What CFIA's 2026-27 Inspection Campaign Means for Licensed Food Manufacturers
What the campaign commits CFIA to, who it puts in scope, and what an operator should be doing in the next 90 days.
CFIA has committed to inspect more than 2,400 previously uninspected manufactured food establishments by fall 2026. For licensed Canadian manufacturers without recent inspector contact, the next inspection year is designed to find them.
Three things, taken together, brought the campaign about. The Inspector General reviewed CFIA's coverage of plant-based manufactured food establishments and found that nearly half had never been visited. The Agency's 2026-27 Departmental Plan committed to a plant-based manufactured foods action plan and an 85% compliance-resolution target by March 31, 2027. And the Action Plan in response to the Inspector General's recommendations committed CFIA to risk-based inspections of more than 2,400 previously uninspected manufactured food establishments by fall 2026.
This page sets out what those commitments mean in operational terms, who is in scope, and what an operator should be doing in the next 90 days. The analysis tracks where commitments and timelines stand as of mid-2026; for evergreen readiness content, see our page on CFIA Inspections.
What the campaign is
CFIA’s inspection campaign is a set of commitments distributed across two CFIA publications and an Inspector General's review, and the way they relate to each other is the campaign.
The Inspector General's review of CFIA's coverage of plant-based manufactured food establishments is the analytical predicate. The review found that 26 of the 54 plant-based food manufacturing establishments examined had never been visited by CFIA at the time of the review. The plant-based finding sits inside a broader coverage question: the manufactured food sector was onboarded to the SFCR in 2022, and CFIA's inspection coverage had not kept pace with the licensed population. The Inspector General's review made the gap visible, and the rest of the campaign is the response to it.
CFIA's 2026-27 Departmental Plan set the strategic frame. It committed the Agency to a plant-based manufactured foods action plan covering inspection oversight, licensing controls, risk modelling, and enforcement. It also set a 2027 indicator: at least 85% of food establishments with identified compliance issues will have addressed them upon follow-up or been brought into compliance by March 31, 2027. The historical series puts that figure in context (75.4% in 2022-23, 79.5% in 2023-24, 85.8% in 2024-25); with 2024-25 actuals already at the target, the 85% indicator functions as a floor against backsliding through 2027 rather than a stretch goal.
The Action Plan, published in response to the Inspector General's recommendations, translated the Departmental Plan's strategic commitments into operational ones. CFIA committed to risk-based inspections of more than 2,400 manufactured food establishments that are currently licensed but have not yet been inspected. The work began in summer 2025; the target completion is fall 2026.
The Action Plan also signalled an enforcement shift. The manufactured food sector was onboarded to the SFCR in 2022 with an initial focus on compliance promotion, helping the regulated population learn the new framework. The Action Plan stated CFIA's intention to move toward stronger enforcement, including detention of product, licence suspension and cancellation, and Administrative Monetary Penalties when warranted. For operators whose mental model of CFIA in the manufactured food sector was set during the post-2022 promotion period, that mental model is no longer current.
Who is affected
The campaign reaches across the licensed manufactured-food population, but it concentrates on segments where prior inspection coverage has been thin and where the regulatory shifts since 2022 have not been fully tested.
The headline at-risk population is the licensed manufactured-food establishment that has not had recent inspector contact. CFIA's risk model has historically allocated inspection resources toward higher-volume, higher-risk operations; lower-volume facilities, novel-category manufacturers, and operations with limited compliance history could go years without a visit. The 2,400 figure in the Action Plan is the operative count of facilities CFIA has licensed but has not yet visited, and the campaign's purpose is to close that gap.
Plant-based manufacturers sit at the centre of the campaign. The Inspector General's review focused there, and the Departmental Plan's plant-based manufactured foods action plan keeps that focus through the 2026-27 inspection year. Co-manufacturers of plant-based product lines are in the Action Plan's frame as well; importers of plant-based products are in scope through the licensing-tied PCP pathway addressed below. Ready-to-eat producers sit adjacent to the campaign's core population: Health Canada's Listeria policy for ready-to-eat foods runs in parallel, and is applied in the conduct of federal food inspections.
The interprovincial trade transition is the sharpest first-inspection-ever scenario the campaign produces. A manufacturer that has sold only within its province under provincial-only food regulation, and now begins selling into another province, crosses into federal SFCR jurisdiction. The licence is required, the PCP requirement attaches, and the establishment becomes visible to CFIA's inspection scheduling for the first time. Many operators do not see the regulatory shift until the first SFCR licence application is filed; by that point the establishment is in the campaign's at-risk population on day one.
