He took the helm at the height of tragedy. How Danone Canada's president is working to rebuild trust

Hamilton Spectator

2 days ago

After starting his career in Montreal, Frederic Guichard got the opportunity to return 26 years later, but the new president of Danone Canada's arrival was marred by tragedy — a listeria outbreak that would eventually
claim three lives.
The native of Nice, France, spent a year and a half in Canada in 1997-98 as part of a government-sponsored work program, serving as a marketing manager for Paris-based spirit maker Pernod Ricard in Montreal.
Upon his return, Guichard accepted a role at Danone and has been working for the global food and beverage maker ever since.
The company was
founded
in 1919 by Isaac Carasso, a Greek immigrant living in Barcelona, Spain, who was inspired by emerging research on the positive impact of yogurt on gut health and immunity. More than 106 years later, the France-headquartered company maintains its emphasis on promoting health through food.
Today, Danone is a world leader in dairy and plant-based products, and second in packaged water and infant nutrition, with nearly $44 billion in sales in 2024. Its products are sold in more than 120 markets around the world with a global workforce of about 90,000.
In 1972, then-CEO Antoine Riboud announced the company's 'dual project' of balancing business success with social progress, a mantra that Guichard says first attracted him to the company over a quarter century ago and has kept him there ever since.
After nearly two decades working in marketing in Paris on Danone's yogurt, water and health brands, followed by another seven years in Eastern Europe, Guichard and his wife got the opportunity to return to Quebec last June.
Danone entered the Canadian market in 1993 via its acquisition of Delisle, which had been in the yogurt business since the 1930s.
The brand that brings Canadians Silk, Activia, Evian, Oikos, International Delight and more now leads the country in yogurt, plant-based beverages and coffee creamers. Most of the company's 618 Canadian staff are split between its Toronto and Boucherville, Que., offices, while others work remotely from coast to coast.
Guichard was named president of Danone Canada in June 2024 and began in his new post last Canada Day. Within days of his arrival, however, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency
issued a national recall
of plant-based milk alternatives from a production facility that makes its flagship almond milk, Silk — among other brands — due to a suspected listeria outbreak.
Guichard says the company has spent the past year trying to regain the trust of Canadian consumers by investing in its health and safety practices, while furthering its sustainability efforts and developing new products to meet changing consumer preferences.
The Star recently spoke with Guichard from Danone Canada's headquarters in Boucherville, just outside Montreal, about the organization's long-standing commitment to taste, sustainability and health, and the challenges of confronting a tragedy that seemed to call those principals into question.
As a French person, food is the only thing we talk about. Even when we're eating a meal, we're talking about the last one, and the next one.
I was especially interested in the products that people consume every day, and the impact it has on their lives. It's something I learned from my mom, who gave me a strong nutritional education at home, and over time we've only learned more about how important food and nutrition is to your health.
Originally, I studied engineering, because I was interested in how things work. I enjoyed learning about industrial engineering, manufacturing and supply chains, but I couldn't picture a career in it, so I went back to school to study marketing and communications.
I enrolled in a program organized by the French government that sent recent graduates to work for French companies based all over the world for a year and a half.
It's a great way to get on-the-job experience to bring back to France. I had always wanted to travel to Canada and there was an opportunity to work in Montreal, so I decided to go for it.
I always thought Canada was a fantastic country to visit, but I didn't think I would really fall in love with it like I did. I came here with my future wife after we had been together for six months, so this was the first step we made as a couple, and maybe that's why it became so important to me.
I wanted to work for a large French corporation that had a strong presence and a strong impact internationally, both because of the impact it could have, and because I wanted to go abroad again as soon as possible.
It took 17 years, but I ended up moving eventually, and I never got bored working for this company, even in France.
You don't stay at a company for 26 years unless you're passionate about the work you're doing.
Danone's mission is to improve people's health through food while improving the health of the planet. If you want to be a leader in sustainability, you need to be a certain size, and as a global company we can make a significant impact.
The two largest parts of our environmental footprint are agriculture and packaging.
On the agricultural side, we are working with our upstream partners to promote regenerative agriculture to reduce the carbon emissions of milk production worldwide. Danone was also the first major food company to sign a
pledge
to reduce methane emissions from dairy production 30 per cent by 2030.
On the packaging side, we are working with stakeholders across the supply chain to ensure our packaging is recycled properly. Last month we announced a $9-million investment in our Boucherville plant to develop more sustainable packaging. In fact, Danone is Canada's
largest consumer-facing B-Corp
.
We call ourselves the 'health through food' company, because nearly 87 per cent of Danone's global dairy, plant-based, water and aqua-drinks portfolio has at least 3.5 out of five stars on the international Health Star Rating system, which is unique in our industry.
We've accomplished that by focusing on making our foods healthier, and by promoting healthy food categories. For example, we've reduced the amount of sugar in our Canadian products by 30 per cent in the last seven years.
They say the second brain is in your gut, and we know that a healthy gut has benefits that go beyond digestive health, like mood and mental health. We develop products based on the latest in fermentation and gut health science.
Activia has been clinically proven to improve digestive health, and if you have Activia twice a day for 14 days in what we call the 'Activia Gut Health Challenge,' nine people out of 10 report feeling the difference.
We've also seen a surge in products that are high in protein, which has been proven to not only help build muscle but promote healthier aging. Yogurt is a great way to deliver protein to people in a way that's convenient, versatile, affordable and nutritional, without sugar or fat, which is why we introduced Oikos Pro, a high-protein Greek yogurt, this year in Canada.
The same is true of plant-based milks, which were pioneered by Silk in the '70s, before being acquired by Danone in 2017.
It's not just for those who can't tolerate dairy. In fact, many Canadians prefer having their cereal with sweetened almond milk than regular milk because of the taste, but also because it doesn't have as much sugar.
This category really illustrates how we can have the best of nutrition and taste at once, and we continue to innovate in that direction.
Those events have been devastating for all of us, because as you said we are a company that is based on health through food, so facing the reality that we might have missed something somewhere that led to these events was very hard.
This happened a few days after I landed in Canada, and I immediately faced one of the most tragic events in the company in many years.
The entire industry was caught off guard; we didn't think something like this could happen in this product category.
I'm proud of how quickly the team worked to protect the health of our consumers. After we made the recall, we discovered that the issues were from a factory of a co-manufacturer and so we completely changed all our sourcing and moved everything into our Danone factories.
It's been emotionally challenging for everyone, but I'm proud of how we managed to sustain production, raise the bar of all our products in terms of quality and safety, and created awareness across the industry.
We are operating in consumer goods categories that are growing faster than average, and we need to lead those categories and shape them in a way that meets consumer expectations.
Canadians want healthier products that take better care of the environment. They want transparency on what goes into them, the science behind them, and the values of the company.
We're going to double down on what we do best, which is crafting new recipes that not only taste good, but go one step further in terms of health and nutrition.
We are here to develop such products and to develop trust with our consumers. There is a lot of room for innovation, and we aim to lead those categories, not just to serve them.