Comfort and nostalgia on the shelves

Cashiers in Sunny Foodmart. Some Chinese supermarkets have expanded to serve different ethnic groups with diverse products and the cashiers they hire. Li Na / China Daily

More holidays

During the Chinese Dragon Boat Festival in early June, more than 30 types of rice dumplings were on sale in the store, including Rice Dumpling with Rose & Longan, Osmanthus & Red Dates, Shanghai Rice Dumpling, and Taiwanese Rice Dumpling.

Now it's time for another Chinese holiday, the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the store has been decorated with Chinese red lanterns to attract people to buy the festival's traditional food, moon cakes.

"We try to keep the Chinese traditions within our shopping space," said Wei. "Since we are far away from our home country, we hope our descendants can experience our traditional culture through the Chinese festivals provided here."

More than 60 percent of Foodymart's products are imported from China and Asia, and cooks prepare varied Asian cuisine at the store all the time for customers to taste.

"The markets are also social and cultural spaces to consumers, thus the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs reproduce homeland images and reinforce ethnic identity in the consumption atmosphere," Lo explained.

Some Chinese immigrants to Canada differ from newcomers who want to continue the way of life they experienced back home, and they try to integrate into the culture of their new country by shopping in mainstream or general stores. Still others try to find a middle ground, according to both Lo and Wang.

Expanding to serve

A few of the Chinese supermarkets have expanded to serve different ethnic groups with diverse products and even the cashiers they hire. One of them is Sunny Foodmart. The multicultural grocery chain store is run by another Fujian group and led by Bill Chen, a young Chinese Canadian who was a student before he came to Canada in 1999.

After launching the Leslie and Finch store in 2004 as an Asian supermarket that catered to Chinese and Korean customers, Sunny Foodmart started to diversify.

When its Don Mills store at Flemingdon Park Shopping Centre opened in November 2010, the 35,000-square-foot store attracted a long line of local shoppers. Sunny Foodmart had stocked multicultural food and ingredients and even reached out to Muslim customers with a certified Halal meat counter.

"We aimed for both Chinese and multicultural, and we are very mindful of the area's Muslim core," said Chen. "Our management team made friends with Muslims for advice on how to get the Halal goods to be unique."

The store's regular meat counter also carries pork, which is 100 meters from the Halal meat counter, and has a separate receiving door and storage cooler.

"Canada is a multicultural society and our business needs to diversify, too," said Chen.

While Wang believes that Chinese supermarkets should try to become more multicultural, he said: "It would be a challenge for ethnic supermarkets to attempt to translate themselves to non-ethnic consumers, unless they have abundant resources to operate a large store network and be able to compete with other large chains."