On this episode, we chat with the dynamic Katie Hotze, CEO of Grocery Shopii, a Top 10 Women in Grocery Tech, with her grocery industry eCommerce application solving a $550B problem in the CPG & Retail industry by reducing cart abandonment with machine learning.In the news, the Inflation Cookbook: Canada’s first-ever AI-powered meal-planning tool designed to help Canadians source affordable and nutritious food items and maximize their weekly grocery budgets. The tool tracks the top ten food items trending upwards and downwards in price each week and uses the power of AI to curate seven healthy recipes that consumers can create using the best-priced items from that week. Next, we talk about a new report that is a collaboration with RBC, BCG Centre for Canada’s Future and Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph that finds by 2033, 40% of Canadian farm operators will retire, placing agriculture on the cusp of one of the most significant labour and leadership transitions in the country’s history. We also talk about the lobster industry in Canada and lobster politics, the Blue Jays home opener with hopefully new food offerings - Rogers Centre ranks 25th in MLB as the best place to have food, and the most reputable companies in Canada, by Leger: Shoppers, Costco and Dollorama make the Top 10.About KatieNamed a Top 10 Women in Grocery Tech by RIS, Katie Hotze is an innovative leader and entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in digital marketing, data analytics and business strategy. Katie is the founder and CEO of Grocery Shopii, a Charlotte-based startup that solves a $550B problem in the CPG & Retail industry by reducing cart abandonment with machine learning. Grocery Shopii uses recipes as a recommendation engine to expedite online grocery shopping inside the shopping journey.Prior to Grocery Shopii, Katie spent 20 years in management and technology consulting where she led global marketing teams for Mercer, the world’s largest HR consultancy, and BearingPoint. She holds an M.B.A. and Business Analytics certification from William & Mary, and a B.S. in Marketing from Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2018, Katie was a Direct Marketing News (DMN) 40-Under-40 Award Recipient. She’s also been awarded the Top Women in Grocery honor by Progressive Grocer. Today, she is a regular speaker on both digital and social media topics at conferences in the marketing and grocery retail spaces.A resident of Charlotte, N.C., Katie is a graduate of UNC-Charlotte’s Ventureprise entrepreneurial program and is an active participant in the city’s tech community. About UsDr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Professor in food distribution and policy in the Faculties of Management and Agriculture at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He is also the Senior Director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab, also located at Dalhousie University. Before joining Dalhousie, he was affiliated with the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute, which he co-founded. Known as “The Food Professor”, his current research interest lies in the broad area of food distribution, security and safety. Google Scholar ranks him as one of the world's most cited scholars in food supply chain management, food value chains and traceability.He has authored five books on global food systems, his most recent one published in 2017 by Wiley-Blackwell entitled “Food Safety, Risk Intelligence and Benchmarking”. He has also published over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles in several academic publications. Furthermore, his research has been featured in several newspapers and media groups, including The Lancet, The Economist, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, NBC, ABC, Fox News, Foreign Affairs, the Globe & Mail, the National Post and the Toronto Star.Dr. Charlebois sits on a few company boards, and supports many organizations as a special advisor, including some publicly traded companies. Charlebois is also a member of the Scientific