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Two families, one Latin pantry
Parce Canada was built by two families who shared a conviction: that the Latin community in Nova Scotia deserved a proper place to shop, not just a scattered shelf in a general grocery store.
Carlos Amaya and Carlos Rincon came from backgrounds in business, community work, and cultural initiatives focused on newcomers in Canada. They had spent enough time close to the Latin community to understand the gap from the inside before they built anything to fill it. What they understood specifically was that the gap was not just arepas and tortillas. It was six countries' worth of pantry staples, spices, frozen goods, drinks, and the particular kind of coffee that only tastes right when it comes from the right place.
They are curators in the truest sense: every product on the shelf was chosen deliberately, sourced carefully, and brought to Nova Scotia because someone in the community needed it. The inventory now spans Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, and El Salvador. That breadth didn't happen by accident. It happened because both families kept listening to what people were looking for and couldn't find.
In a market where Latin products are still scarce, that consistency is the whole offering.
From a missing shelf to a growing table
The products people reach for first and come back for again
The arepa is not a side dish. In Colombia it is the meal itself, or the thing beside every meal, or what you eat when there is no meal yet but you need something now. It is breakfast, a late snack, the specific smell of a family kitchen on a Sunday morning.
Parce Canada carries 25 arepa varieties, more than anywhere else in Nova Scotia. For Colombians in the province, that depth is the point. Not just finding an arepa, but finding your arepa.
First-time customers come with curiosity and leave with extra. That is more or less how arepas work on people trying them properly for the first time.
Mexico is Parce Canada's largest category by product count. The tortillas are where most people start, but they are a doorway into a much deeper inventory: chili peppers, seasonings, specialty flours, sauces, and ingredients that make authentic Mexican cooking possible outside of Mexico.
The tortillas themselves are made to the standard that makes them worth eating as food, not just as a vessel. Soft, with the particular flavour that comes from the right process and the right source.
Mexican customers find things they had stopped expecting to find in Nova Scotia. Everyone else discovers what they had been missing without knowing it.
A Heartfelt Note
We named this business after the word Colombians use for the people closest to them. We meant it literally.
When we started, we were thinking about the people who arrive in Nova Scotia and immediately begin missing something that is hard to explain. It is not just food. It is the comfort of a familiar package in an unfamiliar aisle. The smell that places you somewhere else for a moment. The arepa that tastes like Sunday morning in another country, in another kitchen, in a life you are still connected to even though you live here now.
We wanted to make that less hard to find.
We also wanted to invite people in who had never tasted any of it. Latin American food is not one thing from one place. It is Colombian Arepas and Mexican tortillas and Peruvian tradition and a hundred other things that deserve to be known in Nova Scotia. Every time someone tries something for the first time at one of our market tables and comes back the following week, we feel why we started.
Supporting Parce Canada means supporting a small business built by two people who care about this community and the table it is setting. We are grateful for every customer: the ones who grew up eating this food and found us when they needed it, and the ones who had no idea what they were trying and returned with someone to introduce it to.
You are all parce to us.
Carlos and Carlos
