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Canada’s fastest-growing ethnic groups are top grocery buyers
Vancouver resident Siva Sivaguranathar and his son Shangar head out of the Real Canadian Superstore on Southeast Marine Drive one recent afternoon with a cart full of the usual list of things: milk, bread, cereal, meat, eggs . . . .
It wouldn’t be worth interrupting them except for newly released stats showing that South Asian-Canadian families spend a whopping 23-per-cent more on groceries than other households in Canada.
“I’m not surprised. We probably do. We always cook at home,” said the elder Sivaguranathar as the younger loaded the car. “The relatives come over, and it’s always a minimum of three but closer to a maximum of five dishes per meal.”
Joanne Lee-Young
Vancouver Sun
Monday, May 26, 2008

Elsewhere in the parking lot and in the store, and indeed in casual conversations around town, others take a stab at explaining the spike. Many vividly describe food-centred family gatherings. Some chalk it up to socio-economics. Others shrug their shoulders or gaffaw at the stereotype.
Toronto-based market research firm Solutions Research Group, which conducted the survey, also singled out Chinese-Canadian shoppers as big grocery spenders. They log nine-per-cent more than the benchmark for all other residents in Toronto and Vancouver, according to SRG.
In sum, it said that “two of the fastest-growing Canadian population segments are also above average in their grocery spending and now account for nearly 1-in-3 dollars spent on groceries in Toronto and Vancouver,” a market worth some $17 billion per year.
The 2006 census counted nearly 2.5 million individuals who identified themselves as South Asian- or Chinese-Canadian, a jump of 27 per cent over numbers from the 2001 census. This rate was five times faster than the 5.4-per-cent increase for the Canadian population as a whole during the same period.
In Vancouver, 27 per cent of South Asian shoppers named the Real Canadian Superstore as their top destination, followed by Save-on-Foods and Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, Chinese-Canadian shoppers in Vancouver overwhelmingly (53 per cent) said T&T was their top place for groceries, and put the Real Canadian Superstore (17 per cent) in a distant second spot.
From that vantage point, T&T Supermarket spokesman Herman Poon sketched out these consumers: “It’s a population with a larger proportion of families, with more dependent children. It is very normal to go and buy food and prepare and cook it and enjoy it at home rather than eating out at a restaurant, even though there is a younger generation that is eating out more.”
He added: “It just costs less to cook at home. Some of these are working immigrant communities with many mouths to feed, and they can save up on day-to-day expenses by cooking at home.”
This may be true, but at the same time, home-cooked South Asian and Chinese meals are by comparison “more elaborate. A lot of Western households tend to have simpler meals when they cook for themselves,” said Vancouver-based food critic Stephen Wong.
He added: “There is often someone home [in Asian households] to cook, to do the shopping. Many Chinese housewives [in Vancouver] still shop multiple times a week instead of once a week, and this enables the making of more complex meals with more ingredients and contributes to the cost.”
While T&T — a Vancouver-based chain that was started by immigrant entrepreneurs and backers from Taiwan — has had obvious success in consolidating grocery spending among Chinese-Canadian shoppers, it is increasingly eyeing the potentially lucrative South Asian demographic, said Poon.
“We would like to make the South Asian customer feel at home, and to see a part of the store dedicated to specific products versus just having a few strewn here and there in our stores. We are trying to understand South Asian eating habits, their ingredients. We are going into their communities and researching.”
Over at Saravanaa Bhavan on West Broadway, a restaurant chain from India, the survey’s two groups are crudely represented at one table. Krish Satheesh, who was born in Chennai, India, but has lived in Toronto and Vancouver for over 20 years, is chiding his colleague, who was born in Taichung, Taiwan, but moved to Vancouver as a teenager. “Who is more food-obsessed? We haven’t even finished this meal, and you are thinking about the next!”
The two chuckle at the survey’s findings, but find it unremarkable that households such as their own would spend more on groceries.
Satheesh remembers that, growing up in Chennai, “my neighbours would buy lots and lots and lots of milk. They used it to make their own yogurt. … Now, I see people in Superstore buying lots and lots, a whole grocery cart full of milk. And sometimes even I think, ‘What are they doing with all that milk?’
“But of course, I know. They just like milk. My landlords [for instance] — they are an old couple from Punjab and they probably buy five times the amount of milk that I do.”
jlee-young@png.canwest.com
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/business/story.html?id=6aa2443b-00e8-4f88-82c1-d456989d62a0