Brian Kerr: Scooping Up a Full Circle

Brian Kerr is the Chief Executive Officer of Kawartha Dairy Limited, where he is helping the third and fourth generations of the Crowe family expand and grow their premium, cottage-country ice cream through Kawartha Dairy Retail store expansion and distribution through Grocery and Independent businesses across Canada.

Brian grew up in Bobcaygeon, home of Kawartha Dairy, and started working early mornings at the factory at 11 years old. It was here that he learned, at an early age, the importance of showing up every day, hard work in a team environment and the value of money. He did this until the age of 19, when one of the second-generation owners convinced him to go to University for business.

Brian is a graduate from Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario with an Honours Bachelor of Accounting (Co-Op), earning his CPA designation shortly after graduation and working on Bay Street at an Accounting firm servicing small to medium-sized businesses for four years. However, the food business was calling, and he joined Kraft Foods and spent the next 20 years learning and building his knowledge of the food business in Finance, Sales, Strategy, Marketing and Business Unit leadership roles culminating in the Chief Marketing Officer role.

However, it was a chance meeting with one of the Crowe family owners in 2017 when Brian was invited back to Kawartha Dairy as the CEO in his hometown of Bobcaygeon to help build this small, Canadian-owned, family business into a household name across Canada.

Brian’s family is the house of Badgers. Brian met his wife Christina (also a past CPA) at Brock University, and both of his two daughters, Maya and Sophie, attended Brock University in the field of Education.

What led you to choose Brock University and the Goodman School of Business?

The first decision was to go to university at all. 

I’d been working at Kawartha Dairy since I was 11 years old, scooping ice, working in the plant, learning to drive a truck at the age of 14, and loading it before school. 

Fast forward eight years; it was August of the summer before my first year rolled around, and I was still working at Kawartha Dairy. I was seriously considering staying instead of heading to university. I didn’t want the debt, and I already had a job I loved. In fact, I wasn’t planning to go at all.

It was one of Kawartha Dairy’s 2^nd Generation owners, Monty Crowe, who changed my mind. 

He jumped into the back of a truck one day and said, “Look, you should go to university. I never got the chance; I had to stay and work with my dad. So I’ll make you a deal: go get your education, and you can come back at any time.” 

So I went to Brock University. 

Growing up in the small town of Bobcaygeon, I was looking for a school where I wasn’t going to get lost, somewhere that had a small-town feel. A lot of people from the area went to Brock; my cousin went, and that’s how I got introduced to the school. Those were the emotional reasons I chose Brock. 

The practical reasons were that I knew I wanted to become a CPA, and Brock was a real pioneer in co-op education back in the early 1990s. I only applied to schools with co-op programs, and I felt Brock had the best co-op accounting program in Ontario. 

On top of that, the Bachelor of Accounting program was designed in a way that integrated everything I needed to qualify as a CPA, faster than anywhere else.

I graduated with my Honours Bachelor of Accounting (Co-Op), earned my Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) designation, and spent 20 years at Kraft Foods.

Then, I ran into Monty’s son, 3rd-generation owner Mike Crowe, at a beer festival in Bobcaygeon. He told me he had been following my career on LinkedIn and asked if I wanted to come back and run Kawartha Dairy. 

I accepted on the spot.

Coming back to Kawartha Dairy had always been the dream. I often say I’m the luckiest guy on earth. Everything came full circle—from loading trucks at Kawartha Dairy as a kid to coming home as CEO.

What experiences or programs at Brock had the greatest influence on your development?

Brock’s Co-op program was the game-changer. 

I’m a learn-by-doing person – being able to learn a concept academically, then apply it in the real world for four months, come back and do it again, was incredibly important to me.

Brock was an early pioneer in that model, and I don’t think it gets enough credit for how far ahead of the curve it was.

The Bachelor of Accounting program reinforced that. It was fully integrated with the CPA qualification requirements in a way other schools at the time weren’t, so I came out well positioned to write my CPA exams. For someone as eager to get into the workforce as I was, that mattered enormously.

But honestly, it was the smaller class sizes that shaped me most. Coming from a small town, I thrived in that environment. I still remember my professors by name 30-something years later — Professors Brown, Young, Stillabower, Adamson. They knew who we were. That personal dynamic shaped how I think about mentorship and teaching to this day, which is part of why I’m excited to come back this fall as a guest lecturer.

Are there any moments from your time at Brock that stand out as formative experiences?

Looking back, many defining moments in my life started with this community. Brock wasn’t just where I earned a degree; it was where I found lifelong friends, met my wife, and discovered the kind of environment where I thrive.

My wife and I were part of the same tight-knit group of accounting co-op students who were always on campus in the summer. 

People thought it was a drag to be in school in the summer. We thought it was great: 17 hours a week of class instead of 40 hours of work. That community, the 40 of us grinding through classes from May to August while everyone else was on break, was something special. It was a fun time.

