Proposed exemptions to the federal regulations on “Product of Canada” and “Made in Canada” food claims will be the subject of an online consultation until May 16.
Participants will be asked to consider “specific guideline details” such as exemptions for certain ingredients that are difficult to source within Canada, such as sugar.
“We define that to write on your product ‘This is a product of Canada,’ the contents should be 98 per cent (Canadian grown), but the producers told us the problem was when they add some sugar or when they add salt or spice or vinegar,” Jean-Pierre Blackburn, the federal minister of state for agriculture, was quoted as saying last week on the hog industry-sponsored program Farmscape.
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“When they add that in their product it’s like they are over and they are not able to say ‘This is a product of Canada.'”
Ultimately, he said, “we want to be sure that the consumers agree with those products that we should not count in the total of the 98 per cent” of Canadian ingredients, Blackburn said.
Participants visiting the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s online consultation are asked to keep in mind some “key factors and objectives” in the federal “Product of Canada” guidelines — namely, that the guidelines:
- are first and foremost in place to avoid misleading claims;
- must be clear, transparent and support consumer choice; and
- must be easy to understand and communicate to consumers, producers, processors and importers and be clear for the regulator to enforce.
Blackburn last week also pledged that the government, by the end of 2010, working in “close collaboration with industry,” will finalize “an action plan for the food processing that responds to the sector’s needs.”
What’s been dubbed the Food Processing Competitiveness Industry-Government Action Plan is meant to “help to equip the industry to address current market challenges and position Canada as a world leader in food processing.”
