The Voice of Retail

The Voice of Retail is a weekly podcast hosted by retail pioneer, advisor and keynote speaker Michael LeBlanc and is produced in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada. Each and every week I interview the most interesting people in and around the retail industry, examining the key issues and strategies on the minds of thought leaders in Canada, the U.S. and around the world. © 2018-2026 M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The Voice of Retail is a business podcast hosted by Michael LeBlanc, with 556 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Michael LeBlanc hosts The Voice of Retail, a business show with 556 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #530

  Andrew Clarke, New CEO of Calgary Co-op, on Delivering Member Value

  Oct 2, 202631 min

  Andrew Clarke brings 30 years of retail experience. He started out delivering eggs for his family's business near Cheddar, England, then worked as a merchandiser at Marks & Spencer and later ran the apparel business at Kmart for Sears Holdings. He joined Calgary Co-op in March 2026 as a strategy consultant to the board before taking the top job, as the cooperative heads into its 70th year. The big strategic question is how to coordinate two food businesses, two drink businesses, four pharmacy and healthcare businesses and a gas operation that have largely run independently, and turn them into one ecosystem that delivers value members can actually feel. Andrew explains why the co-op model is a business model rather than a loyalty programme. He describes how bonus cash and fuel discounts connect the gas pump to the grocery basket, and he says members have told him Calgary Co-op must communicate value better without becoming a discount retailer. He also discusses private brands Cal & Gary's and Founders & Farmers, the Care Pharmacy and Beacon pharmacy businesses, and what it has been like adapting to Canadian corporate culture after a dozen years in the U.S. Topics include: Integrating a multi-banner retail portfolio The cooperative ownership model and member value Bonus cash, patronage and fuel savings Private brands and value perception Pharmacy as a trust-based business AI as an enhancer, not a replacement Presented by Konek, Canada's Way to Pay. Visit Konek.ca to learn more. Michael LeBlanc is the president and founder of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, a senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and now, media entrepreneur. He has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, CanWest Media, Pandora Jewellery, The Shopping Channel and Retail Council of Canada to his advisory, speaking and media practice. Michael produces and hosts a network of leading retail trade podcasts, including the award-winning No.1 independent retail industry podcast in America, Remarkable Retail with his partner, Dallas-based best-selling author Steve Dennis; Canada's top retail industry podcast The Voice of Retail and Canada's top food industry and one of the top Canadian-produced management independent podcasts in the country, The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dalhousie University in Halifax. Rethink Retail has recognized Michael as one of the top global retail experts for the fifth year in a row, the National Retail Federation has designated Michael as on their Top Retail Voices for 2025 and 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him on of the Top 50 global thought leaders in retail. If you are a BBQ fan, you can tune into Michael’s cooking show, Last Request BBQ , on YouTube, Instagram, X and yes, TikTok. Michael is available for keynote presentations helping retailers, brands and retail industry insiders explaining the current state and future of the retail industry in North America and around the world.

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #528

  The Countdown to Black Friday: Getting Agent-Ready for Holiday with Caila Schwartz, Head of Agentic Commerce & Shopper Insights, Salesforce

