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We build grocery delivery mobile apps for Canadian supermarkets, Indian / Pakistani / Filipino grocers, and farm-direct produce stores. Customer app, picker app, driver app, and inventory dashboard with barcode scanning — built for the realities of fresh produce, weight-based items, substitutions, and refrigerated cold-chain delivery windows. Roughly half the cost of a Vancouver or Toronto agency, in 10–14 weeks.
Indian and South Asian grocery chains in Brampton, Surrey, and Mississauga competing with Instacart and the major chains. Independent supermarkets needing their own ordering platform to escape per-order fees from Instacart and Cornershop. Farm-direct CSA boxes, halal meat shops, and ethnic specialty stores whose inventory is too unique for mainstream apps to list correctly.
Canada’s online grocery market grew to roughly CAD 6.5 billion in 2024, with Instacart (operating since 2017), Voilà by Sobeys, PC Express by Loblaw, and Walmart Grocery dominating mainstream share. But the ethnic grocery segment — Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, Chinese, Middle Eastern — is under-served by the mainstream apps because their SKUs (atta brands, halal cuts, fresh paneer, ethnic produce like karela and methi) often don’t exist in standard catalogues. This has created a real opening for community-focused grocery delivery apps in Brampton, Surrey, Scarborough, Mississauga, and parts of Calgary and Edmonton. Cold-chain logistics is the operational hard part: Canadian winters mean refrigerated items are fine in a car in January but a liability in July, and Canadian food safety guidance recommends keeping perishables under 4°C from store to door. PIPEDA applies to all customer data, and Apple’s App Privacy disclosures require you to list every type of data collected. Push notifications via FCM and APNs are critical for delivery-window reminders, out-of-stock substitution prompts, and driver-arrival alerts. Most apps integrate Stripe (2.9% + 30¢ for cards in CAD) rather than going through Apple’s in-app purchase system, since physical groceries are exempt from Apple’s 15–30% take. Quebec operations require French localization. Most single-chain grocery apps ship in 10–12 weeks; multi-vendor marketplaces with picker apps take 12–16.
Customers order produce by approximate weight (a 2 lb mango pack, a 1 kg paneer block), and the picker can adjust the final billed weight in-app — customer is auto-notified of the price delta. Out-of-stock items trigger substitution suggestions (organic for conventional, store brand for name brand) with one-tap accept / reject before checkout closes.
Store staff use a phone-based picker app that walks them aisle-by-aisle through the order in optimal pick path, scans barcodes to confirm SKU, weighs produce on a Bluetooth scale, captures photos for high-value items, and flags missing stock instantly. Reduces picking errors by ~70% versus paper lists and makes onboarding new staff a 30-minute job.
Customers pick a 1-hour or 2-hour delivery window. Drivers carry insulated bags for frozen and refrigerated items, with in-app temperature reminders and timestamps captured at handoff. Premium tier supports refrigerated van routing where multiple orders are batched on a single cold run — keeps your ice cream solid and your liability low.
Single brand with multiple locations? Each store has its own inventory feed, pricing, and delivery zone. SKU catalogue supports thousands of items with photos, weight, dietary tags (halal, kosher, vegan, gluten-free), ethnic category trees (Indian / Pakistani / Bangladeshi / Sri Lankan / Filipino / Chinese), and search in English plus transliterated terms (atta, ghee, dal).
Stripe handles cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and split tipping between picker and driver. Store credit wallets for customer refunds, gift cards for diaspora customers sending groceries to family, and prepaid subscription boxes for weekly produce deliveries. All payouts to Canadian bank accounts in CAD with GST/HST captured per line.
Web admin to bulk-upload SKUs via CSV, manage pricing, run flash sales, monitor stock-outs, view picker performance, and analyze basket composition. See which ethnic categories drive repeat orders, peak grocery shopping windows by neighbourhood, and which substitutions get accepted versus rejected — so you stock smarter next month.
Ontario
Ontario
Ontario
Ontario
Ontario
British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia
Alberta
Alberta
Alberta
Ontario
Ontario
Ontario
Ontario
Ontario
Quebec
Quebec
Manitoba
Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan
Nova Scotia
Prince Edward Island
Customers order an estimated weight, the picker app captures the actual weight at the store via Bluetooth scale or manual entry, and the customer is auto-notified of the price difference before final charge. Stripe auth captures the maximum, and we settle on actual at delivery — no surprises, no chargebacks.
Yes — we have integrated with LightSpeed Retail, Square for Retail, custom MySQL inventories, and CSV-fed legacy systems. The constraint is real-time stock accuracy: if your POS does not push inventory updates within a few minutes, customers will order out-of-stock items.
On Instacart you pay a per-order fee plus give up the customer relationship. With your own app, you own the customer, the data, and the loyalty — and your only variable cost is Stripe processing. The economics work if you do over ~150 orders per week per store.
You can hire your own (most chains do), partner with a courier service like Trexity or local providers, or use a hybrid model. We build the driver app either way; if you use a courier API, we wire that in as a fallback for peak hours.
Single-store grocery app: 10–12 weeks. Multi-store chain with picker app and inventory sync: 12–16 weeks. Apple review for first submission in Canada usually takes 24–48 hours; we handle review-note responses.