Each year, the Edmonton Chamber Ball brings together our city’s business community for an unforgettable evening of celebration, connection, and recognition. At the heart of this signature event are the Chamber Awards — a moment to honour the leaders, innovators, and builders shaping Edmonton’s future.
From rising stars to community champions, and from bold innovators to the ultimate Business Leader of the Year, these awards shine a spotlight on the very best of Edmonton. The Chamber Ball provides the stage, the spotlight, and the story — reminding us all of the extraordinary people and organizations that make our city a place to thrive.
We're celebrating the winners at Chamber Ball 2026!
Join us on Saturday, January 24, 2026.
A Leader Who Teaches a City How to Exhale
“I didn’t have a support network. I didn’t have the chance to exhale. I had to figure everything out myself.”
Traci Bateman knows what it feels like to hold your breath for years. She learned it at fourteen, the age when life is supposed to be opening up, not collapsing. That was the year her mother died of breast cancer. The loss did not just take a parent. It took the one place where grief could land softly.
It is the kind of moment that can push a person inward or outward. Traci went outward. She became the steady hand she once needed. The loud believer. The person who notices the weight someone is carrying before they even say a word.
A Vision Born from Longing, Not a Business Plan
Thirteen years ago, that instinct turned into a business Edmonton had never seen before.
The idea for Bliss Yoga Spa didn’t begin with spreadsheets or strategy decks. It began during years spent traveling for her husband Mike’s work in the grocery industry. They kept discovering the same thing: warm, luxurious wellness spaces where people could breathe deeply, soften, and feel human again.
“Nothing really jumped out at us,” Traci remembers.
Where others saw a gap, she saw a door. Mike was stepping away from the grocery business after decades of family legacy. Traci saw a chance to build something entirely new. A place that combined yoga and spa under one roof, not as separate services but as a single experience of care. At the time, a yoga spa didn’t exist anywhere in Canada. She and Mike were inventing the category at the same time they were building the business.
A Business That Quietly Saves Lives
Every leader has a moment that answers the question: Was this worth it?
For Traci, it came when a client pulled her aside and said, “Thank you for building Bliss. It saved my life.”
The woman had suffered a devastating family loss and found in Bliss the one place where she could breathe again. Traci has heard versions of that story many times over the years. People who walk in carrying grief, stress, burnout, or exhaustion — and leave feeling human again.
“Success was always based on the financials,” she says. “But what keeps me going are the stories.”
A Leader Who Chooses Courage Over Comfort
Risk threads through Traci’s entire story.
Her first leap was moving from Calgary to Edmonton in 2002 to marry Mike and help raise his two boys. Her second was opening a luxury wellness model no one in the market had ever seen. Her third came during COVID, when group classes declined and Bliss needed to evolve fast.
Rather than wait for the world to return to normal, Traci rebuilt. Bliss expanded into primary care, nurse practitioners, IV therapy, acupuncture, reiki, and a full wellness integration model. It was expensive, exhausting, and emotionally heavy. It was also exactly what her community needed next.
A City That Returned the Love
Traci jokes that she didn’t choose Edmonton — Edmonton chose her. But she has chosen the city back for more than twenty years.
“The ripple starts here,” she says. “Our team embodies the vision, and it goes outward everywhere.”
Today, Bliss employs fifty staff who carry the culture forward in every room, every interaction, every moment when a client needs to feel grounded.
She credits the Edmonton Chamber for opening doors, expanding her network, and amplifying Bliss’s voice across the business community. It is a partnership rooted in advocacy, connection, and shared belief in Edmonton’s potential.
A Leadership Style Built on Empathy
Traci leads the way she wished someone had led her at fourteen. With empathy. With compassion. With vision. With the belief that no one should ever feel alone or unseen.
She hopes people remember that she built Bliss to be the space she never had — a place to land softly, to reset, to breathe.
To exhale.
Traci Bateman
Bliss MediSpa & Integrated Wellness (formerly Bliss YogaSpa)
Economic Impact Award
presented by National Bank
Bianca Parsons grew up in a house where food was never just food. It was a memory. It was culture. It was how immigrants kept home alive in a new country. That conviction shapes everything she does now as Executive Director of the Alberta Food Processors Association (AFPA).
This year, things got personal at AFPA. Bianca calls it “tariff whiplash,” a season of shifting rules that made the cost of producing even basic goods feel unpredictable. Ingredients, packaging, machinery parts, everything was moving across borders under changing rules and fluctuating fees. For small processors, the instability was overwhelming. Ninety percent of Alberta food processors have fewer than ten employees. They do not have teams to interpret trade chaos. So AFPA became the translator, the advocate, and the shield.
One Edmonton company saved just over seven million dollars in six months because of AFPA’s tariff advocacy.
Bianca gets emotional talking about collaboration because she has watched what it does for people who start with almost nothing. Many of the businesses AFPA serves are immigrant led, women led, and led by entrepreneurs navigating English as a second language. It is a scary leap for any founder.
In Alberta’s food sector, Bianca sees something different. Competitors help competitors. One company offered to haul another company’s product to the United States for free, just to keep their dream alive. “We’re not fighting against each other,” she says. “We’re fighting together to create a stronger Alberta and a stronger Edmonton.”
