We've recently written a detailed blog post that digs down even further into The Canada Scores, and how you can use them to make your shopping easier HERE.
How are the Canada Scores™ derived?
Effective Date: Apr 8, 2025 | Last Updated: Aug 9, 2025
The CANADA Score is our flagship metric—a 1-to-10 rating that estimates how much a given product or company truly contributes to the Canadian economy. It reflects not just branding or marketing, but actual economic impact.
Our Process
Deriving the CANADA scores involves a multi-stage process.
- First, we use proprietary AI agents to collect, interpret, and synthesize information from public sources.
- All scores are then reviewed by human analysts, who increase consistency and flag ambiguous or incomplete data.
- Once an entry has been reviewed by a human analyst, we mark it as “Reassessed". This does not guarantee that all errors have been zapped, but does indicate that an extra layer of human oversight was undertaken.
We are currently in the process of undertaking this human review, and the list will remain in beta release until this process is complete. Some errors should be expected. We accept corrections and submissions from companies and users, and reassess scores regularly to arrive at the most accurate information.
What We Measure
Defining what counts as "Canadian" isn't always straightforward. There’s no single rule that applies perfectly to every product or sector. That’s why our scoring approach considers multiple overlapping dimensions. We don’t just ask where a company is based—we assess the broader economic contribution of its operations.
Each CANADA Score reflects a product or brand’s standing across four key pillars:
- Ownership: Is the company Canadian-owned?
- Manufacturing: Are the products made in Canada?
- Sourcing: Are components or ingredients sourced domestically?
- Job Support & Economic Presence: Does the company create Canadian jobs or maintain a meaningful footprint in the Canadian economy?
Rating System
Here's a detailed breakdown of exactly what each score out of 10 represents:
10/10 – 100% Canadian: owned, made, and sourced here.
9/10 – Canadian-owned, predominantly made/sourced here, or a large independent retail footprint.
8/10 – Canadian-owned, some materials sourced/manufactured here, or some independent retail footprint.
7/10 – Canadian-owned, but manufacturing/sourcing is largely outsourced.
6/10 – Foreign-owned, but made in Canada, or with large independent retail footprint.
5/10 – Foreign-owned, substantive Canadian manufacturing/sourcing or substantive retail footprint.
4/10 – Foreign-owned, some Canadian manufacturing/sourcing or independent retail footprint.
3/10 – Foreign-owned, on store shelves, some local production (e.g. co-packing), contribution is modest.
2/10 – Foreign-owned, on store shelves, but made abroad, and imported.
1/10 – Foreign-owned, available online, but zero meaningful Canadian economic involvement.
Note regarding foreign franchises: After being scored on the above scale, franchises with a foreign-owned parent will generally have 2-points subtracted from their score: 1 point because of the ~10-20% of sales that is sent back to the parent company as franchise-related fees, and 1 point for the loss of sovereignty over menus, sourcing, manufacturing and/or logistics decisions. This is intended to appropriately acknowledge the local ownership and very real economic contribution of these franchise locations.
Caveats
Some may wonder how a small, self-run Canadian business could score as highly - or even higher - than a large multinational corporation with an extensive manufacturing and distribution network. The answer lies in our unit-based approach: our scores reflect the estimated contribution to the Canadian economy of a single unit sold. We are thus not evaluating total economic impact, but rather relative impact per purchase. In our view, per-unit contribution is the more meaningful lens for guiding individual purchasing decisions because it better reflects the reality that choosing one product usually means not choosing another.
While the above rating system is pretty well-defined, there are still grey areas: Some companies are part Canadian-owned. Some companies have franchise or licensing agreements with foreign companies. Some companies (e.g. major grocers) have their products made by 3rd party agents, which themselves contract with other 3rd-party copackers. Some companies produce in sectors that simply can't source Canadian (e.g. coffee, orange juice), and some manufacturing jobs are cricital stimulators of the Canadian economy, with no domestic comparable. All of this complexity necessitates that we allow a certain level of flexibility beyond the formal scoring system detailed above. To accomplish this, we may at any time 'boost' or 'downgrade' a given brand's/product's CANADA Score by one point above/below their designated spot on the above scoring breakdown, to best reflect nuances of that company's structure. The scoring system is thus highly both standardized and transparent, and also sufficient flexible to handle the complexities of the modern globalized economy.
This scoring system remains a living entity, and we will be continuously refelcting on and refining our methodology to ensure that the CANADA Score a) remains transparent, meaningful, and as accurate as possible, and b) continues to encourage economic activity deemed beneficial for the Canadian economy.