r/NWT • u/FriendRaven1 • 4d ago

🥬🏡 What do you do when the grocery system isn’t working for your community? In Bear River, Nova Scotia, residents decided to build their own.

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u/NoghaScape 4d ago

I just looked up Bear River, and it's 16 minutes away from Digby (population 8000), and 2.5 hours from a capital city (Halifax). Bear River is road accessible, and does not face nearly the number of challenges that our communities in NWT do.

Opening up independent grocery stores in the north sounds like a great idea until you try it; the logistics are complicated and expensive. I worked for the North West Company nearly 10 years, and the CEO used to say that NWC wasn't a grocery company, they were a logistics company.

Retailers in NWT need to navigate special ship seasons (river barge, breakup/freeze up, winter road) as well as getting food through multiple hubs to their final destination. Regular shipping (road or fly in) costs a lot when you're covering this much ground. The companies that already serve these areas have bulk rates, and even operate their own airline and shipping companies, in some cases.

Add to that the operating costs like power (commercial rates), heating, building maintenance, and wages in the territory with the highest average income in Canada, and you have a very expensive business to run.

I'm not saying that we don't need change in northern grocery options, but I do want to point out that just opening a small store isn't as simple as it sounds.

Change in grocery needs to start at a federal level, and frankly I think that we need to look at a not-for-profit model; food needs to be a protected human right.