Episode Details

Everything you thought you knew about ghee is wrong. In this episode of The Food Professor podcast, Michael LeBlanc and Dr. Sylvain Charlebois sit down with Vreshin "Vresh" Nagarajan, Founder and Chief Ghee Officer of Vresh Foods, makers of OG GHEE, recorded live on the show floor at the SIAL Food Innovation Show in Montreal.

Vresh makes a compelling and slightly incendiary case: roughly 90% of the $100 million of ghee sold in Canada every year isn't actually ghee. It's anhydrous milk fat, or butter oil, an industrially processed dairy ingredient usually made offshore, shipped in shelf-stable, repackaged here and sold as "pure desi ghee." Real ghee is cultured butter cooked until the water evaporates and the lactose and casein caramelize, a distinction the Codex recognizes and one you can smell the moment the jar opens.

In four years Vresh has gone from a South Asian meal-kit side hustle in Calgary to a national Loblaw listing and a Costco Ontario rotation, built on an unlikely premise: that ghee is Canada's last viable domestic cooking fat. With a 485F smoke point, a five-year shelf life, no refrigeration required, and 30 litres of Canadian milk in every kilogram, he argues ghee is the best milk-utilization story in the country. He also has pointed words about who has been underselling South Asian consumers, and why "desi" should mean Canadian. The full video interview is on The Food Professor YouTube channel.

But first, we start with the food and agriculture news of the week.

Michael and Sylvain open on the Prime Minister's address to the nation, and the name he never said, before turning to the latest U.S. tariff recalibration, the new ban on Canadian spirits and wine, and what the September 15 and 29 deadlines mean for agri-food. Sylvain argues the real damage isn't the tariff math, it's the total absence of predictability, with dairy leaders now openly weighing whether to shift production south.  Sylvain points to Mark Warner's CBC interview, Ian Lee's parallel argument, and calls for Parliament to be recalled, citing the 1988 free trade debate as precedent.

Then: reindeer. Ottawa is putting $800,000 behind a northern herd grown from a few hundred animals to 7,000, and Sylvain explains why no Canadian parent is selling Rudolph at the meat counter. Plus Sapporo's non-alcoholic production possibly heading stateside, Africa's redrawn map and its enormous agri-food potential, McDonald's dropping pumpkin spice after 34 years of PSL dominance, fresh Satov Consulting research on whether Dunkin' can win over Canadian coffee drinkers, why Sylvain would rather support than boycott, Walmart's delivery ambitions, and a farewell to New Coke architect Brian Dyson.

About Us

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Visiting Professor in Food Policy and Distribution at McGill University and a Professor in Food Distribution and Policy in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He is also the Senior Director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab, also located at Dalhousie University.

Known as “The Food Professor”, his current research interest lies in the broad area of food distribution, security and safety. He is one of the world’s most cited scholars in food supply chain management, food value chains and traceability with over 775 published peer-reviewed journal articles. Dr. Charlebois is also an editor for the prestigious Trends in Food Science Technology journal.

He co-hosts The Food Professor podcast, discussing issues in the food, foodservice, grocery and restaurant industries and which is the most listened Canadian management podcast in Canada.

Every year since 2012, he has published the now highly anticipated Canadian Food Price Report, which provides an overview of food price trends for the coming year. Furthermore, his research has been featured in several newspapers and media groups, nationally as well as internationally. He