Like other small merchants of his day, Aristide Lassonde had to take to the road, travelling from one village to the next to sell his canned goods. In the city, housewives did their shopping at the butcher, the baker, the dairy and public markets. Retail chains were on the horizon but hadn’t yet taken off to the point of transforming the food industry.

At the end of the 1920s, a buyer for the wholesale firm Laporte Hudon Hébert made two troubling observations: first, French Canadians were absent from the food brokerage business and, second, only 250,000 of the three million cases of canned vegetables sold in Quebec were produced locally. This fellow, by the name of Anastase Brault, was also endowed with an entrepreneurial spirit. His encounter with Aristide and Willie Lassonde was providential!

In 1927, he founded A. Brault & Fils, with the mission of representing small canneries and encouraging them to expand production. Anastase began travelling the country roads, visiting small factories, meeting and winning the trust of both owners and retailers. Twenty years later, sales of canned goods produced in Quebec reached five million.

Anastase Brault remained active in the food business well into his 80s and the ties he forged with the Lassonde family endured beyond his lifetime. Under the impetus of his grandson Pierre, his brokerage firm was restructured under the name Effex Marketing, which later became the Lassonde sales group.

Next column: Modernization…