Keep It Local, Eh

Glossary

Ownership structure has its own vocabulary. These are the recurring patterns behind the companies on this site — the ideas worth understanding once, rather than re-explaining on every profile.

Banner / franchise-services model

Different from ordinary franchising. Here, a large parent company doesn't own the stores at all — it sells branding, supply-chain access, and buying-group services to already-independent business owners (often pharmacists, in the cases on this site) who keep full ownership of their own store. The parent's influence is real — it controls the brand name, the supply relationships, and often the terms those independent owners operate under — but the storefront itself, and its profits, belong to the local owner, not the parent.

Controlling parent

Who legally owns a company's shares and who actually controls its decisions aren't always the same thing. Many Canadian companies use a dual-class share structure, where founders or a founding family hold a special class of shares with far more voting power per share than what's sold to the public. That means a family can sell the majority of a company's economic value to public or foreign investors while still controlling every major decision through voting control. A company can be majority foreign-owned by share count and still be Canadian-controlled in practice — or the reverse. Ownership share and control are two separate facts, and this site tries to report both.

Cooperative ownership

No single company owns these banners at all. Each store is owned by its own operator (often the pharmacist or retailer running it), and those owners collectively govern a shared cooperative that handles buying power, marketing, and brand standards. There's no parent corporation collecting profits from these stores — the cooperative exists to serve its own member-owners, not shareholders.

Franchise model

A franchisor owns a brand's trademark, systems, and standards, and licenses them to independent franchisees who each own and operate their own individual location, typically paying an upfront fee plus ongoing royalties. The franchisor usually doesn't own or directly profit from the location's day-to-day sales the way a corporate-owned store's parent would — but it does set the terms franchisees operate under, and profits from royalties and fees regardless of any individual location's success.

Royalty income trust

Some well-known Canadian restaurant chains split into two separate entities: a private operating company that actually runs the restaurants, and a separate publicly traded trust that owns nothing but the trademark and collects a small royalty (often 4-9% of sales) in exchange for its use. The trust doesn't hire staff, sign leases, or make menu decisions — it's essentially a licensing arrangement wrapped in a public stock. So when you see one of these brands listed as "publicly traded," that fact alone doesn't tell you much about who's making day-to-day decisions in the restaurant — that's still the private operating company.

Tax domicile vs. control

A company's official headquarters location doesn't always reflect where real decision-making power sits. Corporate mergers are sometimes structured specifically to move a company's legal domicile to a country with more favourable tax treatment, even when the resulting company's actual controlling investors and strategic direction sit elsewhere. "Headquartered in Canada" and "Canadian-controlled" are two different claims, and this site tries not to conflate them.