Wal-Mart Canada Corp. is pushing aggressively into food as it steals business from grocery rivals, having almost doubled its share of the fresh-food market in the past two years.
U.S.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which arrived in Canada in 1994, started to add massive Supercentres with full fresh-food offerings in November, 2006, taking a bite out of business from other supermarkets and retailers. Its new food focus prompted domestic grocery leader Loblaw Cos. Ltd. to launch a major overhaul of its business, resulting in massive problems which it was forced to patch up in past years.
Today, Wal-Mart Canada continues to add more groceries to its shelves, with food, consumer products such as toothpaste and toilet paper, and health and wellness products making up 41.7 per cent of its estimated $20-billion of annual sales, compared with just 30.6 per cent in fiscal 2008, according to Wal-Mart’s figures.
“We are in our infancy,” Shelley Broader, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart Canada, told an international Wal-Mart Stores Inc. analyst conference in Toronto on Thursday.
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