Can this man make you love Loblaws again? How new CEO Per Bank is changing Canada’s largest grocer to win back trust

“This one is an idea I took from Europe,” he said. “So this is here because of me.”

Since he was recruited from Denmark to run Loblaw in 2023, Bank has been making hundreds of unannounced visits to stores around Toronto, usually on his bike. 

When Bank walks into a store, somebody on staff usually recognizes him within a minute or two. He’s hard to miss, if you know what you’re looking for — tall and slim, with white hair and a Danish accent.

That morning, the owner of the No Frills franchise on Bloor Street East came over to shake Bank’s hand and, without prompting, announced: “We got the pineapple machine back up and running.” Apparently, it had broken down from overuse after the store put pineapples on special.

As the two talked, store staff started to clue in to what was going on, that the big boss had dropped in for a visit. A manager darted his eyes around the store, as if looking for weakness. He spotted something across the store and backed away from Bank and the franchise owner, without either of them noticing.

Once out of Bank’s eye line, the manager started into a trot, headed toward a pyramid of apples. As he got closer, he lowered himself into a crouch, still running, picking up speed, then reached out his arm and snatched a fallen apple from the floor, and another, and another, then disappeared with them, like a ball boy in a tennis match.

Bank didn’t seem to notice, which was lucky, because when he is in stores he is constantly looking around. 

“This is, like, wow,” he said at one point during our tour, scanning the produce section. “Apples are (with) apples. Tomatoes are where tomatoes are should be.”

It is his view that different varieties of apples should be displayed together, not scattered with an island of Honeycrisp here, McIntosh over there, and so on. “If you have apples in 10 places,” he said, “then you don’t see the choice that you have on apples.”

Walking around the store, he could see all the little changes he’d made during his short time at Loblaw — a “Hit of the Month” deal on frozen meat pies was selling well, the pineapple machine was working, and there were fewer messy prices, $1.99 or $2.01, that make it harder to calculate your grocery bill in your head.

Bank is a soldier-turned-executive from Denmark who wants to aggressively expand Loblaw while remoulding it in a more European image. To a lot of people in the industry, he’s an old-school retail guy from one of the most innovative grocery sectors in the world. He’s also pushing the sort of radical ideas that can get an executive turfed at the first sign of trouble.

But beneath the flurry of changes he’s been making, Bank seems intent on making a much bigger change, one you can’t spot in any of his stores. He wants to change your mind. After years of inflation, a bread price-fixing scandal, a national boycott and a series of other controversies, hating Loblaw has become something of a national sport. It’s on Per Bank to fix that, to somehow make Canadians love Loblaw again.

A day before the surprise inspection tour with Bank last October, I went to get my bike tuned up. The bike mechanic warned me that CEO types tend to be pretty hardcore about cycling. So I was bracing myself to find Bank in the full getup: spandex leotard with a big, padded bottom, a sperm-shaped helmet, and clip shoes.

Instead, he was in a tan sweater with a button-up underneath, and dress shoes. His bike was a cruiser by Giant — a no-frills bike. He viewed it as a means of “transport” and nothing more. It was one of the first things he bought when he moved to Toronto. He decided that biking was the most efficient way to get around the city, and that was that.

Bank started as a CEO when he was 36, at a Danish chain of co-op stores. “I would have never hired myself at that age,” he said, “because I think experience matters a lot.”

From the co-op, Bank moved on to the British grocery giant Tesco, and then the Danish retailer Salling Group, where he was CEO for more than a decade. He was planning to finish his career there, until Loblaw came calling.

As we started off, I mentioned the schedule that his PR team had sent along for the day. He waved that off. He had his own plan.

The first stop was a Shoppers Drug Mart at Manulife Centre. He knows the pharmacist who owns the store, but she wasn’t there — a sign that he’d been true to his word and hadn’t warned any of the stores we were coming.

He asked staff what item thieves had been targeting lately. One of the clerks pointed to a display of luxury eye cream. 

