Today’s post is a must-read for anyone hoping to import food into the Canadian market.
Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) share the federal responsibility for regulating food products sold in Canada. Health Canada establishes health and safety standards and develops labelling policies related to health and nutrition, while the CFIA develops standards related to these products’ packaging, labelling, and advertising and oversees all inspection and enforcement duties. These roles are outlined in the Safe Food for Canadians Act (SFCA) and the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SFCR), as well as the Food and Drugs Act (FDA) and the Food and Drug Regulations (FDR). The SFCA and SFCR cover imported, exported, or inter-provincially traded food products.
By creating the SFCR, the CFIA hoped to “improve the consistency of rules across all types of food, reduce the administrative burden, and enable food businesses to be innovative through outcome-based provisions.”
There are three critical elements of the SFCR: licensing, traceability, and preventive controls.
Licensing allows the CFIA to identify and manage food businesses across all regulated food sectors, collect information about their activities, and take responsive action when non-compliant activities are detected. A Safe Food for Canadians (SFC) license is mandatory to import certain foods into Canada. More information is available on the CFIA’s Automated Import Reference System (AIRS) and the CFIA’s licensing interactive tool.
Preventive controls refer to a combination of measures created to prevent food safety hazards and lower the chances of contaminated food entering the Canadian market. License and non-license holders must implement preventive control plans (PCP). The preventive controls related to food safety are based on the Recommended International Code of Practice General Principles of Food Hygiene. The Preventive Control Plan interactive tool will help you determine if you need to prepare a written PCP.
The traceability part of the SFCR requires all license holders to maintain records tracing food, forward one step (e.g., to the immediate customer), and backward one step (e.g., to the immediate supplier). This allows for greater efficiency if unsafe food needs to be removed from the market. Food businesses need to create and keep traceability documents, which may include the following:
- Identification of the food,
- One step back (name of the person the food was bought from),
- One step forward (name of the person the food was sold to),
- Ingredients (if/when applicable), and
- Food animals (if applicable, animals the business slaughters).
There are exceptions: grocery stores, bakeries, butcheries, and other food retailers are only responsible for tracing food one step back to their suppliers, and traceability requirements do not apply to restaurants. Refer to the CFIA’s Traceability interactive tool to determine your traceability requirements and when they must be in place.
Importers can stay updated on the latest news via the My CFIA portal.
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