Why it’s not easy to be a ‘Product of Canada’ at the grocery store – National

A movement by Canadians pushing back against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats has more consumers seeking filling their grocery carts with Canadian foods.

That can be a simple task when shopping on the outer edges of the store, selecting items like locally-grown apples or domestically-raised and slaughtered beef.

But head to the middle aisles, where packaged and processed forces fill the shelves, and finding a “Product of Canada” is a lot tougher.

“There’s a couple of things that can affect the difficulty for a food processor to identify products of country,” says Michael von Massow of the University of Guelph’s Department of Food Agricultural and Resource Economics.

He uses a salsa company in Ontario as an example.

“[It] uses Ontario tomatoes, and onions and peppers when they’re in season and produces them with Canadian labour, so that would be perfect, you would think,” he explains.

“But during the winter, they have to buy tomatoes from somewhere else…and in that circumstance, they’re still using Canadian labour, they’re still using Canadian onions, some Canadian peppers some not, so they never put ‘Product of Canada’ on their label even though for a good part of the season, it is a product of Canada.”

Canada’s climate and growing season are major reasons why it’s difficult for food manufacturers be able to make the claim.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency allows food products to be labelled “Product of Canada” when “all or virtually all of major ingredients, processing and labour used to make the food product are Canadian.”

If non-Canadian ingredients are used (such as flavourings or spices), those inputs should make up less than two per cent of the total product.

“Made in Canada,” on the other hand, can be used when the “last substantial transformation of the product” happened within the country.

Use of a maple leaf on product packaging also comes with caveats. According to the CFIA website, if it’s used to imply a “Product of Canada” claim, it must follow the criteria.

It’s difficult to know just how many food items in stores are labelled as either “Product of Canada” or “Made in Canada”, because the Canadian Food Inspection Agency says it doesn’t keep track.

“It is the legal responsibility of businesses to read, understand and comply with Canadian labelling requirements,” explains a CFIA spokesperson in an email to Global News.

Sourcing domestic ingredients is complicated

When Nova Scotia snack bar entrepreneur Sheena Russell started her company 13 years ago, she named it “Made with Local” because that was her goal.

After starting out at farmers’ markets, her bars are now sold in major grocery stores such as Sobeys, and she recently inked a deal with Costco.

The certified Canadian organic bars use Prairie oats, Ontario wild honey, and Nova Scotia blueberries. But while her nut butters are sourced from a Canadian company, the nuts themselves are imported, which means her label can only say “manufactured in Canada.”

While she tries to source ingredients as close to home as possible, it’s not always easy.

Take strawberries, for instance.

“Last year we did a really fun seasonal flavor in the summer called ‘Summer Strawberry,’” says Russell, “and I was very committed to using Canadian-grown strawberries in this beautiful new flavour. But it was really, really hard for me to find dried or even freeze-dried strawberries here in eastern Canada, even though we all know…there’s nothing better than an East Coast-grown local strawberry in June.”

The dried strawberries needed for shelf stability could only be found on the other side of the country in British Columbia.

It took Russell years of sleuthing to find the domestic ingredients in her products and she says now is the time to make it easier for other businesses to do the same.

“A supply chain directory would be something that would be really interesting to see at a federal, at a national level for raw materials,” she says. “I have dozens and dozens of friends who are small business owners in the food and beverage space and they’ve been reaching out to me to learn more about what suppliers we work with.

“I’ll do it for anybody, but it’s just something that I think there’s definitely a call for there being a national directory of things made here, not just from a consumer level, but also at a business-to-business level.”

The high level of integration in the food production chain between Canada and the United States is also a factor.

Even a product like beef can get complicated.

“I was at a beef feed lot out west earlier this year,” says von Massow. “They were getting animals born in the U.S. that were fed here using Canadian grain and Canadian labour, and shipped to a packing plant in the U.S.

“With those sorts of integrated supply chains, it’s much more difficult to be definitive.”

Tyler McCann, managing director of the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, says the size of the company can also play into the feasibility of finding domestic ingredients.

“A lot of the large food manufacturers are large multi-national organizations, they’ve got people all around the world that can help them source products in Canada or somewhere else,” he explains.

“If you’re a small food producer, it can be more of a challenge, and it depends how complicated the products are that you’re making. Often we get into these problems of scale,” McCann adds.

Transportation costs can also play a role.

“When you’ve got a port in Halifax and you can get a product on a boat and ship it [to Halifax] from South America,…it probably costs quite a bit less…than it does to move it by truck from Western Canada to Halifax. “

Finding alternatives can be tricky

In other cases, there’s little choice for domestic alternatives.

The possibility of retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa if Trump carries through with his plans have prompted Burnaby, B.C., beverage company Earth’s Own to start looking for alternatives to the California almonds used in its nut milks, as nuts aren’t grown in Canada.

“We will see to what degree the counter-tariffs are applicable,” says Maheb Nathoo, CEO of Earth’s Own. “At the moment, all this is grey zone for us we do not know precisely what’s going to get caught, we know from a Canadian perspective it’s going to be selected ingredients, but in the meantime, we recognize…that in our situation, we need to be prepared.”

So far, American almonds are not on the list of products subject to the potential counter tariffs proposed by Ottawa earlier this month.

But some dairy products are, which could also affect the company, which produces most of its products in Canada, with some exceptions.

“And exceptions are some cream cheese, some butter, and some sour cream, which we get from the U.S., but our long-term plan, which was the case regardless, was to build some critical mass for those products — we don’t have the machinery now. And we’ve been transparent with our supplier,” says Nathoo.

A spokesperson for the federal department of agriculture and agri-food says Minister Lawrence MacAulay has communicated with industry, provincial, and territorial leaders to discuss ways to support the sector “in the current context of the Canada-United States trading relationship.”

At the “Made with Local” production facility in Windsor, N.S., where the company bakes and packages 10,000 bars or cookies daily, Russell anticipates more manufacturers will be looking at their ingredients to see what they can source domestically, even if they can’t quite reach the “product of Canada” threshold.

“You’re going to see a lot more Canadian brands putting a big old maple leaf on the front of their package,” she quips.