At the time, he was trying to find the right balance between locking up high-value products behind glass, which deters customers, or leaving them unprotected on a shelf and enduring the thefts. At Shoppers, they’d tried putting some beauty products behind glass, “but we removed it because it hurt sales too much,” Bank said.

In the luxury section, they’d opted to go “two deep” on the shelf, he said, meaning they only put out two of each product. “Otherwise they come in and steal it all.”

As we walked through the store, he was shooting his eyes all around. I asked him what he was looking for. 

“I look for holes,” he said.

Holes are the gaps in shelves, things that are out of stock for one reason or another. To Bank, they can be symptoms of something bigger going on in his supply chains. 

“There’ll always be some holes,” he said. “Then I’ll ask, ‘What is happening?’ ”

As we walked through the pharmacy, he challenged me to a contest — the first of three times he did so that day.

We passed a blood-pressure machine near the pharmacy counter and he smiled. 

“Should we see who’s the best?” he said, before deciding against it, saying I was too much younger than him.

Later, he wanted to race on our bikes, though we didn’t end up doing it. And he wanted to guess the cost of a single banana. He tore one off a larger bunch, we both placed our bets and he went over to a self-checkout to weigh it. (He won, with a guess of 26 cents.) 

He said he was toying with the idea of selling bananas as singles, rather than by the pound. 

It started to make sense why he agreed to bring a reporter along on something like this. He felt practiced here, like he had home-court advantage. Walking around stores is the sort of thing he likes to do for fun when family visits Canada, he told me. 

“I love to be out,” he said. “It’s where I get my energy.”

As we left the Shoppers at Manulife, he got a text from the pharmacist and showed me his phone. 

“One of these days I’ll actually be at Manulife when you pop by!” she wrote. “Hope the store looked OK!”

He sent her a smiley face and wrote, “store was great as always.”

“I mean I wasn’t worried …” she wrote back.

At a Loblaw City Market, a clerk mentioned that one of the last times she saw him, he was shopping for a dinner party. She remembered him picking out peppers.

“The Danish priest was over for a barbecue,” Bank said.

His wife is a member of the Danish Parliament, and his two sons are in their twenties, so he lives in Toronto by himself much of the time. He does his shopping exclusively at Loblaw banners, because he believes shopping at a rival chain is an act of betrayal.

When he was in Europe, he noticed one of his staff members at the office had brought in a competitor’s reusable shopping bag. Bank asked the employee to go to reception and swap it for one of the company-branded bags.

Walking through a No Frills, he pointed out his new “switch and save” signs. They were meant to show how much cheaper Loblaw’s in-house brand, No Name, was compared with the national brand. One sign showed a No Name detergent was 42 per cent cheaper than the OxiClean brand.

“What does OxiClean say about that?” I asked.

“I don’t care,” he said.

There is something startling about how blunt Bank can be, at least to Canadian ears. But I found myself enjoying it, after realizing there’s no anger underneath it, no real emotion whatsoever, just a transfer of facts from his brain to another. For example, in a previous interview, earlier in 2024, I’d asked what kind of car he drove. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“I like detail,” I said back. 

“It’s not a fast car but it’s a normal car, the same as my direct reports have.”

When he first arrived here, before he’d officially started his new job, he said he wandered around and talked to people. “Hey, I’m new to Canada, could you please advise me where to do my grocery shopping?” he’d ask them, without ever saying he’d been tapped to run the biggest food and drug chain in the country, which includes No Frills, Fortinos and Shoppers Drug Mart. 

At the time, Bank’s predecessor, Galen Weston, of the billionaire Weston family that controls Loblaw, was facing growing customer backlash. In the span of a few years, he’d gone from being the wholesome face of the business in TV commercials to a sort of villain, at least in some circles.

Bank took over in 2023, with Weston staying on as chairman, and in the first year or so, the company started closing some uncomfortable chapters that had been haunting Loblaw for years.

