This Commerce Life

She landed in Grammy swag bags and airport shops, then walked away from her distributor after one surprise visit. Ginny Bailey of Friggin Lip Balm on stepping away for nearly a decade and coming back stronger. Ginny started Friggin Lip Balm out of her shop in Uxbridge, Ontario, where customers kept asking her to make a lip balm, the one product she was sure the world didn't need. A spot in the 201...

When Amy Rogerson took over Van Rice Products in 2019, her first week running the company was also her first week of chemotherapy. Then COVID hit. Amy is the General Manager of Plum Good, Canada's only locally-made organic rice cake — and one of the last rice cakes still manufactured in this country. She joins Phil Chang and Kenny Vannucci to talk about buying a small, well-loved West Coast brand...

With the Canada–U.S. trade war pushing brands to rethink where their product goes, Mexico has quietly become one of the biggest openings in Canadian CPG. Former Bed Bath & Beyond Mexico CEO Steve Sotto joins Phil and Kenny to break down how Canadian brands actually get in — and where most of them get stuck. Fresh off touring Mexico City retail together in June, the crew digs into the channel C...

Kids won't drink water — but they'll chase the bright, fun stuff. Laura Chiodola built Electric Kids to hijack that impulse for good. After 20 years building Tealish, Laura saw the same problem every parent knows: sports drinks and TikTok-hyped brands own the kids' beverage space, while the "healthy" options are either boring water or clinical rehydration products. Electric Kids is her answer — a...

Retail veteran Peter Chapman has spent 20 years teaching brands what buyers actually want to hear — and it's rarely another pitch about how great your product is. After 19 years at Loblaw running fresh merchandising across Atlantic Canada, Peter went out on his own in 2008 to help suppliers build real relationships with retailers. On this episode he sits down with Phil and Kenny to unpack what sep...

Elbows up — but make it strategic. Phil and Kenny break down what the latest US tariff escalation actually means for Canadian food, beverage, and CPG brands. This one's raw and unscripted. The guys air out the frustration, then get clinical: how founders should be stress-testing their US ambitions, why "buy Canadian" is more than a slogan right now, and how to hunt for opportunity instead of just...

Meet Colin Christensen, the entrepreneur who turned "mushrooms and chocolate" into a fast-growing Canadian functional food brand — and made it taste like chocolate, not sand. MyCAO (a mashup of mycelia + cacao ) started almost by accident. Hired as CEO of a psilocybin company waiting on regulation, Colin needed a revenue stream and stumbled into the functional mushroom space. A conversation with a...

Getting on a show floor was never the hard part — being ready to do business once you're there is. In this episode, Phil and Kenny sit down with Aaron Skelton, President & CEO of the Canadian Health Food Association, to unpack how the CHFA show is evolving from an exposure play into a readiness engine for Canada's next wave of natural, health, and CPG brands. Aaron walks through Greenhouse — CHFA'...

The real scoop on getting into distribution — straight from the person who reviews the applications. Amanda Coish of Purity Life breaks down what actually earns a "yes." We've had the big-picture conversation about distribution before. This time we wanted the unfiltered version, so we sat down with Amanda Coish, who leads brand selection and onboarding at Purity Life — one of Canada's major natura...

Kristyn Carriere went from running taste panels at Cadbury and formulating for Godiva to founding her own Canadian chocolate brand. This is what happens when a real food scientist decides to build a CPG company. On this episode, Kristyn Carriere of Seven Summit Snacks joins Phil and Kenny to talk about turning deep R&D experience into a grab-and-go energy chocolate — and why a big-company backgrou...

Katie Young moved to Whitehorse, Yukon in 2007 for the adventure — dog sledding, mountains, and a winter practicum — and ended up building one of the North's most beloved CPG brands.  In this episode, she sits down with Phil Chang and Kenny Vannucci to tell the full story of Klondike Kettle Corn: from taking over a popcorn kettle at the local farmers market, to testing packaging at Christmas marke...

When Shaw's Ice Cream announced it was closing its doors in 2001, three sisters — Christine, Kelly, and Kim — made a decision most people would call reckless: they dropped out of university and bought the shuttered 1950s manufacturing plant. Their logic? "We know retail. How hard can manufacturing be?" Twenty-five years later, Shaw's is a Southwestern Ontario institution — and one of the best "gre...

Phil Chang and Kenny Vannucci sit down with Sylvia Bennett, founder of SURCH Foods (that's S-U-R-C-H), a B2B search platform built to solve a problem the food industry has quietly lived with forever: there is no good way to find ingredients, packaging, co-manufacturers, or expertise.  Sylvia spent her career in the industry — starting in a Sobeys bakery, then product development and private label...

