Pete Luckett - Pete's Frootique

Luckett is widely known in the Maritimes for his Pete's Frootique specialty grocery stores. The first Pete's Frootique store opened in 1981 at the Saint John City Market. This was followed by a second store that opened on Mountain Road in Moncton. In 1992, the third Pete's Frootique store opened at the Sunnyside Mall in Bedford. In 2004, the fourth Pete's Frootique store opened on Dresden Row in downtown Halifax, and the fifth Pete's Frootique opened in Wolfville in 2012.

The Pete's Frootique stores are all different in scale. The Saint John City Market store retains its original look as an expansive fruit and vegetable stall. The Moncton store was located in an urban strip development in a former grocery store but has since closed. The Bedford store is the most expansive and up-scale as it houses the following operating divisions: a power juice bar, a gourmet fruit and gift basket shop, a European delicatessen, a gourmet butcher and fish shop, a British specialty food emporium named Best of Britain, plus a wine shop.

Luckett operates a farm in the Gaspereau River valley that supplies vegetables and fruit to his two stores in Bedford and Halifax, as well as commercial customers such as restaurants and caterers.

In 1999, Luckett made headlines when he won a court battle against the Government of Nova Scotia when he sought to keep his Bedford store open on Sunday. To circumvent Nova Scotia's Sunday shopping laws, Luckett registered sections of his Bedford store as separate businesses. He copied this approach at his Halifax store when it opened in 2004. In October 2006 the province's Sunday shopping restrictions were over-turned after both Sobeys and Atlantic Superstore copied Luckett's approach to several of their supermarkets, forcing the government to enact restrictions that were successfully contested in court.

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