What if the biggest sustainability win in Canadian grocery isn't about recycling at all — but about making sure good food gets to good people? On this episode, the first in a series of eight bonus episodes, Michael LeBlanc is on location at the 2026 Loblaw Supplier Summit, where 2,500 suppliers and leaders gathered in Toronto — and I sit down with Jonathan Carroll, Senior Vice President, Real Canadian Superstore Operations, who oversees 182 stores and chairs Loblaw's enterprise-wide food waste committee. We get into the parallel supply chain moving food to food banks across the country. How Flash Food and Too Good to Go put discounted product back into shoppers' carts. And the plan to hit zero food waste to landfill by 2030.
Recorded on location at the third annual Loblaw Supplier Summit — which brought nearly 2,500 suppliers and Loblaw leaders to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre around partnership, value, innovation and trust — this episode of The FEED powered by Loblaw finds host Michael LeBlanc sitting down with Jonathan Carroll, Senior Vice President, Real Canadian Superstore Operations, to explore where food waste, food security and value intersect.
Jonathan oversees 182 Real Canadian Superstore locations and chairs Loblaw's enterprise-wide food waste committee, a cross-banner group that pulls Superstore, No Frills, Maxi and the rest of the 1,700-store fleet onto a single playbook. His framing is blunt: food waste isn't solely a sustainability line item; it's a cost — packaging, transportation, labour and lost product stacked behind every item that never reaches a customer.
But the conversation moves quickly past table stakes. Jonathan walks through the donation network Loblaw has built with Food Banks Canada, Food Banks Quebec and Second Harvest, including the Second Harvest app that lets store operators list short-coded product — food approaching its best-before date — so food bank teams can shop it daily based on what their community actually needs. LeBlanc calls it a shadow supply chain running parallel to the commercial one, powered by volunteers coast to coast. Carroll connects it to Feed More Families, the pledge backed by self-checkout donations, and to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank's freeze-dried strawberry programme, where diverted Loblaw product is transformed and sent to communities that rarely see fresh fruit.
Then there's the consumer-facing side. Carroll has been working with Flash Food since its first pilots in Sarnia and Oakville, and he explains how the daily store walk pulls short-coded bakery and produce onto the app at a discount for pickup at customer service. The newer wrinkle: flash-freezing fresh meat and seafood before expiry to extend shelf life, so shoppers can buy lean ground beef at fifty percent off and stock the freezer. He shares a favourite — the five-dollar produce bag, five pounds of surprise produce — and the story of a shopper who pulled out a dragon fruit and came back the next week to tell her store manager. A Too Good to Go pilot is underway in Ottawa and downtown Toronto.
Upstream, AI-powered forecasting is sharpening ordering accuracy, and the whole system points at one target: zero food waste to landfill by 2030. Carroll is confident the team gets there — and says the real win arrives when the rest of Canadian retail shares the same best practices.
Asked which motivates him most — sustainability, efficiency or food security — Carroll doesn't hesitate: food security. Getting good food out to good people is the whole point.