W. Garfield Weston

W. Garfield Weston was born in the apartment above his father's Toronto bread factory in February 1898. He was the son of George Weston and his wife, Emma Maud Richards. Years later, he recounted a family story of how his father took him down to the bakery floor, shortly after his birth, to put him "in the smell of bread."

In 1917, weeks before turning nineteen, Weston joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force to fight in World War I. A year earlier, he had quit school to join up, but his father refused to give his consent – the legal age of enlistment being nineteen at the time. In the interim, he was put to work in George Weston's biscuit factory, cleaning and repairing the equipment. While in uniform overseas, Weston toured the world-famous British biscuit factories and became convinced that the same sort of product could be manufactured and marketed in Canada.

In 1919, after serving in France as a sapper laying communications lines at the front, Weston returned home to take up duties at his father's company. He was eventually promoted to vice president of George Weston Limited and then general manager of the company's biscuit plant. Weston next convinced his father to import biscuit-making equipment from England:

"He went back to England and not only brought out the best and most modern biscuit-making machinery money could buy, but he hired some of the leading biscuit experts in England, and moved them and their families to Toronto. Then as a further step to ensure absolute uniformity of the product, the Weston firm installed a creamery to produce its own butter."

In 1922, Weston's English Quality Biscuits were launched. They were introduced at that year's Canadian National Exhibition, and the Toronto Daily Star reported long lines of fairgoers waiting to sample the new product.

In 1959, Weston and his wife, Reta Lila Howard, established the Garfield Weston Charitable Foundation. The foundation adopted a philosophy that since it was the hard work of employees that built a successful Canadian business that its philanthropy should be directed to the benefit of Canadians. One of its first major donations was a $1 million gift to the Banting and Best Institute for diabetes research at the University of Toronto. Around the same time, Weston established a similar foundation in Great Britain. The Weston Family Foundation in Canada and the Garfield Weston Foundation in the United Kingdom maintain that charitable legacy today.