In this episode of McGill Management Insights, Neil Cuggy, Co-Founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Goodfood and host Katherine Lake, a current BCom student studying finance and sustainable management, explore the evolution of entrepreneurship, the challenges of building a business from the ground up, and the importance of adapting to meet customer needs. Neil, a graduate of the BCom program and former investment banker, shares his journey from Wall Street to co-founding one of Canada’s most recognized meal-kit delivery companies.
Neil’s entrepreneurial path began at McGill, where he met his co-founder, Jonathan Ferrari (BCom’10). Their post-grad experience in investment banking gave them a solid foundation in analytical thinking, understanding industries, and how companies work. However, their real passions were technology and the food space, and Goodfood came together at the intersection of those two things.
“One was technology, helping Canadians access online grocery more easily and use technology to fulfill their orders and develop supply chains,” Neil explains. “Two was the food space, John has been in and around kitchens his whole life, myself as well. It’s always been something super, super near and dear.”
They started off recognizing the gaps in the grocery industry in Canada, which Neil says has been stagnant for quite some time, with less price competition and less innovation across the board, two things he considers bad for consumers.
“When we started, it was really about how to solve our own problem as young professionals that don’t have access to online grocery, or interesting ingredients from markets or farms,” he says. “How do we bring that on a weekly basis to Canadians’ homes across the country?”
Neil emphasizes that despite the company’s success, the journey of building Goodfood was far from glamorous.
“First delivery days is always something that John and I talk a lot about,” Neil explains. When the company first launched, it was out of their tiny Montreal apartment and they were running the show pretty much on their own. They had planned to have the meal kits delivered with Canada Post, but the kits were never picked up.
“Our first week, we have 14 boxes that are supposed to get delivered the next day, and all of a sudden we can't actually deliver” he says. “So as most entrepreneurs do, we figure it out. We pack our car with food, and we start delivering the boxes ourselves.”
While not how they may have expected to start off, it actually ended up being a blessing in disguise, Neil explains. Delivering these kits themselves exposed them to the logistical challenges of delivering to dorm rooms, apartment buildings and offices, something he says they wouldn’t have otherwise understood and helped them a lot when it came time to scale.
Now, Goodfood serves hundreds of thousands of customers across Canada and has expanded their offerings from what was available in the company’s infancy. But what hasn’t changed is the company’s values and purpose.
“One of the pieces for us that was super important to keep focusing on is we're extremely customer centric,” Neil says. “That was easy to do at the beginning, when Goodfood was a money losing operation, and our investors were backing us to essentially grow revenue, grow a subscriber base, but they weren't expecting any profit.”
But when you’re scaling to $600 million in sales, with 5,000 employees and 15 facilities across Canada, the way Goodfood has, it can become quite complex to continue to over deliver to clients without sacrificing the bottom line.
“I would say it's nowhere near as hard as scaling, well, being profitable on a customer basis and on an absolute basis,” he adds. “So really tinkering with the customer promise to make sure that you're still delivering an exceptional experience that they want to talk about, refer their friends to and they love, and they'll stick around.”
Neil attributes much of Goodfood’s success to their focus on understanding and serving customers better than anyone else.
Neil, Jonathan, and their team have used surveys, customer interviews, and data analytics to constantly refine their offerings. He notes that many of their biggest breakthroughs came from just asking customers what’s missing from their lives and how Goodfood could solve it.
As Goodfood scaled, Neil says his leadership style evolved. He admits that early on, the goal was just survival, but as the company grew, fostering a strong culture became critical.
“As you get further and further away from the founding team members and the founding culture, it's easy for people to kind of start to have their own subculture,” he explains. “They develop their own agenda, develop their own KPIs that they want to manage, and they kind of lose track a little bit of the essential North Star of we're going to make customers happy and make money doing it.”
For Goodfood, the best way to manage this has been for senior leadership to remain focused on the company vision and priorities and to reinforce those things with their team, by being their main cheerleaders.
“A lot of businesses and business owners don't really realize that their psychology and their mindset is the chokehold on their business,” he adds.
Looking to the future, Neil and Jonathan hope to expand their offerings including growing their newly launched ready-to-eat options.
“We think the future of the good food experience is somewhere between a prepared food offering for breakfast, lunch or dinner, and a ready to cook offering, or a meal kit that you can spend a little more time preparing and put a little more effort into getting it onto the table, hopefully with a different result,” he explains.
They’re also looking beyond the direct-to-consumer market and seeing potential other places for the Goodfood brand to show up within their communities, in addition to finding ways to further their mission of creating a healthier planet.
“We just went through B Corp certification, which was a super exciting and super meaningful, really rigorous process,” Neil says. “We want to be out front, educating and talking about what we're doing with farms and what we're doing with our packaging suppliers to make greener and more sustainable packaging.”
Tune into the full episode to hear more about how Goodfood came to be, how they’ve scaled sustainably, and Neil’s tips for aspiring entrepreneurs.
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This episode was hosted by
Katherine Lake
(BCom'25)
