2025 Star Women in Grocery Award Winner Sam Bhullar (Q&A)
Sam Bhullar
Customer Director - Walmart Pet
Mars Pet Nutrition Canada
What do you like most about your job?
I feel privileged to lead teams of passionate associates, helping them learn and grow in their own careers, while also growing our amazing pet category. Mars is also a special place that has enabled me to work across multiple business units and functions throughout my career, from R&D to marketing to sales. Owning your career path has always been encouraged. With this encouragement I have been able to build breadth of perspective and knowledge across the organization that has enabled me to personally learn and grow as a leader, and to tackle new business challenges. I love being able to leverage my breadth of knowledge to help empower my teams to break down barriers and drive results.
How did you get your start in the CPG business?
I started right out of a post-graduate program, where I landed an internship at Mars in its regulatory affairs/R&D department. From there, I was able to turn that internship into a full-time role, which led to my progressive 16-year career at this incredible organization. In my early career at Mars, I made a cross-functional move into marketing, where I spent many years managing our food brands, and then to customer marketing, e-commerce and most recently sales customer management functions in our pet food division.
Proudest moment?
My proudest moment at Mars was being recognized as a North American winner and global finalist for the Mars Make the Difference program, which recognizes projects from across the world that have made a significant contribution to our Mars business results with scalable impact in other markets.
What is a career challenge you've faced?
Dealing with ambiguity and navigating complexity to build a team during the start of the COVID pandemic. In 2020, I also had the privilege to lead and build our first dedicated e-commerce team for our Canadian pet business at a time when our business ways of working were changing, consumer behaviours were changing, our e-commerce retailer businesses were evolving, and our supply chain was unpredictable. At this time, I also took on my first sales customer management role, learning a new customer and building a whole new team. It was one of the toughest and best career experiences I have had to navigate, and happy to say through an amazing team, we were able to deliver fantastic business results.
What are you passionate about outside of work?
Outside of work I am a proud mom of two young daughters, nine and 11. I love spending time with them doing everyday things and watching them learn and grow. We love travelling to new places and are learning to golf together. Being a role model to help them know they can achieve anything they aspire to is a significant part of my purpose.
Click here for the full list of 2025 Star Women in Grocery Award winners.