That is why she chose Edmonton to build her career and her family. She calls the city hungry, hardworking, approachable. A place where people roll up their sleeves and sit down for coffee to solve problems together.
Bianca’s leadership is equal parts policy precision and deep care. She makes space for legacy businesses to keep growing, and for new founders to believe they belong. That is what lifting the whole city looks like.
Bianca Parsons
Industry Innovator Award
presented by Rogers
Cory’s career has a way of turning accidents into advantages. His path into artificial intelligence didn’t begin with code — it began at nineteen, building a website while studying at the University of Alberta. That site became Investopedia, the platform he co-founded with Corey Wagner and later sold to Forbes while still in his twenties.
A decade later, curiosity led Cory back to the UofA with his partner, Nicole Janssen, to explore whether AI could reduce content-creation costs in digital media investments. The project failed. They were ahead of what AI could reliably do, and the ecosystem wasn’t set up for commercialization. But the failure opened a different door. Cory realized Edmonton was home to extraordinary AI talent, and that the bigger opportunity wasn’t academic — it was practical. It was industry.
In 2018, AltaML was launched to solve real-world problems. “I’ve always believed that transformational is possible,” Cory says. “Our innovation drives efficiency and real-world outcomes — like preparing for natural disasters, planning school space, and changing the way we deliver healthcare.” One defining project through AltaML’s GovLab program partners with Alberta’s healthcare system to reduce cancer care wait times. By modelling the oncology system, bottlenecks can be identified and patient flow redesigned. Cory doesn’t describe it as a technical milestone — he describes it as time given back to Albertans and work “that has the potential to literally save lives.”
“Innovation is about partnership,” Cory says. “When you bring the pieces together, you can change lives.”
Born and raised here, he calls Edmonton a city with soul — large enough to build globally relevant companies and small enough for the right conversation to change a career. AltaML didn’t start as a perfect idea. It started as a failed one. And for Cory, that reflects Edmonton: learn fast, partner well, and build the future anyway.
Cory Janssen
Co-Founder and CEO of AltaML
Community Builder Award
presented by Qualico
By day, you’ll find Peter at the University of Alberta, where he leads the eHUB Entrepreneurship Centre and mentors the next wave of Alberta’s entrepreneurs. Most nights, if you walk into one of the Scale Kitchens facilities, past the rolling racks of cooling bagels and the clang of sheet pans, you’ll find him doing exactly what he’s been doing since he was fourteen years old: building something.
Peter’s flagship location is Meuwly’s, a company he co-owns with Glendon Tan. It began as a charcuterie business selling cured meats on 124 Street. Now Meuwly’s produces its own products, runs a small restaurant operation, and, most importantly, is building Scale Kitchens, a launch pad for emerging brands.
This summer, that mission lit up in real time. Beb’s Bagels, a small company Peter has supported for three to four years, went viral on TikTok. The next day, one partner ran downstairs with eyes wide and said, “Guys, there’s a line around the block.” Hundreds of people showed up. Peter watched their turning point happen in the span of a morning, and felt the quiet pride of knowing Scale Kitchens helped make that moment possible.
Edmonton is the perfect home for that kind of work. Born and raised here, Peter calls the city scrappy, youthful, and stubbornly original. “We do things our own way,” he says. “There’s pride, grit, and resilience here. It makes us creative, and it makes this a really fun place to be.”
Peter Keith
Co-owner of Meuwleys
Emerging Business of the Year Award
presented by Navacord
A CPA, CA with two decades of experience, a mom of two, and a Prairie kid who made Edmonton home in 2009, Alicia had built a solid career in public accounting. But by the time COVID hit, she knew the work no longer aligned with her purpose. She kept seeing the same problem everywhere she went: an entire industry designed around a default client who did not consider how different the world is for women.
When women business owners were in the room, they just were not being served in ways that made sense. “The information was presented in a way that didn’t consider women, that some women understand, or frankly, didn't feel comfortable with,” Alicia says. She knew that if she wanted a different table, she would have to build it.
So, during the pandemic, while she was home with two little girls and the world felt uncertain, she launched MOD Accounting. The purpose was clear from day one: financial empowerment for women entrepreneurs and social impact leaders.
When Alicia posted on LinkedIn about this new endeavor, within 24 hours she had replaced her income. Today MOD serves more than a hundred clients and employs a team of eight, registered in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario.
Edmonton is the engine behind Alicia’s confidence. Alicia was not born here, but she describes the city as the most relationship driven business community she has ever seen. Champions speak your name when you are not in the room. “That integrity and community vibe,” she says, “I haven’t seen it anywhere else.”
She joined the Edmonton Chamber this summer on a whim after watching its social media and thinking, I want to be part of that. What she found was immediate belonging, a network that uplifts members’ voices and connects them to real opportunities.
Alicia Fowler
A Chamber Ball Award, presented by your Company
Interested in sponsoring an award? There are opportunities available here, or by emailing Laura Kinghorn, Vice President of Community Relations at sponsorship@edmontonchamber.com.