GALEN WESTON JR.

Galen G. Weston, widely known as Galen Weston Jr.

to distinguish him from his father W. Galen Weston, was born in December 1972 in Dublin, Ireland.

He is heir to one of Canada's most storied business dynasties, a baking and food retail empire founded by his great-grandfather George Weston in 1882 and expanded by each generation since.

After a Harvard degree and a Columbia MBA he joined the family business and worked his way up at Loblaw. In October 2006 he became executive chairman of Loblaw.

His father had built Loblaw into Canada's dominant food retailer, so Galen Jr. inherited a company that was already formidable and spent his tenure making it larger and more complex.

In September 2016 he succeeded his father as CEO of George Weston Limited, and in December 2020 as controlling shareholder of the family's Wittington Investments.

The defining transaction of his leadership was the purchase of Shoppers Drug Mart, Canada's largest pharmacy chain, announced in 2013 and closed in 2014 for $12.4 billion. It was the largest retail acquisition in Canadian history at the time, and it bet heavily that Canadians would use pharmacies as primary healthcare touchpoints.

That bet has proven well-placed.

His tenure also included the bread price-fixing disclosure. In December 2017, Loblaw and George Weston revealed they had taken part in an industry-wide scheme to fix bread prices from about 2001 to 2015.

The company offered customers $25 gift cards, and in 2024 agreed to a C$500 million class-action settlement. The family also sold Weston Foods and, in December 2021, the Selfridges department store group.

In 2021 he became chairman and president of Loblaw. Amid fierce public criticism over grocery prices, he handed the president's job to Per Bank in 2024 and remained chairman of Loblaw and CEO of George Weston.

George Weston Limited: the family's public holding company, where he has been CEO since 2016. It controls Loblaw and Choice Properties, a real estate trust with hundreds of retail and industrial properties.

The family controls it through Wittington Investments, which he took over from his father in December 2020. Weston Foods, the old baking division, was sold off in 2021 and 2022.

Loblaw Companies Limited: Canada's largest food retailer, with more than 2,400 corporate and franchised stores under banners including Loblaws, Shoppers Drug Mart, No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore and T&T Supermarket. He became executive chairman in 2006, added the president title in 2021, handed the president's job to Per Bank in 2024 and stayed on as chairman.

Under his leadership the company launched PC Optimum, one of Canada's largest loyalty programs, and pushed hard into healthcare services through Shoppers.

PC Financial and President's Choice: the house-brand ecosystem spanning food (President's Choice), banking (PC Financial) and insurance. The PC brand is one of the most valuable private labels in North America.

Selfridges Group: the family's UK and European department stores, including Selfridges, Brown Thomas and Arnotts in Ireland and de Bijenkorf in the Netherlands. The Westons sold the group to Thailand's Central Group and Austria's Signa in December 2021 for about £4 billion.

Galen Weston Jr. is not primarily a capital markets investor.

He is an operator and steward of a complex family business. His approach to deploying capital is strategic and concentrating: identify where Canadian consumers are going, and build the infrastructure to be there first.

The Shoppers Drug Mart bet is the clearest example. He saw that aging Canadians were using pharmacies more frequently than grocery stores for healthcare services, and that the lines between food retail and health retail would blur.

He paid $12.4 billion to own the intersection. That is a large amount of money for a strategic positioning play, not a financial arbitrage.

The logic was retail-strategic rather than financial-engineering.

He has also been willing to sell. The family sold Weston Foods and, in 2021, the whole Selfridges department store group for about £4 billion, narrowing the empire down to Canadian food, pharmacy and real estate.

The Shoppers Drug Mart acquisition in 2013-2014 for $12.4 billion was the defining transaction of his leadership. At the time it was the largest retail deal in Canadian history, and many analysts questioned whether Loblaw was overpaying for a pharmacy chain operating in a market increasingly under pressure from online competition and generic drug pricing reform.

He bet that pharmacies were becoming healthcare hubs — that Canadians would use them for everything from flu shots to diabetes management to mental health services. A decade on, pharmacy and healthcare services are one of the main engines of Loblaw's growth, and the thesis looks right.

The bread price-fixing scheme that Loblaw and George Weston took part in from roughly 2001 to 2015. The last nine years of it happened on his watch.

It involved most major Canadian bread makers and grocers, and kept bread prices artificially high for Canadian families for well over a decade. The companies self-reported to the Competition Bureau in 2017 in exchange for immunity and handed out $25 gift cards, which became a national punchline.

In 2024 Loblaw and George Weston agreed to pay C$500 million to settle the class action. It did not help that, during the grocery inflation of 2022 to 2024, he became the public face of Canadians' anger at food prices, from the 2020 decision to end pandemic pay for store workers to a nationwide Loblaw boycott in May 2024.

His approach is shaped by the family's generational view of business: own great retail assets, protect them from over-leveraging, invest in private label to build margin, and expand only when the strategic logic is clear. He believes consumer businesses win by being relentlessly close to what customers actually need — not by financial engineering.

He also talks up the value of transparency as a business principle, even when it was expensive. The bread disclosure was a choice.

It was also strategic. Reporting first got the companies immunity from criminal prosecution under the Competition Bureau's leniency program, though not from the class action.

He married Alexandra Schmidt in 2005. She is a granddaughter of Thomas J.

Bata, the Czech-Canadian shoe magnate. His father, W.

Galen Weston, who turned Loblaw around in the 1970s and ran the family empire for decades, died in April 2021. His mother, Hilary Weston, was Lieutenant Governor of Ontario from 1997 to 2002.

His sister, Alannah Weston, chaired Selfridges while the family owned it. In December 2020 he succeeded his father as controlling shareholder of Wittington Investments, the private company at the top of the family's Canadian holdings.

He has a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and an MBA from Columbia Business School, then went straight into the family business he was always going to run.

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