  Sep 18, 202637 min

  AI-powered discovery is no longer niche behaviour. It's now a mainstream step in the shopping journey, and holiday 2026 will be the first peak season where retailers compete for the attention of shoppers and AI agents alike. In this episode of The Voice of Retail, host Michael LeBlanc welcomes back Caila Schwartz, Head of Agentic Commerce and Shopper Insights at Salesforce, to unpack the latest Salesforce State of Commerce research and share what Canadian retailers can still do before Black Friday. Caila, who has studied holiday shopping for more than a decade, explains why consumers adopted agentic AI so quickly, with AI-driven discovery up 200% year over year. The data shows Canadian commerce leaders ahead of the global average on agentic AI adoption, yet three times more likely to be stuck in pilot mode. Caila says the gap comes down to data strategy: launching an AI agent without clean, unified data is risky, especially under Canadian consumer protection and privacy rules. With peak season approaching, Caila lays out a practical holiday readiness plan. First, turn on the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to feed accurate product, pricing and inventory data directly into ChatGPT, as bot traffic from OpenAI, Gemini, Meta AI, TikTok and Amazon surges across ecommerce sites. Second, optimize product detail pages for AI agents with human-written, use-case-driven product descriptions and FAQ sections covering holiday shipping deadlines and policies. Third, manage customer reviews on your own site and on third-party platforms like Reddit and Trustpilot, because large language models are pulling that content into their answers about your brand. The conversation also explores how product discovery is shifting: discovery on brand-owned properties is down 7%, traditional search is down 15%, and AI assistants and social are up 38%. Caila makes the case that retailers now need an SEO strategy, an LLM strategy and a social shopping strategy, all unified, and explains why customer service is becoming central to marketing. Physical stores remain the heart of holiday retail, with more than 80% of Canadians preferring to shop in store. But 79% of shoppers are on their phones in the aisle, 12% are asking AI assistants for purchase advice, and 48% of Canadians research products before they arrive. Caila explains why consistent pricing and promotions across channels matter, and how unified customer profiles can empower store associates. Finally, Michael and Caila tackle autonomous shopping. Will Canadians let an AI agent complete a purchase? Caila's research suggests shoppers want AI for discovery and personalized recommendations, but still want to own the checkout on the brand's website. Whether you're a retail executive, ecommerce leader or marketer, this episode is your essential guide to agentic commerce, AI search, omnichannel retail and holiday 2026 strategy. See All the data and insights here: https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/agentic-search-growth/ Presented by Konek, Canada's Way to Pay. Visit Konek.ca to learn more. Michael LeBlanc is the president and founder of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, a senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and now, media entrepreneur. He has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, CanWest Media, Pandora Jewellery, The Shopping Channel and Retail Council of Canada to his advisory, speaking and media practice. Michael produces and hosts a network of leading retail trade podcasts, including the award-winning No.1 independent retail industry podcast in America, Remarkable Retail with his partner, Dallas-based best-selling author Steve Dennis; Canada's top retail industry podcast The Voice of Retail and Canada's top food industry and one of the top Canadian-produced management independent podcasts in the country, The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dalhousie University in Halifax. Rethink Retail has recognized Michael as one of the top global retail experts for the fifth year in a row, the National Retail Federation has designated Michael as on their Top Retail Voices for 2025 and 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him on of the Top 50 global thought leaders in retail. If you are a BBQ fan, you can tune into Michael’s cooking show, Last Request BBQ , on YouTube, Instagram, X and yes, TikTok. Michael is available for keynote presentations helping retailers, brands and retail industry insiders explaining the current state and future of the retail industry in North America and around the world.

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #527

  Ann Tracy, Chief Sustainability Officer, Colgate-Palmolive: Why Retailers Hold the Key to Sustainable Growth

  Sep 11, 202620 min

  Sustainability in retail and consumer packaged goods has spent years filed under advocacy, reporting and good intentions. Ann Tracy, Chief Sustainability Officer at Colgate-Palmolive, wants it filed under growth. In this episode of The Voice of Retail, Ann joins me from Colgate-Palmolive's research centre in Piscataway, New Jersey, ahead of her appearance at the Retail Council of Canada Retail Sustainability Conference in Toronto, where she takes the stage October 28 for a fireside chat with RCC President and CEO Kim Furlong. Ann brings an unusual lens to the sustainability conversation. An engineer by training, she has spent more than 35 years at Colgate-Palmolive, most of it in the global supply chain, with assignments across Asia, Europe, the UK and the United States spanning manufacturing, customer service, logistics and divisional supply chain leadership. That operating background shapes how she runs the file today, after the role moved from the supply chain into the company's growth and strategy team, making it broader, more enterprise-wide, and embedded in the business strategy itself. She also gives listeners a useful reminder of the scale involved. Colgate-Palmolive marks 220 years in the United States this year, generates over twenty billion dollars in net revenue, employs roughly 34,000 people and sells in 200 countries across four core categories: oral care, home care, personal care with regional icons like Palmolive, Sanex and Irish Spring, and pet nutrition through Hill's Pet Nutrition, plus a growing premium skin health business. Colgate sits in more homes than any other brand in the world. At that volume, a small packaging design change ripples through plastic tonnage, pallet counts and the entire retail supply chain. The heart of our conversation is the 2030 sustainability strategy, which Ann describes as an evolution rather than a revolution, building on the sunset 2025 plan across three ambition spaces: driving social impact, helping millions of homes, and preserving the environment. What distinguishes 2030 is a hard lean into value creation, and her insistence that sustainability teams learn to speak finance and marketing rather than acronyms and temperature scenarios. We dig into the intention-action gap, where more than ninety percent of consumers say they support sustainability but far fewer act on it because they will not trade away price, convenience, quality or performance, nor should they. We also cover long-term resilience, the finite nature of plant, mineral, animal and fossil-fuel-based ingredients, and why retailers are essential partners in shaping value creation on physical and e-commerce shelves. A smart, practical listen for retailers, CPG leaders, merchants and sustainability professionals heading to Toronto in October. Connect with Ann Tracy on LinkedIn, and catch her with Kim Furlong at the Retail Council of Canada Retail Sustainability Conference on October 28. https://rccretailsustainability.ca/ Presented by Konek, Canada's Way to Pay. Visit Konek.ca to learn more. Michael LeBlanc is the president and founder of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, a senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and now, media entrepreneur. He has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, CanWest Media, Pandora Jewellery, The Shopping Channel and Retail Council of Canada to his advisory, speaking and media practice. Michael produces and hosts a network of leading retail trade podcasts, including the award-winning No.1 independent retail industry podcast in America, Remarkable Retail with his partner, Dallas-based best-selling author Steve Dennis; Canada's top retail industry podcast The Voice of Retail and Canada's top food industry and one of the top Canadian-produced management independent podcasts in the country, The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dalhousie University in Halifax. Rethink Retail has recognized Michael as one of the top global retail experts for the fifth year in a row, the National Retail Federation has designated Michael as on their Top Retail Voices for 2025 and 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him on of the Top 50 global thought leaders in retail. If you are a BBQ fan, you can tune into Michael’s cooking show, Last Request BBQ , on YouTube, Instagram, X and yes, TikTok. Michael is available for keynote presentations helping retailers, brands and retail industry insiders explaining the current state and future of the retail industry in North America and around the world.

