TORONTO — Shoppers Drug Mart (SDM) is introducing meat and produce in selected stores and has opened its fourth enhanced BeautyBoutique.

The Canadian drug chain, acquired this year by Loblaw Cos., is piloting sales of food including cuts of meat, fruit and vegetables, as well as such prepared food as sushi and salads. Six Toronto stores are carrying the expanded grocery assortment.

“The biggest hurdle is having customers believe that they can get fresh food at a pharmacy,” Mike Motz, SDM’s chief merchandising officer and incoming president, told the Toronto Star.

The retailer has been broadening its consumables offering for more than a decade. “It took a while to build milk, eggs, butter,” said Motz, who will succeed president Domenic Pilla upon his departure at the year’s end. “It took us a while to get to packaged meat; it took us a while to get to bacon.”

For the concept to succeed, the new offerings must be fresh, he said. Customers are “going to hold us to a higher standard than they would hold a conventional supermarket,” he told the Star. “We are going to learn a lot from the ­pilot.”

Besides competing with supermarkets, SDM will be challenging the discount grocery offerings of Walmart Canada and Target Canada. SDM will compete on convenience rather than price, Metz said, noting that its core customers are time-pressed mothers.

The latest enhanced BeautyBoutique, inside an SDM store in Calgary, occupies 5,000 square feet, features 21 prestige brands and has new fixtures, digital signage, and enhanced fragrance and derm areas.

“Our goal was to design a unique and inspiring experience leveraging our customer insights in beauty while also integrating emerging customer trends,” Pilla said last month. “Shoppers Drug Mart has always pushed the envelope when it comes to the beauty category and, as a result, we have become the market leader in mass and prestige cosmetics, fragrances and skin care products and the beauty destination of choice for Canadian women.”

The design reflects a gift box and the idea of unraveling a ribbon to reveal the present. It’s seen in design elements such as the digital signage around the boutique and the finishing elements extending over the fixtures to the ceiling.

“It is the right time to evolve and enhance our concept to modernize the fixtures, adapt to changing shopping behaviors, incorporate new communication vehicles like digital signage and grow our brand assortment to include new prestige vendors,” said vice president of category management Cathy Masson.