Canadian importers of rhum agricole, the French AOC- and IG-bearing cane-juice rums of Martinique and Guadeloupe, have told me more than once that bringing it into Ontario is close to a coin flip: roughly half the time, a shipment fails the LCBO's laboratory and never reaches a shelf. That is their estimate, but it’s enough to dissuade importers from doing much rhum agricole business in Ontario. The molecule at fault is ethyl carbamate, a process contaminant that can form during fermentation, distillation and storage, and one the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies as probably carcinogenic to humans. Historically, the threshold number was 150 ppb.

On 24 July 2026, that number changed its legal character without changing its value. If you make, import or formulate with alcohol, the change is worth understanding.

Of the olive oil the Canadian Food Inspection Agency tested for authenticity in 2024-25, 67 percent matched what its label claimed. Close to one in three samples did not. It is the lowest satisfactory rate of any commodity in the report's authenticity testing, and every one of the 85 olive oil samples was taken at import. CFIA aims this sampling at higher-risk products and businesses and says the results are not representative of the Canadian marketplace. Even so, if you import, bottle or brand olive oil in Canada, that is a serious signal.

Allergen statements, bilingual claims, country-of-origin language, and joint-presentation rules for multipacks are some of the rules that decide whether a product can sit on a shelf in Canada, or whether the company selling it is exposed to enforcement, recall liability, or a Competition Bureau referral. Many of those rules arrived in Canada through the Codex Alimentarius Commission years before they appeared in the Food and Drug Regulations or the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations. Codex sets international labelling standards through its Committee on Food Labelling. Canada hosts that committee, has done so for decades, and chairs its sessions. The 49th Session of CCFL met in Ottawa from May 11 to 15, 2026.

For context, on April 2, 2026, the FDA issued what appears to be its first warning letter with a dedicated AI-manufacturing section, to Purolea Cosmetics Lab in Livonia, Michigan. The letter found that AI agents had generated drug specifications, procedures, and master production records, and that the firm used the AI-generated documents without the review CGMP requires. The firm's owner told FDA investigators she had not known process validation was required because the AI agent had not informed her. FDA devoted a stand-alone section of the warning letter to "Inappropriate Use of Artificial Intelligence in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing."

On April 14, CBC News published the second instalment of an investigation familiar to anyone following Canadian food retail. Reporters visited seventeen stores in three cities, weighed packaged meat on a kitchen scale, and documented thirty-two underweight products across seven Loblaw- and Sobeys-affiliated locations. Overcharges ran from 2% to 16.7%. The mechanism, consistent with CBC's 2025 investigation on the same subject, was that meat had been weighed and priced with its packaging included: the tray, the absorbent pad, the wrap.

Five days before Ottawa amended the Federal Plastics Registry reporting notice, I was presenting on an Alberta Agriculture panel on Sustainable Packaging in Canadian Agri-Food. I described Phase 2 as the next expansion of Canada’s federal plastics data layer. I told them the next phase would add resin manufacturers and importers, broaden the product categories, and pull in industrial and commercial waste data alongside the residential stream that Phase 1 already covers. I was working from the notice as it existed on March 9, 2026. On March 14, Environment and Climate Change Canada published an amended notice in the Canada Gazette that removed Phases 2 and 3 from the reporting notice, confirmed Phase 1 for 2024, and extended it through 2025 and 2026.

Radio-Canada's Enquête recently reported that cans sold as "pure maple syrup" by a Quebec producer contained substantial cane sugar. The story fits a familiar pattern: economically motivated adulteration thrives where premium pricing, low consumer detectability, and gaps in oversight intersect. Canada's regulatory framework for maple syrup is rigorous, but the reported fraud occurred in a distribution channel that falls outside the primary testing regime. For food businesses handling any high-value ingredient, the underlying dynamics are worth understanding.

I have wanted to write about the 2024 Joriki plant-based milk listeria outbreak and the 2025 CFIA audit of the perceived shortcomings of its multiplicative algorithm, the Establishment-based Risk Assessment ("ERA") Model, leading up to the crisis.

For context, the Globe and Mail reported that Joriki went approximately five years from when it received its licence under the Safe Food for Canadians Act ("SFCA") until the outbreak response without a licence inspection. By the time inspectors finally arrived in June 2024, three people were dead, twenty were sick, and Joriki, the co-manufacturer behind national leading brands of plant-based milks, was weeks away from shuttering its operations (it would go on to file for creditor protection with over $200 million in outstanding debts). But up until that point, the ERA model's algorithm did not direct CFIA to require them to go in.

I’ve had a chance to think about the Canada–China Summit in January, which included widely reported agrifood announcements being described as a new dawn or more cautiously, a thawing of what has been a very frosty relationship. I thought it would be worthwhile to think about what is a re-commitment or re-packaged old news, and what we can actually take away from what China and Canada have said since the Summit.