Foodland, Thrifty Foods, IGA & FreshCo Scraper — Canada

Most grocery scrapers give you a name and a price. This one gives you the regular price, the sale price, and the date the promotion ends — plus a 16-field nutrition panel — across four Canadian grocery banners at once.

Foodland, Thrifty Foods, IGA and FreshCo, in one run. About 150,000 products combined. Export to CSV, Excel, JSON, or pull it straight from the API.

Why this one

	Typical grocery scraper	This Actor
Current price	✅	✅
Regular price when an item is on sale	❌	✅ regularPrice
When the promotion ends	❌	✅ priceValidUntil
Multi-buy offers ("Buy 2 for $12")	❌	✅ multiBuyQuantity, multiBuyPrice
Full nutrition panel	❌	✅ 16 fields
Same product across several stores	❌	✅ shared sku

If you are tracking promotions rather than just prices, that middle block is the difference between "this costs $4.99" and "this is $4.99 until Wednesday, normally $6.79."

The four banners

Store	Region	Products
Foodland	Ontario	43,000
Thrifty Foods	British Columbia	38,000
IGA	Quebec	39,000
FreshCo	Discount, national	33,000

All four are Empire Company banners and share one product ID. The same sku identifies the same item in every store, so a single run gives you the same product priced in Ontario, BC and Quebec side by side — which is exactly the comparison a plain price scraper cannot do.

Sobeys and Safeway are covered by separate Actors and use the same sku, so all six line up together.

What you get

Field	Example
banner	Foodland — which store the row came from
name	Compliments Canola Oil 100% Pure 946 ml
brand	Compliments (empty for unbranded items)
price	6.29 — the current price, promotional if one is running
regularPrice	8.49 — the regular price; same as price when nothing is on offer
onSale	true / false
priceValidUntil	2026-09-16 — when a promotion ends
priceAboveRegular	true / false — true when the banner's own data lists a price above the regular price (rare; see Notes)
multiBuyQuantity	2 — how many you must buy for the multi-buy price; empty when there is no multi-buy
multiBuyPrice	12.00 — what that many cost together ("Buy 2 for $12")
multiBuyUnitPrice	6.00 — the price per item when you buy that many
multiBuyValidUntil	2026-09-30 — when the multi-buy ends
currency	CAD
availability	InStoreOnly or OutOfStock
storeId	8253 — the banner's store number the price comes from (see Notes)
category	Oils, Vinegars & Salad Dressing
categoryPath	Pantry > Oils, Vinegars & Salad Dressing
sku	135163 — the internal Empire ID, shared across banners; not a UPC
imageUrl	Link to the product image, where one is published
url	Link to the product page
scrapedAt	ISO timestamp

With Include nutrition panel on (the default), each row also carries servingSize, calories, fat, saturatedFat, transFat, omega3, omega6, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrate, fibre, sugar, protein, calcium, iron and potassium.

What people use it for

• Promotion tracking — every discounted row carries the regular price and the end date, not just the sale price
• Regional price comparison — the same SKU in Ontario, BC and Quebec from one run
• Discount-banner benchmarking — FreshCo against the full-service banners, same product IDs
• Nutrition and diet apps — a large Canadian food database with real retail prices attached
• Research — food price inflation, assortment differences between regions

How to use it

1. Pick your Stores. All four are selected by default.
2. Put one or more words in Search terms — milk, bread, coffee. Leave it empty to walk the whole catalogue.
3. Set Maximum products. This is the total across all selected stores and it is your spend ceiling — the budget is split evenly between them, so 100 products across four stores is about 25 each.
4. Run it. Results appear in the dataset tab and export in any format.

Tips

• Search terms are matched against the product name in the URL, so milk works and 2% milk 4L will not.
• Matching is a plain substring test and any term can match, so short terms catch more than you expect — com also matches compliments.
• Leave the proxy on. These banners block unproxied requests outright.
• If you see failures, lower Parallel requests.

Pricing

$0.75 per 1,000 products, plus a $0.00005 start fee that is small enough to ignore. You are charged per product returned — nothing for products that fail, and nothing for the sitemap pages the run reads to find them. A 100-product run costs about $0.08, and 1,000 products about $0.75.

Notes

• Prices come from one store at a time, and storeId says which. Each banner's website prices a product from a default store, and from another store of the same banner when the default one does not carry it. In a 1,000-product random sample (250 per banner, 25 Sep 2026) the default store covered about one product in four at Foodland, half at FreshCo, and three in five at IGA and Thrifty Foods. We have not measured how often prices differ between stores of the same banner. These are the prices the website shows, not checkout prices at a particular branch.
• availability comes from the same published data, so it is not live stock at a particular branch — items are listed InStoreOnly or OutOfStock.
• Multi-buy offers are included. "Buy 2 for $12" and "$2.99 each when you buy 2 or more" are not part of the price data the banners publish for search engines, so most scrapers miss them; this Actor reads them from the promotion data in the same page and reports the quantity, the total, the price per item and the end date. In the same sample, about one product in fifty carried an active multi-buy (22 of 997: Foodland 10, Thrifty Foods 9, IGA 2, FreshCo 1). Promotions change weekly, so treat that as a snapshot. Only offers open to every shopper are reported — Scene+ member-only offers, points, percentage-off and free-item deals are not.
• priceAboveRegular flags a contradictory row. Very occasionally a banner's own data lists a price above the regular price — on one IGA product in September 2026, a "2 for $5" total was published as the price of one. The published values are passed through unchanged, and the flag lets you filter or check them.
• Every product carries a price — 1,000 of 1,000 in the August random sample — but Foodland publishes a price of 0.00 on about 2% of products (6 of 250 in the September sample). Treat a 0 as "no price set", not as free.
• About a third of the catalogue is OutOfStock at any time, and it varies by banner — Foodland runs nearest a quarter, Thrifty Foods nearer two in five. Those rows still carry price and nutrition data.
• About one product in six is on offer at any time, ranging from 14% at FreshCo to 22% at Thrifty Foods.
• Roughly a quarter of products publish no image, and about one in ten no brand. IGA has the best brand coverage of the four. Missing values come back empty rather than missing, so your CSV columns stay stable.
• About four in five products publish usable nutrition data, and a filled panel averages roughly half of its sixteen fields.
• Nutrition values come through exactly as published, which means some are numbers (220) and some are strings with units (21 g). A published 0 is a measured zero, not a gap.
• This reads the structured product data each banner publishes on its own pages for search engines, and only follows URLs listed in their public sitemaps. It does not touch account, cart, or checkout areas, which their robots.txt files disallow.

Problems or requests

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab. Bug reports get fixed and reasonable field requests usually get added.