What Does It Really Mean to Be a “Resilient Supplier” in Canada’s Food System?
If 2025 made anything clear for Canada’s agri-food sector, it’s that resilience can’t just be theoretical. It’s built practically (or undermined) through operational business decisions.
At FoodBridge, we spend our days working across food value chains with businesses navigating a familiar tension: how to stay economically competitive while responding credibly to growing environmental and social challenges?
These trade-offs show up in real ways: in sourcing decisions, supplier relationships, shifting data needs, and investment of resources. To better understand what resilience looks like in practice, we recently convened a conversation with three industry leaders from Ontario and Quebec operating at different points in the value chain:
- Taylor Stanley, Director of Impact Strategy at Riverside Natural Foods, an Ontario-based manufacturer of the MadeGood organic snacks brand
- Jean-Sebastien Dorais, Production Planning Manager at Brasseurs du Nord, which operates Boréale Brewery in Quebec
- Lara Fabiano, Environmental Advisor at METRO, a leading retailer operating in both Ontario and Quebec
Three companies; one shared reality: resilience is becoming a core business capability.
Here’s what we learned:
Competitive pressure is reshaping how businesses prioritize longer-term resilience
For Brasseurs du Nord (Boréale brewery), resilience has become a tactical necessity. Years of rising input costs and intensifying competition in the Canadian brewing sector have pushed the company to think seriously about how they work with suppliers and plan for the future.
Jean-Sebastien shared that moving away from short-term procurement transactions towards intentionally building supplier relationships that more transparently share longer-term business goals and planning horizons has been critical. This has strengthened procurement resilience and improved the business’s ability to adapt under pressure.
It’s not possible to eliminate disruption, but it is possible to build relationships that can absorb it.
Resilience requires going beyond immediate risk management by centring relationships
One strong theme across the discussion was the recognition that resilience isn’t something a business can build alone. From Riverside Natural Foods’ perspective, recognizing the reality of interwoven supply chains, particularly with upstream suppliers, is core to building better business.
Rather than treating longer-term sustainability planning as a compliance exercise, Taylor also emphasized relationship-based approaches.This is enabled by building shared language with suppliers around goals and expectations, as well as introducing tools such as supply chain lifecycle analysis to build common understanding.
Taylor shared Riverside Natural Food’s experience that resilience grows when suppliers work together towards building more transparency, often through data sharing across supply chains, and getting collectively clear on why this data is mutually useful.
Retailers are looking for suppliers willing to grow capabilities together, not perfection
From the retail side, METRO offered a clear signal to suppliers: it increasingly matters that suppliers build capacities, including data sharing, that support supply chain sustainability goals.
METRO is increasingly interested in suppliers that are thinking longer-term about environmental impacts and actively building the capability to assess, manage, and communicate those impacts (particularly around emissions) through supply chain data. The ability to clearly explain how environmental considerations connect to business operations today and how suppliers plan to reduce risks over time is becoming increasingly important to retailers like METRO.
That said, Lara emphasized that retailers are not expecting perfection; they are developing systems real-time as well. Openness, transparency, and a demonstrated willingness to learn and improve often matter more than having everything fully solved.
Core takeaway: resilience is built through learning loops, within and across suppliers
When asked which resilience-focused investments delivered the most value, a clear theme emerged: learning built through stronger relationships, within organizations and across supply chains. By investing in longer-term supplier relationships, creating internal frameworks that connect sustainability considerations to business decisions more clearly, or developing data systems that assess and communicate business impacts more credibly across supply chains, food businesses learn faster, adapt sooner, and become more resilient suppliers.
