The Edible Man: Dave Nichol, President's Choice and the Making of Popular Taste

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

This deserving winner of the 1994 National Business Book Award makes
business history accessible to the general reader rather in the way that
Dave Nichol brought gourmet food to the consumer. Anne Kingston deals
with the food industry, focusing on Dave Nichol, but extending her
attention in many directions, among them the structure and character of
George Weston Co., the position of national brands in the food marketing
chain, and the even more subtle business of fashion in foods.

Essentially, the story begins with the friendship of Galen Weston and
Dave Nichol, formed when both were students at the University of Western
Ontario in the late 1950s. They came from very different backgrounds,
Nichol’s plain and Weston’s fancy, though there were elements of
plain living in the Weston family. In 1971, Galen Weston was given the
task of revivifying the languishing Loblaw supermarket chain, and he
assembled a very able team to do it, including Dave Nichol, who became
president of Loblaw supermarkets in 1976. For some considerable time,
efforts were not rewarded with success, and it was only the support of
the parent Weston company that enabled the Loblaw people to persist.
Indeed, Dave Nichol was demoted in 1984 to being president of Loblaw
International Merchants. It was here that he scored his greatest
successes, after he had assembled his own first-class team.

Obsessed with quality, in love with gourmet food, and at war with the
national brands that absorbed the profits he craved for Loblaw, Nichol
developed the President’s Choice line with amazing success, for he was
intensely idiosyncratic and clearly a marketing genius. He could sell
“Memories of Marrakesh” to those who had none. He even carried the
war against national brands into the United States with considerable
success. Increasingly restless, Nichol left Loblaw at the end of 1993,
not without some bruising all round, to concentrate on the private-label
invasion of the United States, in alliance with Gerry Pencer of the Cott
Corporation. Anne Kingston tells a complicated story in an entertaining
way. Her hero has warts, but is still a hero after all, and the times he
lives in are absolutely astonishing.