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #526

  Uncommon Leadership: Author, former Walmart Executive Keith Wyche on Restoring Trust in Leadership

  Sep 4, 202630 min

  How do you lead when trust in business, government, and media is at a generational low? On this episode of The Voice of Retail, host Michael LeBlanc welcomes Keith Wyche, Fortune 500 board director, keynote speaker, and author of the new book Uncommon Leadership: A Blueprint for Restoring Integrity, Trust, and People-Centred Leadership . Keith's retail story begins in the back room of one of Ohio's largest Sears stores, working the paint department as a college intern. From there, he built a career inside organizations in the middle of massive change: AT&T as the Bell monopoly broke apart, IBM as it shifted from hardware to solutions, then grocery at Cub Foods, where he spent his first months cutting meat, icing cakes, running a register, and stocking freight to understand the work before changing it. He shares the hard feedback that explained why he kept hitting quota at IBM but never got promoted: without followership, there is no leadership. That lesson underpins his trust formula, character times competency times consistency, where a zero in any one factor cancels the other two. Keith and Michael dig into why leadership drifted from service to self-interest, pointing to quarterly earnings pressure, a celebrity culture that rewards charisma over character, and CEO pay that has climbed from roughly 25 times the average employee to 200. The conversation turns to Walmart, which Keith joined in 2015, a year after Doug McMillon began pushing the company out of its brick-and-mortar comfort zone. He describes the unvarnished truth session, the burning platform, the jet.com talent infusion, and the storytelling that made the stakes real, including his reminder that Sears once had both the stores and the catalogue and is gone today. For executives who want somewhere to start Monday morning, Keith offers a practical framework. Listen to associates, using the two questions he asks on every store walk. Listen to customers and vendors. Then clarify and simplify the mission the way Walmart turned everyday low cost into everyday low price. A Chicago self-checkout rollout that consulted neither associates nor shoppers serves as a cautionary tale. They close on board composition in the AI era, the CEO, CFO, and operations seats plus the cybersecurity and AI expertise that may sit with a director in their thirties, and why customer-facing automation like shelf-scanning robots and AI greeters got piloted and pulled. As Keith says, AI can tell you a tomato is a fruit; wisdom tells you not to put it in the fruit salad. His parting advice for the next generation of retail leaders is simple: human capital is the most important asset on the balance sheet. "I'm in the people business," he says. "I just happen to sell groceries." Presented by Kokek, Canada's Way to Pay. Visit Konek.ca to learn more. Michael LeBlanc is the president and founder of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, a senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and now, media entrepreneur. He has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, CanWest Media, Pandora Jewellery, The Shopping Channel and Retail Council of Canada to his advisory, speaking and media practice. Michael produces and hosts a network of leading retail trade podcasts, including the award-winning No.1 independent retail industry podcast in America, Remarkable Retail with his partner, Dallas-based best-selling author Steve Dennis; Canada's top retail industry podcast The Voice of Retail and Canada's top food industry and one of the top Canadian-produced management independent podcasts in the country, The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dalhousie University in Halifax. Rethink Retail has recognized Michael as one of the top global retail experts for the fifth year in a row, the National Retail Federation has designated Michael as on their Top Retail Voices for 2025 and 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him on of the Top 50 global thought leaders in retail. If you are a BBQ fan, you can tune into Michael’s cooking show, Last Request BBQ , on YouTube, Instagram, X and yes, TikTok. Michael is available for keynote presentations helping retailers, brands and retail industry insiders explaining the current state and future of the retail industry in North America and around the world.

