Research profile: Sylvain Charlebois

Dr. W. Sylvain Charlebois is a professor in food distribution and policy. He is also scientific director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, a unit focused on understanding the future of food systems in Canada and elsewhere. His current research lies in the broad area of food distribution, security and safety. Most citations of his work are in food supply chain management, food value chains and traceability. He has authored five books on global food systems, the most recent published in 2017 by Wiley-Blackwell entitled Food Safety, Risk Intelligence and Benchmarking. His sixth book, on contemporary food trends, will be released in 2021. He has also published more than 500 peer-reviewed journal articles in academic and professional publications.

Dr. Charlebois has mostly published with scholars outside his field—food scientists, microbiologists, nutritionists, agricultural economists, organizational behaviourists and experts in the fields of finance, accounting and human resources, to name a few. In May 2008, he led a team of 35 scholars from around the world in publishing the first-ever World Ranking of Countries on Food Safety Performance. The report garnered substantial international media attention and remains an important source of information on food safety around the world. As a result of the report, he was asked to chair an international summit on food safety regulatory metrics in Helsinki, Finland, in 2011 that involved 24 countries. Given the report’s significance, a second edition was published in May 2012 and a third in December 2014 in partnership with the Conference Board of Canada, Health Canada and Agriculture Canada.