Importers of in-scope commodities who hold trade-licence-tied PCPs are in scope through that pathway, even where the importer does not manufacture in Canada. Brand owners and consumer-products GCs whose exposure runs through co-manufacturers are indirectly in scope: the co-manufacturer's PCP is the brand owner's exposure, and a finding at the co-manufacturer's facility lands on the brand owner's product.
Several populations are not in this campaign's primary scope. Federally registered slaughter and meat processing, conventional dairy, eggs and processed eggs, fish processing, honey, and maple are already in regular federal inspector contact under separate programmes. The Inspector General's review and the Action Plan are addressing the manufactured-food coverage gap, not these established sectors.
How first contact arrives
In the matters now surfacing under the campaign, there is a clear pattern: first contact arrives as an unannounced email from a CFIA inspector proposing a scoping call, typically about 45 minutes, scheduled a few days out. The call's purpose is to scope and schedule an on-site inspection, and determine inspection priorities vis-à-vis the operational realities of the regulated party. The inspections that follow have, so far, concentrated on Part 4 of the SFCR: the preventive controls themselves and the Preventive Control Plan that documents them.
What’s striking is how quickly this moves for regulated parties: the gap between the email and the call is days, and the gap between the call and the visit is one or two weeks. An operator's preparation window effectively closes when the email arrives; whatever state the PCP and its supporting records are in that morning is the state the scoping call will be working from. The programme below assumes the email has not yet landed. The closer an operator is to having completed it when the email does land, the more the scoping call becomes an administrative step rather than the start of a scramble.
What to do in the next 90 days
For licensed Canadian food manufacturers, the operational task in front of you is not new, but the urgency is. And the campaign's timeline gives operators a clearer schedule than they usually have for work that should already be moving.
The highest-priority work is likely internal: open the Preventive Control Plan and walk the floor with it. The question is whether the document on file describes the operation as it runs today. Reformulations, equipment changes, line additions, supplier substitutions, packaging configurations changed at a customer's request, and SKUs added since the last formal review all create dissonance between document and operation. The PCP that does not reflect the operation as of this morning is the document the inspector will read; doing this walk is how the gap surfaces in time to close it. For the substance of how the walk runs and the six categories where files most often diverge, see our page on CFIA Inspections.
The second priority is related to the operational records and the supporting programmes that the PCP relies on. Refresh the supplier verification file: letters of guarantee, certificates of analysis, audit reports, and approved-supplier lists, each tied to specific lots or shipments rather than running on assumption. Run the recall procedure end-to-end with a notional product and lot, and time it against the timelines the regulation requires; a procedure that has never been executed under time pressure will not be ready when it is called on. Verify traceability one-up and one-down across the most-recent reformulations, where the records most often fall short of the steady-state picture. Audit the training matrix against what staff actually know and do, not just who attended which session. None of this is sophisticated work; the value is in doing it before an inspector does.
The third priority is external: a reader trained on the regulator's perspective, walking the documents and the floor, will surface the parts an in-house team has stopped seeing. The point is not to outsource compliance; it is to bring a calibrated outside read of the document-operation alignment and the credibility picture the next inspector contact will produce.
These three priorities share one operational principle. The campaign's volume of inspections means CFIA will surface gaps that are already visible from a desk; the operator who does the work first finds those gaps on better terms than the operator who finds them with an inspector standing in the room.
Where this is headed
The campaign does not end with this inspection year. CFIA's 2027-28 Departmental Plan, when published, will set the next year's frame; the Action Plan will report against the fall 2026 completion timeline; and the Agency's enforcement posture in the manufactured food sector will produce a public record over the next 18 months. This page is written for the operator who has to plan against that arc.
For evergreen inspection-readiness substance, including what inspectors look at, the six categories where files diverge from operations, and response posture during a finding, see our page on CFIA Inspections.
GSJ&Co. advises licensed Canadian food businesses on inspection preparation, response to findings, corrective action plans, and ERA score management. Contact info@gsjameson.com or +1 (647) 638-3994.
Primary Authorities
Safe Food for Canadians Act (S.C. 2012, c. 24): inspector powers and enforcement provisions
Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SOR/2018-108): preventive controls and PCP requirements (Part 4), traceability (s. 90)
CFIA, 2026-27 Departmental Plan: plant-based manufactured foods action plan; compliance-resolution target
CFIA Inspector General, Review of plant-based manufactured food establishments
CFIA, Response to the Inspector General recommendations regarding manufactured foods (action plan with six commitments)
Health Canada, Policy on Listeria monocytogenes in ready-to-eat foods (2023)
Last updated: June 2026. This page is news-current and is maintained by GSJ&Co; it is updated when CFIA publishes material changes to the campaign or its targets.