Origin Story

Garner Enterprises started with two people who knew food cold. My parents, Malcolm and Lynda, came to logistics after careers spent making and moving it. My father built Cambridge Canadian Foods through the 80s and 90s, private-labelling for
Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro and Marks & Spencer. My mother, a McMaster nurse practitioner turned entrepreneur, created Golden Earth in 1979 – the first flavoured garlic bread ever sold frozen in Canada, and she built it into a national brand as a woman in an industry run almost entirely by men. We lost her in 2019.

They founded the company in 2000 on one idea: combine rail, road and water well and you take CO2 and cost off every load at once. Ship smart for the planet was the reason they started, not a tagline.  Then in 2007 my mother fell ill, and I came home to help my father run it. I did not grow up planning a life in freight, but I learned it from the inside – boxcars, drayage, customs, intermodal rail, and the ocean side I taught myself because the business needed it. Over nearly two decades I went from client relations to resident, grew sales by more than 300% in a two-year stretch, took on an $8M+ operation, and ran the cold chain on 14 million pounds of fresh produce a year

without ever letting it break.

I have negotiated directly with Class I railroads, global ocean carriers, unionized Teamsters and long-haul partners, and built cross-border lanes through Canada, the United States and Mexico. We stayed in business as a family, survived 2008, and
kept the planet promise intact the whole way.

Somewhere in there I stopped only moving freight and started fixing how it moves.  That became three United States patents on the design, apparatus and method of transferring intermodal freight between road, rail and ocean. I argued the case at the USPTO myself and won it. Garner Enterprises today is not only a
temperature-controlled logistics provider. It is the home of patented intermodal-transfer technology.

We ship smart for the planet, and we still treat every cold-chain load like the food it is. If you operate rail, terminals, ports or ocean lanes and want to talk about licensing or building on the technology, I would welcome the conversation.

President

Hilary Garner, M.A.