Canada’s food safety authority made a subtle language change to its guidelines earlier this year to make it easier for foods to identify as Canadian. 

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has largely adapted the Competition Bureau’s definitions of the terms “Made in Canada” and “Product of Canada”. 

The former required a 51% threshold of Canadian content, along with some kind of qualifying statement that noted the product contained imported elements, according to Bureau guidelines. The CFIA has followed those rules, including the Bureau’s requirement that the “last substantial transformation” of a product should be in Canada to quality as Made in Canada. 

“Product of Canada” however, has higher standards. To the Competition Bureau, those claims should be limited to products where meaningfully all (98 per cent or more) of the content is Canadian. 

Until recently, CFIA guidelines were that “all or virtually all major ingredients”  needed to be Canadian (along with the processing and labour) in order to qualify as a “Product of Canada”. A 2025 update now defines “Product of Canada” as “a significant amount of the ingredients are Canadian”. (Some CFIA information retains the older ‘all or virtually all’ language.) 

The change from “all or virtually all” to “a significant amount” may be small, but it is in the direction the industry requested, based on responses to a 2019 consultation when CFIA first proposed changes from ‘98 per cent’ threshold to ‘85 per cent’ for the Product of Canada requirement for food.

The CFIA has adopted a principle of “working with the industry” on numerous food safety and authenticity issues.

A mid-March web notice to the industry about accurate use of Product of Canada and Made in Canada genteely discusses working “to promote clear, transparent and accurate product labelling” and asks industry to “consider using” the proper labels, because accurate labelling “fosters a marketplace and builds trust. This strengthens consumer confidence in Canadian businesses.” 

The CFIA notice does mention that complaints are on the rise, or that it would enforce the rules. A recent Globe and Mail article noted that complaints about non-compliant country of origin labelling have risen eight-fold in the past six months and that CFIA investigations found six companies to be non-compliant. 

However, a CFIA response in The Globe and Mail story was that no enforcement action was required as “the implicated companies took corrective actions to address the cause of the error.”