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Leading Brands, Inc. North American Bottling Division Announces: New Co-Packing Agreement with Major Beverage Company

VANCOUVER, CANADA - December 11, 2002 - LEADING BRANDS, INC. LBIX (TSX:LBI) - December 11, 2002 - Canada's largest independent, fully integrated brand management company, announces that it has entered into a new co-packing agreement to provide significant new volume to its Edmonton plant.

The Company has agreed to a new, multi-year contract with a major international beverage company to add new products and package sizes to the portfolio presently bottled for them.

North American Bottling President Tim Dagg said: "We are very proud to expand our relationship with this customer, as well as finalize a multi-year contract with them. Under the terms of this arrangement we will add both new products and package sizes. With 1,500,000 new cases, we anticipate that this agreement will also be significantly accretive to earnings in 2003. This is the fourth new co-packing agreement we have entered into in the past three months, which is indicative of the growing demand for our specialized hot-fill packaging services."

About Leading Brands, Inc.
Leading Brands, Inc. (NASDAQ:LBIX) is North America’s only fully integrated premium beverage company. The Company’s unique Integrated Distribution System (IDS) ™ offers turnkey, one-stop shopping to food and beverage brand owners, including manufacturing, distribution, sales/marketing and licensing. In addition, Leading Brands produces their own line of beverages such as TrueBlue®, LiteBlue®, TREK® Natural Sports Drinks, NITRO® Energy Drinks, INFINITY® Health Water™, Country Harvest® Juices, and Caesar’s® Cocktails.

Forward Looking Statements
Certain information contained in this press release includes forward-looking statements. Words such as “believe”, “expect,” “will,” or comparable terms, are intended to identify forward-looking statements concerning the Company’s expectations, beliefs, intentions, plans, objectives, future events or performance and other developments. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are based on information available to the Company on the date hereof. Such statements speak only as of the date hereof. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company’s estimations and projections are disclosed in the Company’s securities filings and include, but are not limited to, the following: general economic conditions, weather conditions, changing beverage consumption trends, pricing, availability of raw materials, economic uncertainties (including currency exchange rates), government regulation, managing and maintaining growth, the effect of adverse publicity, litigation, competition and other risk factors described from time to time in securities reports filed by Leading Brands, Inc.

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