There is a particular kind of work hidden inside a bag of pet food. Before the package reaches a shelf, somebody has to reconcile nutritional language, ingredient lists, regulations, retailer expectations and the tender anxiety of a person buying dinner for an animal they love. The package cannot carry the whole meeting. It has a few seconds and a few square inches. Its first job is to make a complicated product understandable.
Jaimie Turkington recognized that problem early in her time at Petcurean. When the British Columbia company introduced a new identity and packaging system in 2011, she praised the designers for protecting the consumer’s desire for “simple and clear communications,” even though the product could be technical. The sentence sounds like feedback on a design project. Read across the next decade of her career and it looks more like a thesis.
Turkington joined Petcurean as director of marketing in August 2010. She later led North American sales and marketing, became chief marketing officer in 2021, and is listed in recently updated professional directories as chief revenue officer beginning in April 2025. Each move widened the field around that same fundamental task: connect what the company makes with why somebody should care.
The education of a translator
Her route into pet food started elsewhere. Turkington studied communications, marketing and public relations at Simon Fraser University from 1998 to 2002. An early public-relations role at the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society placed communication beside community need. A short turn as marketing director for the Vancouver International Comedy Festival added a very different test: earning attention for something experienced live, in a crowded cultural calendar.
Then came the BC Dairy Foundation. As manager of marketing and communications, Turkington worked in a category where logistics, education and consumer habits meet. A presentation credited to her on British Columbia’s elementary school milk program dealt in unglamorous constraints: limited refrigeration, delivery difficulties and uneven school participation. The message could not float above the system. It had to account for how cartons actually reached classrooms.
From 2007 to 2010, she managed healthy-living initiatives at 2010 Legacies Now, the not-for-profit organization that used the Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics as a platform for lasting community programs. She also served as president of the board of DASH-BC from 2004 to 2009. The through-line was not a particular product. It was the practice of making institutions, programs and choices intelligible to the people they were meant to serve.
“Our product can be quite technical in nature.”Jaimie Turkington on Petcurean’s 2011 brand work
A company becomes a category education
Petcurean gave Turkington a long runway. Founded in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley in 1999, the independent company grew a portfolio of dog and cat food brands that now includes GO! Solutions, Now Fresh, Gather and Summit. Its products moved through specialty retailers and online channels in Canada, the United States and international markets. That created a recurring translation problem at scale. The food had to make sense across products, life stages, countries, retailers and customer questions without collapsing into a wall of claims.
The 2011 packaging project made that work visible. Petcurean’s identity and the GO! and NOW FRESH systems were redesigned around stronger formula identification, ingredient callouts, iconography and photographs of active pets. Communication Arts later credited Turkington as a writer on the GO! packaging system. Writing, in this setting, did not mean merely finding a pleasant slogan. It meant helping organize the hierarchy of information a shopper would meet at the shelf.
A year later, the company took the opposite surface - a trade-show wall - and turned it into a conversation. At SuperZoo 2012, Petcurean installed a 12-foot interactive “WonderWall” built from two 80-inch displays and a 16-foot product shelf. Attendees and Facebook followers supplied more than 100 pet photos to a live mosaic. It was an early piece of participatory brand theatre, but Turkington’s description stayed grounded: it engaged people and brought the on-site and online communities into the same frame.
The useful idea was not the size of the screens. It was the invitation. A technical company had found a way to let customers provide the most emotionally legible material in the room: their own animals. The product remained present, but the community made the display move.
From the message to the machinery
Turkington’s responsibilities expanded with the company. In 2018, she became vice president of sales and marketing for North America. Her own description of the role covered sales, marketing and product-innovation strategies, along with team support and company culture. It is a revealing combination. Brand work was no longer only what a customer saw. It included the commercial and organizational machinery required to make the promise real.
Her public comments from the period show attention to demand rather than novelty for its own sake. When Petcurean introduced freeze-dried meal mixers in 2018, Turkington connected the launch to growth in the category and requests for products tailored to specific consumer needs. Whether one agrees with every line extension is beside the point. The operating logic was clear: observe a behavior, identify the request inside it, and create an offer the sales channel can explain.
There was evidence that she cared about execution as much as concept. In a 2013 testimonial for trade-show training, Turkington said her team had exceeded its sales goals by at least 150 percent after using the program’s principles. Testimonials are naturally selective, but the detail is useful. It shows a marketing manager willing to train the people at the booth and measure what happened after the display was built.
A widening operating brief
The value of staying long enough
When Petcurean promoted Turkington to chief marketing officer in May 2021, it asked her to oversee global marketing while continuing to guide the Innovation Team. CEO Rick van Schagen described her as one of the first hires on the marketing team and emphasized her passion, enthusiasm, appetite for learning and caring personality. The promotion formalized something her career already suggested: she had become a bridge between functions.
Long tenure can harden into habit. It can also compound context. A leader who has watched a packaging system age, listened to retailers, launched extensions, trained teams and carried a portfolio into new countries builds a memory of why the business works the way it does. That memory becomes especially valuable when marketing and innovation share a brief. The person shaping the message is close enough to the product to challenge it, while the people shaping the product can hear how its advantages will survive translation.
Turkington’s public professional description calls her a lifelong learner and stresses a high level of engagement. The phrasing fits the architecture of her career. She did not leave communications behind as her remit grew. She kept adding adjacent systems: first the channel, then the product process, then global brand planning, and eventually revenue.
The newest title deserves a small note of precision. Public trade coverage documents her chief marketing officer appointment in 2021. Current professional directories list her as chief revenue officer from April 2025, though some older pages still carry the previous title. The change makes strategic sense as a widening of scope, but the public record offers few details about the new mandate. What can be said is simpler: sales and marketing, once joined in her earlier North American role, appear joined again at the executive level.
The advantage of a long apprenticeship is not familiarity. It is knowing which parts of the business need to speak to one another.
Purpose, made concrete
By Petcurean’s 25th anniversary in 2024, the company’s story required more than a retrospective. Turkington helped announce “Nourish to Flourish,” a plan to donate 250,000 meals to rescues, shelters and community groups across five Canadian provinces. Employees also volunteered with the S.A.Y. Lands Office on salmon-habitat restoration. The milestone became a unit of action: one meal for each symbolic measure of the anniversary’s scale.
In her anniversary remarks, Turkington connected product, community work and environmental action as parts of the same desired impact. The move is worth noticing because corporate purpose often becomes least persuasive when it is most abstract. A meal count is concrete. A volunteer week has dates and participants. Habitat work has a place. Specificity gives the story edges.
That instinct returns us to the package. Clear communication is not synonymous with fewer words. It means giving the audience the information that helps them act. At different points in Turkington’s career, the audience has been a school coordinator solving a refrigeration problem, a retailer navigating a product range, a trade-show visitor contributing a photo, or a team deciding what to build next.
Her career is therefore less a story of brand polish than one of connective judgment. She has worked where communication meets logistics, where marketing meets sales, where innovation meets the shelf, and where a company anniversary meets the communities around it. The thread is practical: complexity earns its place only when somebody can use it.
For leaders in technical consumer categories, that may be the most transferable lesson. Learn the product deeply, but do not make depth the customer’s burden. Learn the commercial system, but do not let the numbers erase the relationship. Stay curious enough to revise the story, and stay close enough to operations that the story remains true.