T H E   T E A M

 Joan Kimball-Morgan - CEO

 About Connect2Market’s CEO-

Joan Kimball-Morgan, a Michigan native, is an innovative leader with more than 25 years of international business experience.  As CEO of Connect2Market, she serves as a sales, marketing and brand catalyst for her US based and international clients. 
 
Joan’s business career spans both domestic and global markets in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.  At power protection giant Tripp Lite, she pioneered international markets and successfully established all levels of sales and marketing operations for Tripp abroad. 

For 22 years, Joan served as Business Development Director-Food Industry for the Quebec Government Office in Chicago, where she provided strategic business development and marketing expertise and connected US business partner opportunities to hundreds of manufacturers, key industry associations, and government partners located in Quebec, Canada.  She also developed and directed national marketing promotions for Quebec industries, such as Quebec is Cooking! and Quebec MAKES  Your Brand.  In addition, she has contributed to the development and execution of Quebec’s B2B events in the US and Canada and its branding initiatives such as, Foods of Quebec, since 1534 and Quebec Invites You to the Table.   As a food industry expert for Quebec, she developed and directed one of the USA’s first national marketing campaigns for maple products, called “Do More With Maple!”

​For the past 25 years, Joan has been a proactive member of the US and Canadian food industry communities.  Her industry knowledge spans a wide-range of product and industry categories, from retail, private brand, foodservice to ingredients.  She has served on national Boards, Committees and Councils and has volunteered countless hours towards the success of many food industry associations, such as the American Cheese Society, International Association of Culinary Professionals, the PLMA, the FMI Private Brand Leadership Council, the Institute of Food Technologists, Women Impacting Store Brand Excellence (WISE) among others.  She has also chaired multiple international conferences for US based food industry associations and was inducted into the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers  and Les Dames d'Escoffier in 2011. 
 
Joan graduated from Northern Michigan University, where she earned her BA in French and Spanish and helped pioneer the school’s study abroad program.   In 2017, she served as NMU’s College of Business Executive in Residence. In that position she helped to enrich student learning by sharing her experience and expertise with future trailblazers.  She is also a successful entrepreneur, having served as founding partner in a thriving high-end beauty business in Chicago. 

She is a guerilla entrepreneur and strategic thinker whose expertise spans industries and global markets.  Although, if you ask her what she does for a living, she will tell you that she is a solution-finder and a time-saver.

Languages:  English (Native), French (ACTFL Advanced High), Spanish, German and Farsi.