  ListenShow Notes
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  Episode #525

  Inside A Merchandising Revolution with Liza Amlani, Chief Merchant & Principal at Retail Strategy Group (Encore)

  Aug 21, 202631 min

  In this Encore episode of The Voice of Retail , host Michael LeBlanc sits down with Liza Amlani, Chief Merchant and Principal of Retail Strategy Group , who returns to the podcast to share timely insights from her recently released book, "The Material Life: Process Innovation for Retailers and Brands" Recognized globally as a retail thought leader, Amlani brings her two decades of merchandising expertise to a provocative argument: the retail industry has been obsessed with what products it sells, while neglecting how those products are made—a blind spot costing brands both time and money. Amlani illustrates how process innovation begins long before a product hits the shelf. Traditional apparel development starts with a design concept, hunting for materials to match. Her materials-first model flips that dynamic, accelerating time to market, reducing over-development, and eliminating redundant fabric, trim, and colour decisions. She cites examples where retailers were creating thousands of unnecessary material variations—like zippers—without realizing the margin erosion and operational chaos this creates. Throughout the conversation, Amlani explains how silos between merchants, sourcing, materials, design, and marketing teams create a “butterfly effect” where one late-stage decision can unravel deadlines, sample production, and vendor negotiations. Breaking those silos strengthens governance, reduces waste, and aligns teams around measurable outcomes including her Material Adoption Rate (MAR) framework—an accountability tool that tracks how many material developments actually make it into assortments. The episode also explores the rising influence of AI in fabric research and digital product creation, the impact of sourcing regulations emerging in North America and Europe, and how leading brands like lululemon are quietly reshaping their operating models through materials-led go-to-market roles. Amlani argues that brands embracing transparency, vendor partnership, and digital material workflows will unlock significant margin upside at a time when inflation, tariffs, supply chain friction, and fast-fashion disruptors are redefining consumer expectations. Finally, the discussion turns to the road ahead. Amlani urges leaders to rethink the fabric of product creation itself, invest in consumer-centric assortments, and treat materials not as an afterthought but as a strategic asset. For retailers, merchants, product developers, and sourcing teams eager to future-proof their business, this episode is a masterclass in modern merchandising excellence. Presented by Kokek, Canada's Way to Pay.  Visit Konek.ca to learn more.    Michael LeBlanc is the president and founder of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc, a senior retail advisor, keynote speaker and now, media entrepreneur.  He has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions and participated worldwide in thought leadership panels. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience with Levi's, Black & Decker, Hudson's Bay, CanWest Media, Pandora Jewellery, The Shopping Channel and Retail Council of Canada to his advisory, speaking and media practice. Michael produces and hosts a network of leading retail trade podcasts, including the award-winning No.1 independent retail industry podcast in America, Remarkable Retail with his partner, Dallas-based best-selling author Steve Dennis; Canada's top retail industry podcast The Voice of Retail  and Canada's top food industry and one of the top Canadian-produced management independent podcasts in the country, The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois from Dalhousie University in Halifax. Rethink Retail has recognized Michael as one of the top global retail experts for the fifth year in a row, the National Retail Federation has designated Michael as on their Top Retail Voices for 2025 and 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him on of the Top 50 global thought leaders in retail.   If you are a BBQ fan, you can tune into Michael’s cooking show, Last Request BBQ , on YouTube, Instagram, X and yes, TikTok. Michael is available for keynote presentations helping retailers, brands and retail industry insiders explaining the current state and future of the retail industry in North America and around the world. 

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