The RPI
Who Are the Winners
Which retailers have the best RPI scores and are best positioned for long-term success?
1st Tercile retailers tend to be food discount, club and supercenter format banners.
2nd Tercile contains conventionals who blend solid performance in personalization, quality, speed/convenience.
3rd Tercile contains a mix of premium retailers who are too far behind on affordability or conventionals that are behind on quality and only in a lukewarm position on either Price, Mass Promo or Personalized Promo and Rewards
While Costco maintains its position from last year, Maxi jumps from 5th to 2nd place in 2025; No Frills also gains three positions and now occupies the 5th Place. Players with strong Savings and Price are more favored than ever to long-term success in Canada.
How are 1st tercile retailers doing it?
1st Tercile retailers clearly have achieved leadership in perceptions of Price, Promo, Rewards, the pillar most associated with better retailer outcomes.
It once again shows that Canadians are willing to trade off on elements of Quality, in many missions, in their grocery shopping, and the winning retailers are the ones with better offerings in affordability.
With many retailers in a compromised position to compete with 1st Tercile brands, what course of action can they take? In the next sections of this study, we will uncover the specific attributes that are most impactful for Canadians across different regions and formats, providing a blueprint retailers can use to validate their strategies and fight for long-term success.
Amazon would rank 8th overall – a decline of 6 spots vs. last year
We also collected data on several large drugstore pharmacy chains, Dollarama, and Amazon. They weren’t included in our model and rankings, since we chose to focus this study on the competitive set that offers the full complement of typical grocery offerings – spanning perishables, non-perishables, consumables, and HBC.
However, if we simulated Amazon’s RPI score, based on customer perception of its value proposition, it would’ve ranked 8th nationally. It is important to keep an eye on Amazon, since they are already shopping for groceries – albeit in more focused, non-perishable, non-food missions. They are growing, though, and they have a high emotional connection with Canadians that do shop them, ranking 4th overall in Canada on this measure, if we were to rank them against the other 28 retailers we modeled.
Their Customer Value Proposition saw a significant drop from the year before, as Amazon dropped on every single Pillar. At the same time, we saw the Price, Mass Promo and Personalized Promo, Rewards Pillars increasing in importance. There are several retailers stronger than Amazon on this pillar.
This shift in shopper priority doesn’t align well with Amazon’s competitive strengths, as they are unable to compete for base prices with Discounters, and don’t provide the same quality of products as conventionals.
There can also be an impact of social trends such as “Buy Canadian,” which impacts the overall perception of Amazon, while other American brands, such as Costco, have physical locations in Canada, a key asset when driving a sense of local connection.