TORONTO — Loblaw chair Galen Weston wishes he were still best known for hawking President’s Choice brand coffee and produce in television commercials.

At The Logic Summit in downtown Toronto Monday, Weston said he didn’t mind being the face of Canada’s largest grocery retailer during the 10 years he spent appearing in TV ads. But returning to the public eye during the pandemic, then having to defend Loblaw as it became the target of consumer anger over skyrocketing food prices? 

“I probably regret that,” he told The Logic CEO David Skok during an on-stage interview.

In the spring of 2023, Weston—who was president of Loblaw at the time—appeared before a House of Commons committee that was inquiring into whether grocery companies were profiteering from inflation, arguing the idea is “not only false, but impossible.” On the online forum Reddit, people responded by making their anger at their ballooning grocery bills personal, lobbing frustration at his family’s wealth—and four-letter expletives at Weston himself.

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At the summit, Weston repeated the arguments he made before Parliament. Food prices grew 25 times faster than grocer profits over the last two-and-a-half years, he said. “That’s a remarkable gap that would make it mathematically impossible that we were the ones expanding profit margins and driving prices up.”

Despite Weston’s insistence that anger at Canada’s grocery retailers is misplaced, the backlash has hurt the company. A month-long boycott organized on Reddit was widespread enough to hurt Loblaw’s bottom line, contributing to weak food retail sales in the second quarter.

CEO Per Bank met the boycott’s lead organizer for coffee, and in July Loblaw capitulated to one of the campaign’s demands—signing a voluntary code of conduct along with other large grocery retailers. 

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Loblaw and parent company George Weston also paid $500 million to settle two class-action lawsuits in July over a conspiracy to raise the price of grocery-store bread from 2001 to 2015, another PR black eye for the firm. Weston said in a release that “this behaviour should never have happened.”

Rather than retreat from the spotlight completely, Weston said he took the stage at the summit to share his views on the state of public discourse and the future of Canada. He said the vilification of the grocery industry is a symptom of a larger problem of polarization. It’s important to avoid “falling back on the tropes of heroes and villains and simple solutions to complex problems,” he said.

Weston said he’s proud of the role Loblaw plays in providing essentials to Canadians, including during times of crisis like COVID-19.

“People come to our stores every day no matter what,” he said. “Crisis is part of what we do every day. We are involved in every snowstorm, every power outage, every flood.”