From 2019 to 2025, I worked part-time as a contract instructor for various business courses at a local agriculture-focused college. I had an MBA, and my work experience was in international agricultural marketing. I taught my first course, Marketing, to a cohort of international students. The required textbook—for both instructors and students—was Marketing: An Introduction, Sixth Canadian Edition, by Gary Armstrong (Author), Philip Kotler (Author), Valerie Trifts (Author), Lilly Anne Buchwitz (Author), 2016.
Philip Kotler is undoubtedly one of the great marketing thinkers. His ideas remain valuable, especially if you work for a large multinational corporation such as PepsiCo, ABB, or Tim Hortons (part of RBI). But I often wondered how relevant those ideas were to someone trying to market a small business in a sparsely populated place like Alberta—or, for that matter, in much of Canada.
The textbook focused heavily on well-established major companies – Dyson, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Boston Pizza. It said nothing about the business environment small and medium-sized businesses were actually navigating in Alberta in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Outside large cities, Canada had small communities spread across vast areas, with limited local consumer demand, a high concentration of food service and retail chains, and the rapid expansion of Amazon changing consumer habits. Add to this the rising cost of living and limited available capital.
It was one thing to manage a marketing budget for Boston Pizza and very different to promote your own bakery or ethnic grocery shop in Central Alberta. Our students all worked at those franchise cafes for minimum wage and limited hours. There was no way they would become a marketing manager for Boston Pizza in Western Canada, at least not any time soon.
The same story continued with other textbooks – entrepreneurship, project management, small business finance and other student cohorts – Canadian high school graduates, international. Why did we teach them something they could not use or even relate to?
It was one thing to launch a franchise business like Boston Pizza in 1965, 10 years after McDonald’s started doing it. Those early franchisers were competing with local small-business cafes and restaurants. Launching a new food service chain in Central Alberta in 2019 would have been a monumental and futile task, as you would be competing with several established franchises defending their regional market share, not with a few local cafes.
I asked my fellow instructors whether we had any local, more relevant business cases that I could bring into the classroom. They shrugged. Perhaps each instructor had developed examples of their own but preferred not to share them. I was never quite sure. What I did know was that our students needed something more relevant—something rooted in the economic realities of the communities around us.
Opportunity to experiment
Newly arrived Ukrainian immigrants were settling in the area. Many spoke little English, had limited local networks, and urgently needed ways to earn additional income. At the same time, they brought practical skills, family recipes, cultural knowledge, and a strong tradition of making food from raw ingredients.
I began to wonder whether we could turn that combination of need and ability into a real-world entrepreneurship project. Instead of studying only how global corporations marketed established products, perhaps we could learn by building something ourselves.
The idea was simple: help newcomers create small food businesses in our town, test their products at farmers’ markets, and eventually explore online sales. It would give participants an opportunity to generate income while allowing us to discover what marketing actually looked like in a small, low-population community. We could then share our models with others, including students and new immigrants, groups that often overlapped in the 2020s thanks to the student visa immigration stream in Canada.
We did not yet know whether the idea would work. But that uncertainty was precisely what made it relevant. This was not a case study about someone else’s success in another place and another time. It was a live experiment, unfolding in our own community, with real people, real constraints, and real consequences.