I lived at Queenston Residence, an old nursing building converted into student housing off campus. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it was incredibly close-knit. We were the underdogs of an underdog school, and I loved that about it. I became a Proctor there, helping the Don look after a couple of floors, welcoming new students.

I also became President of the Brock Accounting Club, which was probably the nerdiest club that existed in everyone else’s opinion, but for us it was just another excuse to get together. That was my first foray into working with other people to make something happen beyond just schoolwork, working with like-minded people to strengthen the program and enhance the student experience.

Then there was the time I slept through an exam. 

I had stayed up all night studying for a stats exam, went to bed too late, and woke up to a friend calling me from a payphone. He had left the exam saying he had to go to the bathroom and called me. I drove 100 miles an hour in my pyjamas and cowboy boots, but I made it. 

That moment taught me more about preparation and personal responsibility than any lecture I ever attended. I’ve been 20 minutes early to everything important since.

Are there any moments in your career where you felt underestimated? How did you become undeniable?

I am a secret overachiever. My goal is to succeed and exceed at everything I do; I just don’t need other people to know.

When I joined Kraft Foods as a financial analyst, I was doing work that wasn’t glamorous: internal audit and systems integration. Not the sexy marketing or sales floor. I just kept working hard, making accomplishments with my team, and slowly moving up. 

I was pretty proud of the fact that by the age of 29, I was one of the youngest finance directors at Kraft. From there, I made a decision to invest in my long-term career and jump out of accounting and finance into general management. I’ve always liked trying new things. I get bored easily, and every new role was another opportunity to learn.

So I became an underdog in sales and had to learn that. Then I moved into marketing.

Not always through a promotion, just moving laterally to learn. Lo and behold, that investment eventually catapulted me into running entire business units: cheese, beverages, grocery. Ultimately, I became Chief Marketing Officer at Kraft Foods, overseeing more than 50 brands. 

A kid from small town Bobcaygeon, with a Bachelor of Accounting, leading one of the largest marketing organizations in the country.

Kawartha Dairy is its own underdog story. We call ourselves the little dairy up north. We don’t do mass marketing or chest-pounding. We build our business one customer at a time, one ice cream cone at a time. 

Most people either love us deeply or haven’t discovered us yet, and we’re slowly changing that, expanding across Canada with a product that’s been made the same way since the 1950’s. 

The advice I give to people is, if you want something, go for it and take the risk. There’s going to be next to no drawbacks. Trust yourself, because you know yourself better than anybody else, and you know what you can pull off. 

What milestones or achievements best represent your career journey since graduating?

The thing I’m most proud of isn’t a title; it’s the willingness to keep learning. From a Bachelor of Accounting to becoming Chief Marketing Officer at Kraft Foods and eventually CEO of Kawartha Dairy.

Having that background of cross-functional experience in sales, marketing, operations, strategy, and finance is probably what defines my career the most.

Kraft gave me the foundation: a company that genuinely invested in people, gave them responsibility, and let them try things they’d never done before. 

Kawartha Dairy gave me the chance to apply all of that at once: strategy, finance, marketing, operations, culture, and to rebuild a beloved regional institution into a national brand. 

Today, we’re expanding across Canada while remaining one of the last family-owned dairies in the country, proving you don’t have to lose who you are to grow.

We have a significant share of the hard ice cream market in Ontario. We’re growing in the western provinces, and we’re doing it all while making dairy products exactly the way Jack and Ila Crowe invented them back in 1937.

People talk about full circle moments. Mine is working for the same family that told me to go to school in the first place, and helping them take what they built over 90 years somewhere they never imagined.

Why is supporting the Goodman Legacy important to you, and what does legacy mean in the context of your journey?

Brock built my family. I met my wife there. Our two daughters, both smart and hardworking, chose Brock on their own, for the concurrent education program. 

We didn’t push it. They picked it because it was the right school for them, just like it was for us. 

Getting to go back and watch them graduate from the same place my wife and I graduated from is something I don’t take for granted.

I sit on an advisory committee for the Brock president, and I’ve started guest lecturing on campus. So my involvement isn’t just sentimental — I genuinely believe Brock can serve future generations even better than it served me.

It’s pragmatic, it’s approachable, and it’s a place where people can build real confidence. Not everyone thrives in a massive institution. Some people need a place where they can be known, where they can form a community.

The advice I always come back to is what my grandmother told me when I was 11, heading off to my first day at Kawartha Dairy: “If you work hard for your boss, your boss will work hard for you.” 

I’ve applied that to every professor, every manager, every team I’ve ever had. Work hard for the people around you. Take the risks, take that course you maybe don’t think you know enough about or go to that party because you have no idea where it could go. Things happen to people who take risks.

Never accept no for an answer, because there’s always a way to make something work if you care enough to find it. That’s what I want students to walk away with.