Olivier Primeau

Sainte-Martine, the family IGA, and a beach bought in 2015

Olivier Primeau was born on 14 November 1985 in Sainte-Martine, a small town in the Montérégie, into the grocery trade. He worked in the family stores from childhood and by 2005, in his late teens, was running a second family IGA. His first promotional work happened at the local arena, where he put on Coors Light nights; he has since noted that almost no footage of that period survives, which is why it is largely absent from the television series made about him in 2026.

In 2015, using proceeds from the sale of a family grocery store, Primeau bought the Beachclub in Pointe-Calumet together with his father and his brother. The site — an outdoor beach venue running summer day parties — became the base for everything that followed, and the point from which he started treating himself as the product rather than the operator.

The brand that became the business

Primeau's method was to detach the name from the postcode. In 2017 he launched Beach Day Every Day, a clothing and lifestyle brand with Labatt attached, which let the Beachclub exist on a can and a T-shirt in towns that would never visit the beach. In 2018 he published a book, Parce que mon père est riche, taking the accusation most often thrown at him as a title, and released Audacieux, a documentary on Club Illico.

The expansion ran outwards from there. In 2019 he created Festival Métro Métro, a rap festival staged at Montreal's Olympic Park, which gave him a second live property with a different audience from the beach. In 2020 he added a media arm, Beach News Every Day, a pizza franchise called Slice Gang, and a line of frozen poutine. In the autumn of 2024 the listed vehicle associated with him, Prime Drink Group, acquired the Quebec drinks maker Triani Canada, owner of the Glutenberg, Oshlag and Vox Populi brands — the biggest single bet of his career.

Where the money went

The record is not one of uninterrupted expansion, and Primeau does not pretend otherwise. In 2022 a Beachclub subsidiary filed for insolvency owing roughly $1.8 million in unpaid taxes. In May 2023 shots were fired at his Laval condominium, and Slice Gang premises were targeted twice in arson attempts.

Triani was worse. Through 2025 and into 2026 the company fought the revocation of its alcohol licence, then went bankrupt in the spring of 2026, with Prime Drink Group writing down more than $26 million on the assets tied to it. Primeau has described the collapse as a setback rather than a reinvention, and has kept working through it; the drinks business was the one part of his portfolio that depended on a regulator's signature rather than on an audience.

A docuseries and a campaign van

In July 2026 Crave released Olivier Primeau, pas encore milliardaire!, a docuseries fronted by the accountant and commentator Pierre-Yves McSween, which takes apart how the Beachclub and Beach Day Every Day actually convert attention into revenue. Compared with Audacieux eight years earlier, the man on screen is quieter about the money. Primeau put the change down to maturity and to the fact that financial security removes a kind of stress rather than supplying happiness, and he drew a firm line around his private life, saying he will not conduct a relationship publicly and privately at once.

Then came politics, which cost him more than the drinks did. Christine Fréchette, leading the Coalition avenir Québec, approached him around sixty days before the 2026 provincial election was called, and he accepted a mandate to tour small and medium-sized businesses on the party's behalf. He ran it for 24 days to 4 October 2026, in a branded minivan nicknamed the Primeau mobile, hitting as many as five businesses a day, seven days a week, across the province with two media staff in tow — roughly 74 companies in total. He told Le Soleil in mid-September that he did not expect to change the world, only to give visibility to the small problems that add up to a big one. The $20,000 honorarium went to organisations supporting entrepreneurship.

The CAQ lost; the Parti Québécois won, and subsequently asked him for his tour report. On 23 October 2026, on Hugo Girard's podcast Sans Limite, Primeau broke his silence on the episode with « J'ai été naïf » — naive, he argued, about the timing rather than the substance, since the same visits made before or after a campaign would have been read as business journalism instead of partisan work.

The 4 April game, and the rematch

The live act is new. On 4 April 2026 Primeau played a hockey match against the Charlevoix streamer Lewislefou at the Colisée de Laval, with both sides iced from the Quebec creator scene plus comedians and former professionals. The 3,500-seat building sold out and took more than 4,000 people in. Primeau's team led 3-1 early in the second period through Kess Notargiacomo, Jonathan Marchitello and Stefano Musacchio; Team Lewis answered within eight seconds through Derek Fontaine, levelled through Maxime Lavoie and Olivier Leblanc, and won it 4-3 when Lavoie scored 3:52 into overtime. Greg Lancto and Jean-Charles Lajoie ran Primeau's bench; Georges Laraque ran Lewis's.

The online audience is what made the rematch inevitable. Organisers counted about 820,000 viewers across the stream, peaking near 50,000 at once on Twitch and 20,000 on YouTube, and $30,000 of the profit went to community organisations.

On 21 April 2026, at a press conference in Quebec City, the pair announced the return fixture: La revanche, at the Centre Vidéotron on 21 November 2026, a step up from 3,500 seats to more than 18,000. Tickets opened the following day at between $20 and $40, and more than 10,000 seats went in under an hour, the entire lower bowl clearing the same day.

Standing, in early November 2026

Fifteen days out from the Centre Vidéotron date, Primeau sits in an unusual position for a nightlife operator: he has a ticketing-site artist page with a single show on it, and the show is a hockey game. The pipeline behind it is a poutine restaurant with the streamer Cocotte, an attempt to take Beach Day Every Day into France, and a water venture he describes as the furthest advanced of the three — the one he expects to land first, bankruptcy or not.