In 2016, I joined Loblaw Companies Limited as a Product Manager within Loblaw Brands. My initial mandate was practical and concrete: sourcing kitchen toys from China. It quickly expanded into something far more complex—overseeing a $400 million portfolio across No Name and President’s Choice.

Loblaw was, in many ways, an MBA conducted in real time.

I learned how to build business cases that could survive scrutiny—how to weave Nielsen and Mintel data into clear narratives, how to model financials with discipline, and how to think in terms of end-to-end systems rather than isolated decisions. I sourced like a professional: running vendor RFPs, negotiating COGs, collaborating with merchandising, category teams, and supply chain partners to move products from idea to shelf.

But what made Loblaw truly fascinating wasn’t just the scale. It was the internal market.

As Loblaw matured, its internal ecosystem evolved into something like a high-stakes marketplace for attention and investment. Different divisions and business units competed—constructively—for resources, airtime, and belief.

Imagine a perpetual version of Dragon’s Den, except instead of startups pitching investors, seasoned leaders pitched one another. Some of the most skilled business minds in the country went head-to-head, deploying data, storytelling, and oratory to win alignment.

It was intense. It was rigorous. And it was incredibly educational.

Watching this taught me something critical: large organizations don’t just allocate capital—they allocate belief. And belief moves through narrative, posture, timing, and trust as much as through numbers.

Loblaw’s private label program is one of the most sophisticated system designs in Canadian retail.

At its core was a simple, disciplined structure: good / better / best.

No Name delivered national-brand equivalence with clean ingredients and radical simplicity.

President’s Choice aimed to outperform national brands through flavor, texture, and ingredient innovation.

PC Black Label positioned itself as aspirational—“the best you’ve ever had.”

To understand the power of private label, you need to understand the asymmetry at play.

Brands invest heavily in R&D and marketing to convince customers to reallocate their finite dollars—and calories. Once a product succeeds, retailers—who own the shelf and the customer relationship—can study, adapt, and internalize those wins.

Loblaw executed this not cynically, but systematically. It was a masterclass in incentive alignment, margin control, and long-term value creation.

One of the aspects of Loblaw I valued most was its commitment to inclusion.

I had the privilege of working alongside exceptional colleagues—women, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community—who were compassionate, driven, strategic, and deeply thoughtful. The organization made a visible effort to ensure diverse voices were not just present, but influential.

That mattered to me. It still does.

Large organizations, like all complex human systems, operate with hierarchies. Titles, reporting lines, and decision rights exist for a reason—they provide structure. But they also shape behavior in subtle ways.

What I learned at Loblaw wasn’t how to “climb” a hierarchy so much as how hierarchies shape cognition: how confidence, communication style, and perceived authority influence outcomes alongside evidence.

I’m not a conventional corporate climber. My thinking is non-linear. I care deeply about outcomes. Sometimes too deeply. When I see a system underperforming, my instinct is to interrogate it—follow the data, surface the misalignment, and propose a fix.

That instinct served me well technically. It taught me where leverage lives.

It also taught me humility: systems don’t just reward insight—they reward timing, trust, and alignment.

• How to design value propositions at scale
• How to think in portfolios, not products
• How incentives quietly shape behavior
• How belief moves through organizations
• And how to find money—not by chasing it—but by understanding the system that produces it

Most importantly, it taught me that great systems are built by people, and that learning how those people think is as important as any spreadsheet.

Loblaw was an education I still draw from. I’m grateful for it.