Labatt sees its culture as its competitive advantage

Now 177 years old, Labatt Breweries of Canada has not only a rich cultural heritage but a deep dedication to innovation. Those company aspects are two sides of the same coin, says Bea Grubesic, Labatt’s vice-president, people.

“We have always honoured our legacy and our guiding principles – that’s what allows us to innovate, and that’s why we see our culture as our competitive advantage,” Grubesic says.

In tribute to what has brought the company to this point and looking forward to the future it’s building, Toronto-based Labatt has decided to introduce its latest innovation: October’s Cheers Fest. “We regularly get our people together,” says Alexia Lee, manager, employer brand and employee engagement. “But Cheers Fest culminates all of that in a half-day event hosted live from Labatt’s brewery in its London, Ontario, hometown.

It brings together employees from coast to coast to celebrate three focus pillars: our brands, our impact on our communities, and our people.”

In regard to the first pillar, Labatt’s dedication to showcasing its portfolio of over 70 brands – from Corona and Budweiser to Michelob Ultra and NÜTRL – is apparent in one of its 10 guiding principles: “Build brands consumers love.” Christine Hamilton, marketing capabilities manager, explains: “Working for Labatt instills a sense of pride because our brands are deeply woven into Canadian culture and social life. They symbolize national identity and bringing people together.”

As for community impact, Labatt’s commitment goes back to its earliest days, Grubesic notes, when founder John Kinder Labatt donated 1,000 pounds of flour to a London soup kitchen during an economic depression in 1859. It continues in Labatt’s current Disaster Relief Program, in which production lines in London, and now Halifax switch from producing cans of beer to cans of water destined for people in need in stricken areas of the country. Labatt’s long history also informs another of its guiding 10 Principles: “We grow when our communities grow.”

Labatt’s “we are owners” workplace culture was evident to Lee from her start as an intern in 2022, she says. “Ownership isn’t just about results – it’s about the people. When you are part of a team that shares your passion, their commitment becomes yours, and together, you build something greater. This is something that has been evident to me since day one.”

The Cheers event wrapped up with what Grubesic calls a cross-Canada happy hour, a time, “for our employees to get together in their locales after the broadcast to celebrate the day and enjoy our products.”

“Cheers Fest let us display our culture in a way that resonated the same with someone, say, in the logistics team in Moncton as with someone in sales intelligence in Vancouver,” Lee says, “so everyone could really feel it, rather than just know it, by stepping aside from their work for a time and coming together.”

But the showcase is not only for current employees. “To continue to be recognized as a Top Employer for 12 consecutive years and beyond, means we need to make the next workforce generation aware of our culture and the people who shape it,” says Grubesic. “We also want to communicate it externally, to the new generation that we’re looking to hire.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Top 100 Employers winners, published November 15, 2024 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.

Labatt’s Toronto head office is its innovation hub

When Doug Port took on his latest position at Labatt Breweries of Canada in March 2023, one of the first tasks facing the new vice president, Beyond Beer, was bringing Cutwater canned cocktails on board. If the Canadian launch of America’s bestselling ready-to-drink cocktails wasn’t a large enough project in itself, there were other, closely related, innovations on the near horizon.

In Ontario, Cutwater varieties and other Labatt brands would soon be available in a new venue – the province’s convenience stores – and Labatt was also investing millions in packaging technology that would see the end of plastic beverage rings.

Port, like Labatt as a whole, was ready for it all. “We always like to be out of our comfort zone here,” he says. “Innovation is at the heart of our culture at Labatt, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Jaime Gancman, senior innovation manager since 2023, echoes Port. She joined Labatt as a logistics employee four years ago and soon learned about the innovation team. “Everything I had heard about Labatt being an excellent place to work, with amazing people, was already confirmed,” she says. “So, I really wanted to switch over to the innovation team. For someone who wants to explore new products and gets excited about new things to come, this company, especially this office, is a great place to be.”

“Our head office in Toronto is Labatt’s hub for innovation,” says Port, “because you can’t innovate in a vacuum – it’s a highly collaborative process.” The colleagues who surround Port and Gancman come from across Canada and around the world, bringing a variety of tastes and ideas with them.

“There are people on my team from Winnipeg, from Vancouver, from our Edmonton brewery, from our Calgary office, and people who began in Toronto, moved to other offices, and then came back,” says Gancman. “There is a lot of movement for career reasons.”

Those colleagues are crucial to bringing everything to life, Port says. “We receive ideas from all corners – the legal team, supply team anecdotes, people stopping me in the hallways to tell me about something they drank while travelling, from everywhere – and we encourage that.”

In the rapidly growing ready-to-drink category, a third of the volume sold in any given year consists of new brands and flavours, Port continues, including Labatt’s SVNS Hard 7UP launched in 2024 in partnership with PepsiCo Canada.

That’s why Gancman has a second fridge in her home to hold new products to try, whether Labatt’s or not, and why Port sees the Ontario convenience store development as far less a distribution challenge than a distribution opportunity. “It puts our products in more places for consumers to interact with and explore our brands.”

It’s also why he so values his colleagues’ input. “When we’re getting close to which taste will be the final choice in a new launch, we might have four versions, so we’ll have a blind tasting with the whole office,” he says. “But it doesn’t stop with the launch. We come back to the employees here with a product drop on their desk for them to sample with their own networks to help us understand what people think.”

Together, it all makes for a solidly informative feedback system, says Port, but its importance goes beyond providing raw data. “It really makes sure our people feel like innovation is a total team effort.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Greater Toronto’s Top Employers winners, published December 3, 2024 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.

