Sobeys
supermarket chain in Canada
Sobeys Inc. is a national supermarket chain in Canada with over 1,500 stores operating under a variety of banners. Headquartered in Stellarton, Nova Scotia, it operates stores in all ten provinces and accumulated sales of more than C$25.1 billion in the fiscal 2019 operating year. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Empire Company Limited, a Canadian business conglomerate.
It is a participant in the voluntary Scanner Price Accuracy Code managed by the Retail Council of Canada.
History
Sobeys was founded in Stellarton, Nova Scotia by John W. Sobey, a former carpenter, in 1907 as a meat delivery business.
In 1921, Sobey's son, Frank, became a partner of the company and added six new grocery stores serving the Pictou County and Antigonish County regions. In 1946, Sobey's opened its first supermarket in New Glasgow after purchasing the operations to Barker Store. By this time, Frank was the first president of J. W. Sobey Stores Limited. By late 1977, Sobeys had 65 store locations.
“Sobeys” enters the record as supermarket chain in Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sobeys, supermarket and chain can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1143340. VIAF identifies the subject as 172041096. The Library of Congress control number is n86094890. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019, 1907, 1921 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sobeys” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.