Top Global Retail Technology Expert Carl Boutet on a Summer SIAL Food Innovation Bonus Episode

The Food Professor

Top Global Retail Technology Expert & friend of the #pod Carl Boutet discusses his role as the in-house retail technology expert at the Montreal SAIL show, highlighting his involvement in marshalling the experts in the food and innovation industry together to share wisdom and insights across the sector here in Canada and around the world.

Carl emphasized the importance of food in retail, noting that successful retailers like Walmart and Costco have integrated food offerings as part of their successful business growth model.

Carl also mentioned the challenges of innovation and details McGill's innovation lab, which focuses on frictionless commerce and healthy consumption, as well as its interdisciplinary research. Boutet also touched on the overhyped and underhyped aspects of smart carts and AI in retail and the need for more iterations in format innovation.

About Carl
Business strategist and executive advisor, McGill

Carl is a Montreal-based business strategist, digital marketer and executive advisor with over 25 years of hands-on operational, marketing and retail executive experience. He has worked across a full array of business environments from the very large, such as 10 years with Costco Wholesale to working as commercial applications lead for a global B2B security technology company. In both, managing product portfolios and emerging go-to-market strategies.

As the founder of StudioRx, he advises executives, B2C/B2B solution providers and all types of ecosystem partners on how to tailor their solutions according to customers’ evolving needs and build effective commercial strategies to meet them.

He holds an MBA from Queen’s University as well as professional certificates from Stanford, Harvard and MIT.

He advises several technology startups, industry associations and innovation labs.

He is the principal advisor for the McGill University Retail Innovation Lab in Montreal, Canada. He is also, course instructor at McGill Masters in Retail Innovation (emerging technologies and new business models) and adjunct digital marketing faculty at Asian Institute of Technology MBA School of Management.

Carl is recognized by Rethink Retail among the world’s most influential thought leaders and has keynoted, chaired and/or moderated the largest retail conferences around the world. He remains a regular media contributor with global news networks.

In 2021 he published his first book; The Great Acceleration – on how the Covid-19 pandemic rapidly propelled digital transformations and the business strategies to address the challenges that followed.

The Food Professor #podcast is presented by Caddle.

About Us

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 president and founder of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, a senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and now, media entrepreneur. He has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.

Michael has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels, most recently on the main stage in Toronto at Retail Council of Canada’s Retail Marketing conference with leaders from Walmart & Google. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, CanWest Media, Pandora Jewellery, The Shopping Channel and Retail Council of Canada to his advisory, speaking and media practice.

Michael produces and hosts a network of leading retail trade podcasts, including the award-winning No.1 independent retail industry podcast in America, Remarkable Retail with his partner, Dallas-based best-selling author Steve Dennis; Canada's top retail industry podcast The Voice of Retail and Canada's top food industry and one of the top Canadian-produced management independent podcasts in the country, The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Rethink Retail has recognized Michael as one of the top global retail experts for the fourth year in a row, Thinkers 360 has named him on of the Top 50 global thought leaders in retail, RTIH has named him a top 100 global though leader in retail technology and Coresight Research has named Michael a Retail AI Influencer. If you are a BBQ fan, you can tune into Michael’s cooking show, Last Request BBQ, on YouTube, Instagram, X and yes, TikTok.

Michael is available for keynote presentations helping retailers, brands and retail industry insiders explaining the current state and future of the retail industry in North America and around the world.