Industry committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear. I think there's certainly an opportunity, and I think there are a lot of SMEs like mine that can certainly take that leap. I like the fact that you mentioned inspiration. I think that is what we need. There are so many things going on, but I think there's an inspiration there that makes us better people, and certainly it allows us to compete at any level and to level the playing field with manufacturers, big retailers, big box.

Industry committee  I would add that what it does is make us better retailers, because we have to think outside the box on everything. You talk about the technology and the information you put in your systems: everything is cleansed and everything is looked at. We're constantly looking at cost and constantly innovating to try to lower our costs, because this e-technology brings in a whole lot of competitors that we didn't have before.

Industry committee  We ship the entire store—

Industry committee  We ship produce, we ship baked goods, frozen meat. We ship the entire selection.

Industry committee  On delivery time, it depends where. So, obviously, within the city it's a three-hour window.

Industry committee  We're not quite there. For example, for anything within the city limits you obviously have the entire list. If you're shipping up north through First Air and Canadian North, our partners, we will sell full groceries. If you order your groceries by three o'clock today, you will have them in Iqaluit tomorrow, and Resolute Bay tomorrow afternoon.

Industry committee  Everything is packaged. We actually use the same packaging as we get it in, so if we're getting apples, we would reuse that packaging to go out. Everything is in refrigerated trucks. Everything at the airport is refrigerated until it gets to the plane, and then the plane is equipped to deal with that.

Industry committee  It's interesting because it's not your maple syrup, smoked salmon, or things like that. Often it's chocolate bars, something sweet. So you had a lot of people looking at it in Las Vegas when they had the construction boom, and they wanted chocolates that were available in Canada, Smarties for example, things like that—M&M;'s in the States and Smarties in Canada.

Industry committee  —but we did manage to do that. It's certainly been interesting. The requests are interesting because people come online, they find you and they say, “Can you please...”. And cost is not an issue because food is to the heart. Thank you.

Industry committee  I think what we're seeing in our industry, interestingly enough, is the manufacturers wanting to go directly to the consumers, to the end users. So if we are not part of that online business, we're going to see the manufacturers leaping over us to actually sell products. If you look at South Korea, for example, 92% of the diapers are actually sold from the manufacturer to the end user, the family.

Industry committee  For us it was basically trying to look at the future. We were actually in a conference where they were talking about trends. They were saying that grocery shopping online would have 10% of the market share within five years. This was back in 1995. As I said before, margins are 2%.

Industry committee  To be honest, it was all word of mouth. We started out in Ottawa. Actually, it was the clients there who found us online. They asked us to do specific things, such as help them ship grocery orders. They educated us and showed us how to supply them. Then, we worked with influential people in those communities to meet their needs.

Industry committee  Thank you.

Industry committee  We did not. We basically built it with whatever funds we had, and built it slowly and gradually. Certainly, we've been asked a few times and we've looked around, but there was certainly nothing that came out with flashing red lights that said, “Please join here, apply here”. A lot of my colleagues—there are a lot of successful colleagues—like Grocery Gateway and Mollie Stone's Markets, have gone online.

Industry committee  I'm François Bouchard. I'm the owner of The Country Grocer and OnlineGrocer.ca, so our store is a little bit different. We're very much a brick-and-mortar store that decided to go online to expand our marketplace. Our shop is here in Ottawa, in the south end. We have 10,000 square feet, 26 employees, and the grocery store has been there for 50-some years.