Labatt’s unique approach to young talent brews leaders

For Labatt Breweries of Canada, choosing among applicants to its Graduate Management Trainee (GMT) program has always been more a matter of looking for a mindset than a skillset, an attitude shared with many of those accepted, says vice president of sales Rob Legate. “We are okay with generalists,” says Legate. “We're actually looking for generalists.”

He should know. A finance major at McGill in 2010, Legate applied to GMT for the sake of practice interviews to help him with the upcoming interviews with financial-sector employers. He received offers from an investment bank – and one from Labatt. “Everyone, from my mentors to my parents, strongly recommended investment banking,” recalls Legate.

“But my gut feeling was urging me in the other direction,” he continues. “There was something pulling me toward Labatt as I came to believe in its people and its culture through the interview process. And 14 years later, I have never once regretted my decision.”

Category manager Taniya Spolia, a member of the 2021 GMT cohort, began university in a medical-science program before pivoting into social sciences and psychology. “Not having followed the quintessential business studies path had a positive weight on my application,” she says. “The interviewers were excited to have someone with new ideas and a fresh pair of eyes to consider.”

Since its 2004 launch, the GMT program has offered more than 100 participants immersive onboarding, exposure to senior leadership, and in-depth experience. Participants rotate through business functions within the Toronto-based company (supply, marketing, logistics and sales), as well as experiencing varied locations across Canada, and sometimes further afield. Legate had stints in Montréal, Edmonton, Calgary and St. Louis, while Spolia went to London, Ont., and Saskatchewan.

“The GMT is far from a linear program,” says Legate, who remains involved in the program. “We weigh the skillset and ambitions of the individual, as well as considering our needs and where opportunities and challenges sit at a given point in time. There are always possibilities, because we prioritize promoting, developing and getting the most out of our people.”

Legate and Spolia have vivid memories of their opening GMT postings in Labatt breweries, and for the same reason. “Culture shock is not quite the right phrase,” says Spolia. “But seeing what is actually a small community of people who are so passionate about what they are doing was a real eye-opener for me.”

Legate agrees. “Seeing the passion that goes into our products from all levels of the supply organization was a great experience,” he says.

But the most valuable aspect of Labatt’s program arises from the way trainees experience “the right level of stretch,” Legate says. “That comes by continually extending their level of stretch – in the form of new roles or new projects that expand the capacity of their current roles.”

Spolia agrees that the “stretch” was at the heart of her experience. “The biggest thing about being in the Graduate Management Trainee program is it teaches you to be comfortable in situations where you aren’t fully comfortable,” she says. “GMT encourages you to challenge the status quo, and that really builds your confidence.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Top Employers for Young People winners, published January 21, 2025 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.

For Labatt, sustainability is a collaborative effort

Matt Costa, senior director, sustainability and procurement, at Labatt Breweries of Canada, loves the scale of his company’s green ambitions. “We made our pledge earlier and with a shorter timeline than most other consumer packaged goods makers,” he says, “at a time when we really didn’t have a roadmap on how to achieve them, knowing that we had the right values, resources and people to figure it out.”

By values and experience, Costa is one of those right people. After undergraduate studies in his native Brazil and an MBA from Cornell University in the United States, he went to work in Switzerland for AB InBev, Labatt’s parent company. “In 2020, I became the director of barley and malt procurement for North America and spent a lot of time in farmers’ fields, gaining insights about what it takes to grow great barley, which becomes great malt, which becomes great beer,” he says.

In 2024, Costa took on a role managing the sourcing of aluminum cans in all of the countries in the Americas. “It was a really interesting experience, moving from the raw materials — hops, water, barley — to the packaging, which is just as important from a sustainability perspective.”

All in all, an apt background for Costa’s new role with Labatt, a company committed to short supply chains and local brands, as well as a green future.

“Sustainability is the right thing to do and so is doing it in the right way. My responsibility at Labatt is to source the best materials with the smallest environmental footprints at the best terms — call it economic sustainability — in a balance that extends across the entire value chain,” Costa says.

“It’s not just about having the lowest carbon footprint possible in our operations, but working with and enabling our partners in the supply chain so that we all become more sustainable,” says the director. “We’re aiming for an optimal equilibrium where you have profitability, sustainability and partnership, and the whole system is better.”

In Gatineau, Que., François Bernard-Hébert echoes Costa’s statements. As Labatt’s national fleet and capex manager — the person in charge of all of the company’s trucks — Bernard-Hébert oversaw the 2024 introduction of 10 half-million-dollar EV trucks into the Québec distribution network. “It’s a massive investment and it has to keep extending all along the line,” he says.

The purchase is the largest single order of VNR Electric trucks for Volvo Trucks in Canada, representing nearly 25 per cent of their deliveries, and was in addition to a purchase of Labatt’s first zero-emission mobile service repair truck earlier in the year.

“It’s absolutely the right direction, and it’s not just senior managers who are owning this initiative, but also front-line employees,” continues Bernard-Hébert. “The drivers, who were happy to hear the EVs were coming, have been great in providing feedback. We all understand it’s where we need to go for the next generation.”

Costa agrees on that point too. “It’s energizing and humbling to work for a company that integrates its green goals into its culture, not treating sustainability as something to bolt on to the basic business model,” says Costa. “I’m extremely excited to expand on what we are doing, making sure that we continue to be a prosperous and respected company, one that honours the role we have as stewards of our communities, our industry and our planet.”

This article appeared in the magazine announcing this year's Canada's Greenest Employers winners, published April 22, 2025 in The Globe and Mail. This article was prepared with the financial support of the employer, which reviewed but did not write its contents.