Episode Details

This episode is recored live at the Canadian Grand Prix New Product Awards 2022 in Toronto June 1st with very special guest Darell Jones, President Save-On-Foods, Margaret Hudson, CEO Burnbrae Farms, Michael Graydon, CEO at Food, Health & Consumer Products of Canada, the one and only Jim Slomka (episode picture credit to Jim!), and Errol Cerit, SVP FHCP. 

We take the opportunity to congratulate and then chat with the CGP Lifetime Achievement Award Winners Darrell and Margaret, learn a bit more about them and their respective businesses and tap into their insights on the state of the food and grocery industry. 

We also talk about food inflation, the state of palm oil, countries rationalizing their food supply, food inflation, automation and much more in this extended episode, our last live episode until the early fall.  

To see the Finalists in the Canadian Grand Prix, and to see who took home the hardware click here. 

About Us

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Professor in food distribution and policy in the Faculties of Management and Agriculture at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He is also the Senior Director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab, also located at Dalhousie University. Before joining Dalhousie, he was affiliated with the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute, which he co-founded. Known as “The Food Professor”, his current research interest lies in the broad area of food distribution, security and safety. Google Scholar ranks him as one of the world's most cited scholars in food supply chain management, food value chains and traceability.

He has authored five books on global food systems, his most recent one published in 2017 by Wiley-Blackwell entitled “Food Safety, Risk Intelligence and Benchmarking”. He has also published over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles in several academic publications. Furthermore, his research has been featured in several newspapers and media groups, including The Lancet, The Economist, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, NBC, ABC, Fox News, Foreign Affairs, the Globe & Mail, the National Post and the Toronto Star.

Dr. Charlebois sits on a few company boards, and supports many organizations as a special advisor, including some publicly traded companies. Charlebois is also a member of the Scientific Council of the Business Scientific Institute, based in Luxemburg. Dr. Charlebois is a member of the Global Food Traceability Centre’s Advisory Board based in Washington DC, and a member of the National Scientific Committee of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) in Ottawa.

Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada’s top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus  Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  ,      T