A younger, more affluent urban generation wants companies to deliver on higher quality and more transparency.

Meet your new boss, same as the old boss

Your key customers are reacting to the shifting demands of their key customers

The only Washington, D.C.-area team having a worse year than the Baltimore Orioles is big food’s biggest, richest lobbying arm, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, or the GMA. Most American farmers and ranchers don’t know GMA by its acronym; they do, however, know its work: it was the organizer and chequebook behind the defeat of several

Editorial: Reimagining leftovers

Sometimes deciding what to feed the family after a long, arduous day juggling daycare, jobs and traffic seems overwhelmingly complicated. If the May 31 press release from the U.S.-based Tyson Innovation Lab is any indication, deciding what we’re going to put into our mouths next is about to get more cluttered with new products, new


Opinion: Have better conversations around agriculture

Recently the Farm and Food Care Ontario speakers’ program hosted speaker Tamar Haspel who described how to reach out to the public in ways that spark people’s interest and encourage engagement in meaningful discussion. Connecting with a public audience is a skill that seems to be at a premium in today’s conversations surrounding agriculture. Haspel

McDonald’s Canada’s senior marketing manager Jean-Guillaume Bertola spoke to the CAMA meeting April 26 about the company’s efforts engaging with customers.  PHOTO: LORRAINE STEVENSON

‘We are all responsible for earning public trust,’ food and ag industry leaders say

Canadian Agri-Marketing Association hosted a two-day Winnipeg session focused on best practices and skills for nurturing public trust

Earning public trust is about doing the right thing, and being able to show and tell others why and how you do it. But in the noise of social media-spread myth and misinformation, being heard, believed and trusted has never been more complicated or challenging. The food industry is now in a veritable “pressure cooker”


Opinion: Divorcing Tim Hortons

Leger-National released its annual report ranking Canada’s most admired companies recently. Tim Hortons’ year was just plain awful. It went from fourth to 50th, in just 12 months. This significant free fall can be linked to the very public spat between Tim Hortons franchisees and parent company, Restaurant Brands International (RBI). This dispute has taken



Canadian food buyers are a complex lot, according to a newly released survey of them. PHOTO: CREATIVE COMMONS/LEFTOVERTURE

Reaching consumers a complicated challenge for the agri-food sector

Consumers are tribal these days, which makes talking to them tough

Farmers and food companies striving to better connect with consumers need to prepare for dealing with a diverse audience, says the Canadian Centre for Food Integrity (CCFI). “There is no single consumer group,” the centre says in a report on its 2017 Public Trust Survey on public attitudes on food issues. “Today’s consumers are diverse,

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Talk to family, friends about farming

This holiday season Melodie Chan wants producers to avoid what she calls the “spiral of silence,” which can happen around the dinner table, over beers or even in the gentle lull between turkey and pie if farmers don’t speak up when they hear misinformation about agriculture. “What are we afraid of?” asked Chan, speaking at


Food retail economist John F.T. Scott says trust and transparency are key to marketing food these days.

Consumers are demanding companies prove their sustainability commitment

The rapidly changing retail food sector wants to know what you do on your farm

The $118-billion retail food sector in Canada is becoming increasingly fragmented but it still shares one thing in common: a commitment to trust and transparency, a retail food expert told delegates at the recent GrowCanada conference. That has repercussions that trace through the value chain all the way to the farm, John F.T. Scott said.

Editorial: Guidance needed

You’d be hard pressed to think of a document that could be more innocuous and apolitical than Canada’s Food Guide. The modest booklet has the distinction of being the federal government’s second-most-requested document and is available in a dozen languages. This staple of home economics classes and cooking schools should simply be a straightforward recitation