Welcome to a special summer bonus episode of The Food Professor podcast recorded live in our on-site podcasting studio at the SIAL Food Innovation show in Toronto.  Over three great days in May, Sylvain and I met dozens of food innovators and thought leaders; these are their stories.  We're sure you will enjoy hearing these incredible interviews as much as we enjoy hosting the conversations. Stay tuned for season four of The Food Professor podcast, Canada's top food industry and Canadian-produced independent management podcasts, when we return live on the mic Thursday, September 21stOn this episode meet Tracy Bell, Co-founder + CEO Millennia Tea, **Gold Innovation Award - SIAL 2023**If you like what you heard, please follow us on Apple, Spotify, or your favourite podcast platform so that you can catch up with all our great interviews, including celebrity chef, restauranteur and entrepreneur Chuck Hughes from Montreal.Have a safe summer, everyone.About TraceyI care so much about honest connection and the stories that can change lives. Always have. It started for me as a journalist, when I broke local stories that became national headlines. Then as the head of public affairs for an emergency medical services organization where a bystander CPR program we created legitimately helped save lives and went on to win national and international awards for public service and community relations. Today I'm the co-founder of Millennia TEA - a company I created with my husband after a health scare helped us understand first hand the powerful impact the tea plant can have on promoting wellness and preventing/reversing illness. A deep dive into tea taught us those incredible health properties are highest when the tea leaves are "fresh-picked" vs. dried & cooked like conventional dried teas. So we went looking for someone who could sell us "Fresh Tea," as you would when the science says it is multiples better than the dried stuff. But no one could - and that wasn't ok for our family - so we created a new category of tea: Frozen Edible TEA. Farmer direct, organic, hand-picked in the mountains in central Sri Lanka tea leaves - picked at their prime and washed and flash-frozen within hours. It's a big job, asking consumers to imagine the most consumed beverage in the world after water in a way they've never considered before (i.e. Fresh-frozen vs. dried).. but the science is compelling - that sharing the mighty tea plant in its purest and most naturally-powerful format has the potential to positively impact peoples' health in ways they can see and FEEL. That's the work I want to do and represents the positive impact we want to have in the world. I'm passionate about functional nutrition and the actions we can take - individually and collectively - to help people Live Better Longer in a way that is sustainable and benefits everyone along the supply chain. I'd love to connect with you here, or at tracy.bell@millenniatea.com or 1-506-866-0049. 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 Economi