KW Wholesale is a Grocery Store
A new store opened in the big space on Scott Street near Market Lane, where Bibles for Missions used to be, and Braun's cycles used to be before that. It is called KW Wholesale. I am here to tell you that it is filled with Indian and Middle Eastern groceries, mostly imported from abroad.
This is the second secret Middle Eastern grocery store in downtown Kitchener. The first is Hasty Market. From what I have seen KW Wholesale does not have refrigerators (and thus is not a full-service Indian/Middle Eastern grocery) but if you are looking for shelf-stable goods flown/shipped across the ocean this is your place.
I guess the store calls itself "KW Wholesale" because they are selling (against lockdown rules? I hope not) a bunch of things that are not food -- fancy carpets and cookware and such. But honestly I do not love the name. With a booming South Asian population in KW now I can imagine that there is a high demand for these kinds of groceries.
The store just opened, and as is often the case, the prices are too low. Items that cost three dollars or more elsewhere can be had for $1.39 here. Unless it is some kind of money laundering scheme, I have to imagine that prices will rise quickly once the store is established. Until then it is a good place to pick up supplies.
Even in 2021, I feel there is still nonsense talk about downtown Kitchener being a food desert because the closest white-person grocery store is Central Fresh Mart (I guess Shopper's Drug Mart doesn't count, and nobody counted J&J even when it was open). But there were tonnes of ethnic groceries downtown before, and now there is one more. I wrote this entry so that you would know it exists as another option to get groceries downtown.