About Pista
There’s so much more to local.
Pista is the local discovery guide, helping you find great products with a connection to this place and get to know the brands behind them. Yes, we love local beer and farmers’ markets. But there are thousands of products across almost every category being made right here.
Save and share your discoveries, build shopping lists, and optimize your shopping across your favourite local shops.
We built Pista because finding local products can be surprisingly hard. Great things are being made all around us, but they’re scattered across shops, markets, websites, social feeds, and word of mouth. Unless you already know what you’re looking for and where to look, some of the best local discoveries can remain out of sight, out of mind.
There are lots of good reasons to choose local when you can. It supports independent producers and retailers, keeps more of our spending closer to home, and helps build communities with more choice and character.
Plenty of us would like to do more of it. Pista wants to make following through a little easier.
products
local brands
retailers
What we mean by local
Local can get complicated pretty quickly.
Where was something made? Where is the company based? Where did its ingredients or materials come from? The answers don’t always point to the same place—and we don’t think they have to.
We’re less interested in splitting hairs over what’s truly local than in giving you useful information about how a product connects to a place. A loaf of bread doesn’t stop being local because the baker didn’t grow the wheat. At the same time, simply putting a local address on something doesn’t necessarily make it a local product.
For now, much of the information on Pista comes directly from the brands and retailers themselves. We ask them to be honest and specific about where products are made and where important ingredients or materials come from, and we use reasonable standards for what belongs in the guide.
We won’t get every judgment exactly right. But we’ll try to keep the information useful and transparent, correct things when we get them wrong, and give you enough information to decide what local means to you.
Starting close to home
Pista is starting in Nova Scotia, with more places to come.
We’re still building the guide, which means there are plenty of great products, brands, and shops we haven’t found yet. If you know something that belongs on Pista, we’d love to hear about it.