For starters, it negotiated a $500-million settlement in a class-action lawsuit over the company’s role in a bread-price-fixing scheme (though the company says the settlement was in the works long before he arrived). 

Loblaw also dropped its fight against a code of conduct for the grocery business, which was billed as a way to stop big grocers from bullying farmers and food manufacturers.

Bank met with the head of a national boycott movement against Loblaw, even though his advisers thought it would backfire. He applauded new federal rules that prevented grocers from blocking new competitors in their shopping malls. And at No Frills, he got rid of so-called multi-buys — the two-for-$10-style deals — because customers on tight budgets complained they couldn’t afford them. It had been a top complaint from customers, he said. “They hate it.”

He mentions other brands by name in his public comments, which, for most CEOs, is not done. He writes his own LinkedIn posts, sometimes about touchy subjects like tariffs. He also does interviews, which is rare. Weston almost never did them.

“The tone just seems to be a little bit different,” said Michael Graydon, a manufacturing lobbyist who represents Loblaw’s suppliers. For years, he’s been one of Loblaw’s most outspoken critics. But he likes Bank. “Per’s been in this for a long time. He gets it.”

Around the industry, Graydon said, a lot people see Bank as a grocer’s grocer, the sort of guy who’d rather be in a store than a boardroom at Loblaw headquarters in Brampton, Ont. 

“He’s just different,” Graydon said, “and I think some of it may be his European background.”

At the beginning, it wasn’t clear that being different would be enough.

When Bank came on the scene, he earned more than $20 million in his first year, with plans to make Loblaw even bigger than it already was. He dismissed the idea that Loblaw had ever taken advantage of inflation to boost its profits, declaring Canada to be one of the most “hotly contested” grocery markets in world.

It looked like a recipe for more turmoil, more dissonance with aggrieved grocery shoppers. But then Donald Trump became U.S. President and the context suddenly shifted. As Trump’s threats of tariffs and annexation escalated, having a Canadian giant in the food business didn’t look so evil anymore. 

In February, Bank announced a $10-billion, five-year plan that will see 80 new stores open across the country, including his new, smaller discount grocery store model — similar to European discount giants Aldi and Lidl — that can break into cramped urban markets as well as underserved rural areas. 

When it comes to financial markers, Loblaw has “favourable momentum,” RBC analyst Irene Nattel said in a note to clients in February. Last year, Loblaw’s revenue grew nearly $1.5 billion, or 2.5 per cent year-over-year. Profits were up by about six per cent, on an adjusted basis.

But money is not love.

“Can he make us love Loblaw again? I mean, maybe. Anything’s possible,” said Vass Bednar, who co-wrote the book “The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians.” Bank certainly has the opportunity to make progress, she said, against a backdrop of growing trade tensions with the U.S. Especially if he wins back some trust by championing Canadian suppliers.

Mohamad Fakih, the founder of the Lebanese restaurant chain Paramount Fine Foods, which partnered with Loblaw on an in-store Paramount-branded butcher counter, said Bank needs to realize the feeling of betrayal among consumers, and focus on treating customers and staff well.

“He needs to go back and understand how the romance changed between Loblaw and Canadians and deal with the elephant in the room,” Fakih said, adding that it looks to be on the right track.

“They do understand and they do get it,” he said. “They’re working on the right moves.”

Bank said recently that Loblaw has “work to do” to win back trust.

But to him, making customers love you isn’t that complicated. You stop doing things that bother them, and you sell them cheaper products. That’s why he wants more discount stores, selling more cheap goods, with more bright signs in stores advertising how many bargains there are.

He made that point over and over on our tour, but never more clearly than in the No Frills store, the one with the pineapple machine. When a customer walks in, he said, they need to find something to put in the basket within five steps. And he wants the act of putting something in the basket to give a little jolt.

He walked over to a bunker of frozen meat pies that were on sale. “When they can buy this for one for $1,” he said, “they feel happy.”