When Conrad Scotchburn first arrived in Halifax, it wasn’t with dreams of launching a startup.
The recent graduate of Saint Mary’s University came to Nova Scotia to play basketball.
Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Scotchburn was raised in a diverse international community where service and connection were central values. His father had played university basketball, and following in those footsteps eventually brought him to Halifax after a year in Calgary pursuing opportunities to compete at the collegiate level.
“My dad played university basketball. I always wanted to play university basketball, so I was really making a push to do that.”
While injuries eventually led him away from competitive basketball, they opened the door to another passion: entrepreneurship with a social purpose.
Today, Scotchburn is the founder of Blyyss, a Nova Scotia-built grocery affordability and food accessibility platform helping thousands of Canadians stretch their grocery budgets at a time when food prices continue to rise.
Before launching Blyyss, Scotchburn explored several entrepreneurial ventures, including an AI-powered receptionist service for small businesses. While the technology worked, something felt missing.
“I realized it wasn’t aligned with what I wanted my ventures to do,” he says. “I was focusing too much on creating proprietary technology when I should have been focusing on leveraging this emerging tech to accomplish real value within the community.”
At the same time, grocery bills were becoming an increasingly common source of stress among students and families.
“Seeing myself and a lot of my friends struggle with grocery expenses, seeing how big of a portion of our budgets were just on groceries, motivated me to want to do something about it,” Scotchburn says.
The idea for Blyyss was born during the winter break earlier this year.
After examining existing grocery-saving tools, Scotchburn noticed major gaps in the market.
“I didn’t think there was an easy way to search your entire grocery list and compare it from a holistic perspective,” he says. “Most tools only let you search one item at a time. They weren’t user-first platforms.”
Blyyss allows users to enter their entire grocery list and instantly see which nearby stores have the highest number of items on sale.
Unlike larger platforms that focus primarily on major grocery chains, Blyyss includes local and independent grocers often overlooked by competitors.
Users can also choose how many stops they are willing to make during a shopping trip, allowing the platform to recommend combinations of stores that maximize savings while minimizing travel time.
“If you’re willing to make two stops, we’ll link together the two closest grocers we can find that have the most sales for your basket,” Scotchburn explained.
Beyond helping shoppers save money, Blyyss also addresses food accessibility.
After consulting organizations such as Feed Nova Scotia, Parker Street Food & Furniture Bank and United Way, Scotchburn discovered that many community resource listings were outdated or difficult to navigate.
The solution became the Blyyss Resource Map, a directory featuring more than 275 organizations across Nova Scotia.
The map allows users to search for food banks, community programs, volunteer opportunities and support services based on location, operating hours and available services. Organizations can even update their own information directly through the platform.
“Really, what Blyyss is built on is trust and transparency,” Scotchburn says. “We want users to know the information they’re seeing is accurate and current.”
The platform’s newest feature, Blyyss AI, is quickly becoming one of its most popular tools.
Rather than simply showing shoppers what items are discounted, the artificial intelligence tool creates complete meal recommendations built exclusively around items currently on sale.
Users select their preferred grocery store, indicate how many people they are shopping for and describe the type of meal they want.
The platform then generates recipes, nutritional information and estimated meal costs based entirely on weekly discounts.
“Some of our meals get as low as less than two dollars per person,” Scotchburn says.
Future updates could allow users to create full weekly meal plans, track pantry items already purchased and receive personalized recommendations through voice conversations with the AI assistant.
Although Blyyss officially launched only a few months ago, growth has been swift.
The platform has surpassed 5,000 users since launch and has recorded more than 350 App Store downloads. In the past month alone, the company welcomed more than 1,250 users, putting it on pace for significant continued growth.
The startup has also expanded its team, recently hiring its first full-time chief technology officer and a director of public relations and marketing.
Today, Blyyss operates out of Halifax’s innovation hub, Volta, while working alongside organizations such as Ripple Ventures, Tribe Network and local university partners.
One of the biggest turning points in Scotchburn’s journey came this year when he received the prestigious Frank H. Sobey Award.
The award, which recognizes eight of Atlantic Canada’s top undergraduate students, includes a $50,000 prize designed to support leadership and innovation.
For Scotchburn, the recognition provided more than financial support. It gave him the freedom to bet on himself.
“I had opportunities to pursue a finance and accounting path in Toronto,” he says. “But receiving the Frank H. Sobey Award allowed me to pursue my startup full-time, attend my master’s program and not have to go the corporate route.”
The funding is helping Scotchburn continue growing Blyyss while pursuing Saint Mary’s University’s Master of Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation program.
“It’s always been a dream and a risk that I’ve wanted to take,” he says.
As grocery affordability remains a growing concern for Canadians, Scotchburn believes technology can play a meaningful role in helping people make smarter decisions while improving access to community resources.
For him, however, success is measured by more than downloads and user growth.
“We’re committed to being an ad-free space and a subscription-free space,” he says. “We want to make the experience as accessible and as easy as possible.”
Residents interested in using the platform can download the Blyyss app or visit its website, while community organizations can partner with the company by joining its resource map and helping ensure support services remain accessible and up to date.
For Scotchburn, the mission remains simple: make healthy food more affordable, improve access to resources and build technology that genuinely serves people.
“We want to leverage technology to accomplish real value within the community,” he says.
Wow, great work, Conrad and the team! Had a look at the website and the combination of meal planning with sales sold me! Blyyss got themselves a user in me and all my friends and family.