SPAR Canada, the Canadian operating arm of SPAR Group (OTCQB: SGRP), and ReposiTrak (NYSE: TRAK) today announced the Canadian launch of Touchless Retail™, an in-store merchandising program that gives Canadian brands access to expert services at a fixed rate that is typically about half the cost.
Touchless Retail launched in the United States earlier this year, and its expansion into Canada reflects more than a simple rollout across the border. The program is shaped around three realities of the Canadian market: a grocery sector concentrated among a handful of national banners, a geography that stretches merchandising coverage across enormous distances between population centres and bilingual, province-specific compliance requirements that add complexity.
“Operating in Canada isn’t just doing the U.S. playbook on a smaller scale; it’s a different set of trade-offs,” said Mindy Finegold, General Manager, SPAR Canada. “Our merchandising teams already cover ground from the Greater Toronto Area to Western and Atlantic Canada, working with a retail landscape where a small number of major banners set the standard nationally. Touchless Retail lets us combine that on-the-ground reach with fixed, predictable costs and demand-driven ordering, so brands get consistent execution whether a store is in the urban core or a smaller market hundreds of kilometres from the nearest distribution centre.”
Canada’s grocery sector is significantly more consolidated than that of the United States. Five retailers, Loblaw, Sobeys (Empire), Metro, Costco and Walmart, account for roughly three-quarters of national grocery sales. That concentration changes the calculus for brands because with fewer, larger retail relationships, consistent execution at each banner carries outsized weight and any gaps in shelf presence are harder to offset elsewhere in the market.
At the same time, Canada’s population is unevenly spread across an enormous landmass, for which brands still need consistent coverage. This makes the variable travel and labour costs of traditional merchandising visits especially difficult to predict north of the border, which is exactly the unpredictability Touchless Retail’s fixed-rate model is designed to remove.
Canada also layers on compliance requirements that don’t exist in the same form in the U.S. Packaging and labeling must appear in both English and French under federal rules enforced by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and individual provinces add their own language requirements on top of that. Associates in the field need to be attentive to those nuances at the shelf, so ReposiTrak’s data and compliance tools help keep underlying product and supplier information accurate across languages and jurisdictions.
“American brands have grown used to a fragmented, highly competitive retail base with dozens of significant banners to manage. Canada is a different game,” said Randy Fields, chairman and CEO of ReposiTrak. “Touchless Retail brings the same demand-driven ordering and professional in-store execution we built for the U.S. market but tuned to that concentration and to a supply chain that has to cover far more ground per retailer relationship, typically at about half the cost of traditional merchandising.”
As in the U.S., Touchless Retail in Canada pairs an elite team of local merchandising professionals with automated ordering driven by actual demand data, helping ensure the right product is ordered, available and properly presented at the shelf. The program supports a range of in-store activities, including product placement, shelf replenishment, display maintenance and product rotation, delivered through SPAR Canada’s highly skilled network.
Rather than relying solely on scheduled visits or manual ordering decisions, Touchless Retail uses demand signals to support more precise replenishment while professional merchandisers help ensure available inventory makes it onto the shelf, an approach suited to a market where a stockout at one of Canada’s dominant banners can be harder to recover from than at a smaller regional chain.
Touchless Retail merchandising and automated ordering capabilities enable Canadian brands to improve store-level execution without changing how they currently transact with their retail partners. For suppliers that do participate in ReposiTrak’s supply chain solutions, Touchless Retail further connects store-level sales and inventory visibility with automated replenishment and professional in-store execution across their Canadian operations.
The fixed-rate model offers a needed alternative in a market where variable labour rates, travel expenses and the cost of covering long distances between stores can make the true cost of merchandising visits difficult to predict. By reducing that cost and pairing it with demand-driven ordering, Touchless Retail can make it economically practical for Canadian brands to expand coverage, including into smaller and more remote markets, while improving replenishment effectiveness.
For suppliers managing products across retail locations from coast to coast, the combination helps reduce out-of-stocks, improve shelf availability, maintain displays, refresh inventory and better align product flow with actual consumer demand, regardless of a store’s distance from major distribution hubs.
About SPAR Group
SPAR Group, Inc. (OTCQB: SGRP) is a leading provider of retail merchandising, marketing and execution services for consumer goods companies and retailers. SPAR combines experienced merchandising teams with technology-enabled insights to help clients improve in-store execution, increase sales, grow profitability and operate more efficiently. Its services include merchandising, resets, remodels, product launches, display execution, shelf stocking and other retail support programs delivered at scale.
For more information, visit sparinc.com.
About ReposiTrak
ReposiTrak, Inc. (NYSE: TRAK) is an AI-powered, integrated platform that connects retailers, wholesalers, suppliers, and food manufacturers through a suite of applications designed to reduce risk, support regulatory compliance, strengthen operational controls, and protect brand integrity. The ReposiTrak platform serves as a shared system of record across its solution areas, maintaining and synchronizing complex supplier and customer data to enable secure, accurate, and scalable information exchange.
ReposiTrak’s solutions are organized into three core product families: traceability, compliance and risk management, and supply chain solutions. Through its scalable, cloud-based platform and U.S.-based team of experts, the Company helps organizations streamline operations, improve data transparency, and meet evolving regulatory requirements across the food supply chain.
For more information, visit repositrak.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
Any statements contained in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “expect,” “forecast,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “project,” “should,” “will,” and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Factors that could affect actual results are detailed in ReposiTrak’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ReposiTrak undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.
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