Ricardo Larrivée

Chef, Owner and Founder, Ricardo Cuisine
Television Broadcasting – Class of 1990

2021 Premier’s Awards nominee

There can be few more readily recognized brands in Canada’s competitive food scene than Ricardo.

Ricardo is a magazine, retail stores, restaurants, website and an online boutique. The name has graced thousands of cooking shows for both French- and English-speaking audiences. In excess of 700,000 copies of nine French and five English cookbooks have sold under the Ricardo brand, which also commands an enormous online following. Ricardocuisine.com has attracted more than 3.8 million unique visitors and the company has 600,000-plus fans on social media.

Prominently featured in every media and related venture is the genial face of the man behind the brand: Ricardo Larrivée, who, with his wife Brigitte Coutu, a nutritionist and President of Ricardo Media Inc., heads up the Saint-Lambert, Quebec company located on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River opposite Montreal.

Ricardo came to Algonquin College after studying hotel management at the Institut de tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec. Interesting as that was, he realized the prospect of being in a restaurant or hotel office for the rest of his life was not for him. He didn’t want to go to university for further studies — “I wanted something practical, something I could touch and feel” — and found what he was looking for at Algonquin. “I knew I wanted to do something in media, but what? Was it TV? Radio? Do I want to be a technician? The College allowed me to work at everything.”

It was also the first time in his life that he went to Ottawa. “Everybody said to me, ‘It is boring,’ but I was like ‘Wow!’ To me, it was a big city with a lot of action and it was so beautiful. There were a lot of kids from all over at the school, which was another great thing about it. It opened up your windows on the world. I have friends to this day across Canada and in California — we all met in Ottawa.”

Ricardo has vivid memories of instructors at the College who engaged and challenged him and pushed him to his limits. “The first semester, one teacher said to me, ‘Ricardo, you are such a disappointment. You had such a good interview, we accepted you proudly, and you’re not giving us your best right now.’ I was so shaken. I was afraid they were going to kick me out of school. He and other teachers pushed me as far as they felt they could. I’ve never been someone with super-high scores but I worked hard, I loved every minute of it and it was the beginning of a happy life.”

Much of that success has come in recent years from Ricardo’s (and Ricardo Inc.’s) focus on food and the family. In 2006, after three children, the youngest of whom was not quite two years of age at the time, Coutu was diagnosed with cancer. In the wake of that terrifying moment, she and Ricardo set out on a professional mission that sustains them to this day: to serve families much like theirs by highlighting healthy, flavourful meals that can be prepared with minimal fuss and enjoyed together.

In addition, Ricardo has for more than a decade been the spokesperson for La Tablée des chefs, an organization devoted to feeding needy families and teaching young people to cook and be self-sufficient.

Ricardo has received numerous awards and honours for his work. He is a Member of the Ordre national du Québec and a Member of the Order of Canada. He received an honoris causa diploma from the Institute de tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for his devotion to youth. He and Coutu were both awarded honourary doctorates in nutrition from Université Laval.

These are testing times for anyone with a career in food media. A massive loss of advertising revenue over the last two years to Google and Facebook forced the company to shut down the award-winning English-language version of Ricardo magazine in spring 2019 despite strong subscriber numbers. (The French-language version continues to publish). But the appeal of his daily French-language TV show Ricardo, which is seen in over 150 countries, and his other media outlets remains strong. He has never been short of new ideas and his determination to continue making a difference in people’s lives remains secure.

“If somebody asked me today ‘How do you find success?’, it’s easy to say, do what you enjoy. I don’t say that. I say to young people, find yourself a mission, something that gives you focus and purpose. If you don’t know what it is right away, that’s OK. But keep the idea in mind — once you find your mission, as I did, it makes everything possible.”