Sales leader Josh shares how his passion for people, empowering teams, and forming unbreakable bonds has been a force for good in his pursuit to live our Purpose.
Josh Adams’ journey at Maple Leaf Foods began 15 years ago, in a sales role where relationships, accountability, and how the company shows up with customers matter every day.
The reason he’s stayed? The people.
It’s the people across Maple Leaf Foods who bring our Purpose — Raising the Good in Food — to life every day, through how they work together and how they show up for customers and consumers alike.
That focus was evident from the very beginning.
While his first interaction with the company was an ‘exploratory’ meeting for a manager role on the sales team, it ended up leaving a positive imprint on Josh. “I was curious,” he explains, “but honestly a bit hesitant.” During that time, Maple Leaf Foods was going through a period of change and was still coming off the 2008 Listeriosis crisis. Because our company is rooted in transparency and trust, it was a topic that was still top of mind for Canadians and continues to be an important part of our food safety culture and history.
At the time, Josh was hired under the leadership of Curtis Frank, who today is Maple Leaf Foods’ President and Chief Executive Officer. Josh notes that “in classic Curtis fashion, he had me hooked right away. He was down to earth, genuinely interested in me and my journey, and clearly driven by a desire to win — but to win with the right people who shared the same passion for food, quality, and doing what's right. I was sold.”
Now a decade and a half later, Josh is the Vice President for Metro Inc. and the National Field Sales Team, and his connections with the people across the organization have stayed strong. Because when people bond over a shared passion for our Purpose, the bonds are hard to replicate. “The relationships I’ve built here have carried me through tough times and made the good times even better.”
As a sales leader, Josh’s goal is to empower and support his team so they can deliver against the company’s strategies and sales targets. And, he likes to have some fun while doing it!
A responsibility to living our Purpose
Josh spends his days focusing on how to build and execute growth plans alongside his sales team and internal partners. He also gets to spend a lot of time with his customer, Metro Inc. — a regional retailer with banners across Ontario and Quebec — looking for ways to partner in driving mutual growth.
Since our role at Maple Leaf Foods is to constantly adapt and improve how we show up for our customers, Josh is regularly out in the field working with a strong group of leaders to bring our branded and customer strategies to life in stores.
That’s how Josh is Raising the Good in Food — by making sure that when consumers shop at grocery stores under the Metro Inc. banner, they’re always seeing showstopping displays featuring Maple Leaf Foods products. These in-store experiences ensure that our products really make an impact — so that they go from enticing displays to grocery carts to homes and dinner tables.
For Josh, living our Purpose means having a responsibility: “I feel incredibly fortunate to be in a position where I can empower, support, motivate, and develop people — whether that’s teammates, customers, or consumers. To me, Raising the Good in Food is a path to having a positive impact on people, communities, and the world around me.”
He also feels a real sense of pride in working for a Canadian company that’s committed to ambitious sustainability goals and building a better future. Because working in a sales role is about being part of something bigger than just a month or a quarter’s financials — it’s about creating shared value for our thousands of Team Members, their families, and their communities.
Always leaving a place better than he found it
The feeling of “responsibility” to our Purpose means that Josh is a big advocate for creating environments where people can be their authentic selves. “When people feel accepted as they are, it fast-tracks creativity, smarter work, better outcomes, and ultimately how we are all Raising the Good in Food.”
That’s why he lives by the concept of “leaving a place better than you found it” and applies this to the hundreds of meetings he’s part of every month. He believes that how people feel when they leave a meeting matters just as much as the agenda or content that was discussed. That doesn’t mean avoiding accountability or tough conversations — after all, two of our Leadership Values focus on Our Accountability and Disciplined Decision Making — but Josh emphasizes a need to always be respectful, appreciative, and kind to one another.
“People usually leave meetings with work to do. When they leave feeling supported, trusted, and in the right headspace, the quality of that work improves. That’s how we build a passionate, engaged workforce — and that’s central to Raising the Good in Food.”
When the day’s activities are done and Josh retreats from his office at our Mississauga headquarters to his family back home, our Purpose lives on through the delicious meals they enjoy together, featuring our family of brands. In their house, breakfast for dinner is a weekly occurrence. Josh, along with his wife and two children, love to fry up some Maple Leaf bacon with pancakes, the occasional mini sizzler, air-fried hash browns, and orange juice.
Bacon for dinner just works, because bacon is good at any time of day. “That one is hard to beat.”
