's public.
ILLUSTRATIVE BASKET INDEX, NOT A PRICE PROMISE. THE ONLY PROMISE IS THE BOARD ITSELF: OUR COST, OUR PRICE, THEIR PRICE, EVERY WEEK.
Simple rule: crowdfunding pays for the launch, and from opening day the store has to live on its own sales. If it can't, the model is wrong and we'll say so. There was a nonprofit grocer in Boston called Daily Table, run by a former Trader Joe's president, that depended on donations to keep going. Donations dried up in 2025 and it closed in a weekend, after ten years. We don't want to build that. If every donation stopped the day after we open, our shelf prices wouldn't change.
Right now we're raising the first $100,000. It pays for incorporating the nonprofit that holds the money, the legal work and co-op bylaws, wholesale negotiations, and finding the right building in Edmonton. When that's done, we go wider and raise the full $3.5M for the actual build.
If the store never happens for whatever reason, all the remaining money buys groceries that get delivered to low-income families, and we publish receipts for every delivery.
So worst case, money that was raised to make food cheaper ends up putting food on someone's table. And none of it can go to any company owned by me or anyone else running this. That's in the bylaws too.
Honest reasons Edmonton goes first: the rent is cheap enough that the discount model actually has a chance, and it's where we live. Starting in Toronto would burn the entire price advantage on rent before we sold a single apple.
But here's what we're actually trying to build, and why we think it's worth $20 even from Halifax:
"A shopper-owned store can survive next to the giants" is a theory people argue about on Reddit. One store with a year of published numbers ends the argument, in whichever direction.
Everything we figure out gets published. Bylaws, supplier contracts, tech setup, mistakes. Calgary, Winnipeg or Toronto doesn't start from scratch, it starts from our manual and plugs into shared buying power.
Once there's enough combined volume across stores, we go upstream: buying direct from Canadian farms at published prices, and eventually making our own store-brand products here.
Wherever a real discounter opens, the chains nearby drop their prices to keep customers. It's measured everywhere Aldi goes. Store one makes groceries cheaper in its neighbourhood no matter what.
Run the store on donations. Crowdfunding pays for the launch and that's it. From opening day it lives on sales. If it can't, we'd rather close it honestly than keep it alive on charity until it dies anyway.
Use tech to cut wages. Automation shrinks headcount. The people who remain get paid above market, with the wage scale in the annual report.
Publish a claim without a number. If we can't attach a figure to it, we don't say it.
Expand before store one carries itself. Daily Table opened five stores before the first was self-funding, and all five are gone.
Sell. One member one vote plus anti-takeover bylaws. There's no controlling stake for anyone to buy.
If you believe in this idea, back it on GoFundMe. Every dollar is public, tracked live on this page, and governed by the Plan B written above: build the store, or fund the documentary and community food projects instead.
LIVE COUNTER AT THE TOP UPDATES EVERY HOUR FROM GOFUNDME.