PACKAGING FOR FRESHNESS
Cardiff Products founder Stewart Cardiff (left) poses alongside his son-in-law and company vice-president Jon McPhail inside a state-of-the-art co-packing facility operating two high-speed turnkey Tetra Pak aseptic packaging lines in London, Ont.
ALL IN THE FAMILY New co-packing enterprise well on track to make big waves in plant-based beverage markets with state-of-the-art aseptic packaging technology By George Guidoni, Photos by Naomi Hiltz
CANADIANPACKAGING.COM
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f the quality of life is determined by finding a happy balance between work and family life, then Stew Cardiff thinks he has one of life’s biggest mysteries figured out. Growing up as one of six children on a family farm outside the tiny southwestern Ontario community of Brussels, being part of a family business was an integral part-and-parcel of Stewart’s upbringing that laid foundations for a highly successful career path in both the food business and the more buttoned-down white-collar world of corporate finance, where he rose through the ranks to join a senior management team at TD Canada Trust, one of the country’s largest commercial banks. While the latter career feat would more than suffice for most people trying to make a good living for themselves and
their loved ones, Cardiff’s exceptional entrepreneurial skillset—combined with solid academic background and natural curiosity about food science and technology—helped him grow into a man whose happiness is defined by being fully in charge of his own destiny. So when he quit his high-paying job with the bank in 2003 to start up a cheese company literally from scratch, there were more than a few eyebrows raised among many of his friends and colleagues. “Most people I knew, just about everybody, thought I was crazy,” Cardiff recalls. “Leaving a very good job, a senior level position, at a leading bank, to start making cheese from milk from my sheep farms I also owned … it’s just something no one could relate to. “I still recall one of the senior V-Ps at TD Bank calling me six months into the December 2021 · CANADIANPACKAGING
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