Two Edmonton software groups develop apps to help Canadians buy local

As Canadians have debated about how best to react to the threat of tariffs from the United States, two groups in Edmonton came to similar decisions to develop apps that can help consumers make informed choices about buying Canadian products.

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“When you watch the news and you just watch how as a people we were kind of being treated, it kind of made me angry,” said William Boytinck, who co-developed one of the apps, called Shop Canadian, with Matthew Suddaby.

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“The idea originally came to me because I was trying to figure out if what I was eating was Canadian. And the packages aren’t always clear.”

Similarly, for Punchcard Systems CEO Sam Jenkins, it was a product at the grocery store that prompted his business partner, Estyn Edwards, to pitch the idea for Check the Label.

“They were looking at mustard, I think, and he was doing a little bit of Googling along the side, and realized that Canadian mustard is actually made (in the U.S.). Like we harvest the mustard here in Canada, it’s shipped across the border for production, and then it comes back across the border so we can buy it,” said Jenkins.

“And we do that with so many products.”

Confusion about the supply chain led both groups to similar ideas, motivated by a shared goal of wanting to give Canadians more information about the products they buy.

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They were also put into action equally fast. Both Jenkins and Boytinck said their respective apps were developed over a single weekend, appearing on the various mobile app stores just days after their conception, with Check the Label coming out Feb. 10 and Shop Canadian appearing on Feb. 5.

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Similar ideas, different approaches

Despite their common goal of assisting consumer choices, the apps have different methods of achieving it.

Check the Label, Jenkins said, uses scanned universal product codes (UPCs) from the phone camera of the consumer, which gives them manufacturing information about the product they’re examining. Artificial intelligence is then employed for further help.

“What we’re doing there is we’re actually using the information from the UPC scan, which often has manufacture data, so that we can then do an AI search to understand, well, what’s the providence of that,” said Jenkins.

The Shop Canadian app differs in that it relies on user-generated data about a product’s origins to inform and rank products on how Canadian they are.

“The app works by allowing users to scan a bar code and then with some company registrations we have in our database, we can display that. But primarily at the moment, we ask people to rate a product on how Canadian it is,” said Boytinck.

He said Shop Canadian chose to steer away from artificial intelligence because he felt it was delivering confident results that were actually false.

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“There’s a lot of nuance in the equation that sort of only can be solved by thousands of people working together.”

He said the algorithm then takes the data and “weights it” to figure out if it is Canadian or not.

How does Shop Canadian show its sliding scale of Canadian-ness? On a scale from one to five maple leaves.

Surprise at where products come from

Jenkins said he felt “terribly” surprised once he started taking note of where products came from, but it wasn’t just U.S. goods that caught his eye.

“It really shows that dependency that we have with our neighbours, with our trading partners, to be able to create secondary and tertiary products along the way. But like most people, I’m surprised at how much I buy and how much we’ve scanned so far that comes from other places,” Jenkins said.

Boytinck recalled feeling a sense of “betrayal” when he heard of U.S. intentions to impose tariffs on Canadian goods. The creators of both apps expect defiant Canadian sentiments toward the United States to persist, which means a consumer focus on buying domestic products should continue, whether the tariffs come to pass or not.

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“Over the past five years, there’s been a sort of a steady decline in how people perceive Canada and how proud they are of the country. But I think this entire situation has sort of reversed that,” said Boytinck.

Jenkins likened the Canadian reaction to the tariff threat to the isolationist approaches between both countries that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. He said he expects tensions will ease over time.

“We have lived with the U.S. economy in a symbiotic relationship for a long, long time. And I don’t see that stopping,” he said.

Regardless of any coming decisions on tariffs, Punchcard will continue to keep the app running as long there remains interest from users, Jenkins said.

Boytinck promised the same for Shop Canadian, vowing to expand the app’s offerings to help support local smaller businesses.

“That’s something I hope can be a part of our legacy, where we just continually try to help Canadian businesses,” said Boytinck.

zdelaney@postmedia.com

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