Keep It Local, Eh

This site traces retail and restaurant banners back to who actually operates and controls them — the parent company, its ownership structure, and its national origin, where that's a meaningful and knowable fact. The goal is to make that structure visible, not to tell you what to do with it. Store ownership and product origin are two different things, and this site only speaks to the former.

Each brand gets a score from 0 to 5 maple leaves, in half-leaf steps. It's fully rule-based — every input is a sourced fact, not a judgment call — built from up to three weighted parts:

• Ownership & control — the share of voting control held by Canadian parties. This is deliberately about control, not just who owns the most shares — a company can sell most of its economic value to public or foreign investors and still be controlled by a Canadian founding family through a dual-class share structure, or the reverse.
• Operating model — corporate-owned, franchised, cooperative, and a few variations in between, and whether the parent collecting the royalty or margin is itself Canadian or foreign. A heavily franchised brand keeps more money with a local owner-operator even when its franchisor is foreign; a fully corporate-owned store sends the entire margin wherever its parent is.
• Manufacturing location — for the handful of brands that make a physical product, not just operate stores, the share of that manufacturing done in Canada.

Every score also carries a confidence level. Exact means the number comes from a clean, unambiguous case — a wholly Canadian-founded company, a wholly foreign subsidiary, or a documented voting-control structure. Estimated means a real number was assigned by informed judgment where a precise one wasn't publicly available — currently 6 of 50 parent organizations. Estimated doesn't mean unreliable, just not yet independently re-verified against a specific, dated source.

Every entry is built from public sources: corporate filings and investor disclosures, established news reporting, trade press, and company statements. Most brand profiles link their sources directly. Ownership changes, sometimes quickly — a few entries on this site have already changed hands more than once in recent years — so treat the "last verified" date on each profile as exactly that: when it was last confirmed, not a permanent fact.

This covers 89 companies so far, concentrated in a handful of categories — not a complete picture of Canadian retail. A couple of brands that make their own products are missing a manufacturing-location score entirely, shown as "not yet scored" rather than guessed at. And this is ownership structure only: it says nothing about a company's labor practices, environmental record, or anything else you might weigh in a purchasing decision.

This is an independent, informational project, not a warranted claim of fact about any specific company. If something here is wrong or out of date, that's expected to happen occasionally given how ownership structures change — corrections are welcome and get fixed quickly once flagged.