Trish, founder of Kettle & Hive, joins This Commerce Life to share how a coworker's break-time basket of lemons, ginger, and honey sparked the idea for a fresh, spoonable lemon and honey tea — made with just two ingredients, no corn syrup, no thickeners, no shortcuts. From her first job as a day baker at Tim Hortons to quitting her job after one exhausting-but-successful farmers market season, Tri...

What do you do when your product is so unique that no five-second pitch can explain it? This week, Phil and Kenny sit down with Brad and Sheila, founders of Natural Farmworks — a regenerative farm in BC's Boundary Country that grows barley greens and processes them using traditional Chinese tea methods to create green, oolong, and black teas that deliver a serving of greens in every cup. No bitter...

Ashley Sauve was 12 years old when she started selling mini straw bales to Canadian Tire stores from her family's cash crop farm. Today, she owns Sauve's Country Market in South Woodslee, Ontario — a destination farm market in Windsor-Essex County that customers happily drive 45 minutes to visit, even though there's no gas station, grocery store, or Tim Hortons anywhere nearby. In this episode, As...

Special thursday episode: Julie Therrien of Biscuits Leclerc is back — and this time we're picking her brain on one of the biggest opportunities for Canadian food and beverage brands right now: exporting to Mexico. Julie's export career started in Mexico in the mid-90s, and she's spent nearly 30 years navigating the market — from co-packing for Bimbo to building branded distribution across Mexican...

What happens when a food scientist and a hairstylist-turned-entrepreneur team up to reinvent cottage cheese? You get Fromage Protein Pops — a frozen treat that started with a $90 thrifted cart, 170+ recipe iterations, and a whole lot of sister chemistry. In this episode, Phil Chang and Kenny Vannucci sit down with co-founders Nuala and Fiona to talk about: 🍦 How a trip to Japan and a "better-for-...

Andy Mollica, founder of Anducci's, joins Phil Chang and Kenny Vannucci for an unfiltered look at one of Vancouver's most legendary Italian food stories. Andy shares how he opened his first pasta bar at 19 years old, built Anducci's into a 27-year East Van institution, and accidentally pioneered Costco's Home Meal Replacement (HMR) category by selling lasagnas out of his car trunk to Costco's orig...

If your brand is trying to scale across Canada, this episode is essential listening. Phil and Kenny sit down with Matthew James, President & CEO of Purity Life Health Products — Canada's largest and only full-service wellness distributor covering dry, frozen, and refrigerated products across all channels, coast to coast. Matthew shares his 33-year journey in the Canadian natural health industry —...

Zane Caplansky opened what's considered Toronto's first pop-up restaurant — a deli inside a dive bar in Little Italy — and turned it into one of the city's most beloved institutions. Along the way he appeared on Dragon's Den three times, got featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and You Gotta Eat Here, ran a food truck, a catering empire, and a College Street restaurant that had lineups for year...

What do you do when the brand you built to over $100 million goes bankrupt — and then you get the chance to buy it back? That's exactly what Amelia Warren and Kyle Vucko did with Epicure. In this episode, Phil and Kenny sit down with the co-managing directors of the relaunched Epicure — a Canadian spice and seasoning brand with a fiercely loyal customer base, a surprising MLM origin story, and a b...

Phil and Kenny sit down with Bonnie Joyce — the photographer and web designer behind some of the best headshots This Commerce Life has ever had (which, admittedly, is a low bar). Bonnie runs Bonnie Joyce Creative Studio, a photography and Wix web design business based in Eastern Ontario, where she's built over 500 websites and shot everything from brand sessions to adoption hearings. In this episo...

The survival math behind Vancouver's independent restaurant scene — and why cheap food is never actually cheap. Phil and Kenny sit down with Robert Belcham — a 35-year Vancouver chef, restaurateur behind Campanolo, Monarch Burger, and Poppina Canteen, and board member of the Chef's Table Society of BC — for one of the most candid conversations about the business of food we've ever had on This Comm...

Julie Therrien has spent 28 years selling Canadian cookies to the world — and she's got the stories to prove it. As Western Canada Sales Rep for Biscuits Leclerc (the family behind Celebration Cookies, Go Pure bars, and that iconic air travel snack you definitely know),  Julie joins Kenny and Phil to talk about her unlikely path from Quebec City to Guadalajara to Vancouver, what it really takes to...