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Archived - About the Food Labelling Modernization initiative

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Objective

The objective of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) Food Labelling Modernization initiative is to develop a more modern food labelling system within CFIA's mandate that responds to current and future challenges by engaging stakeholders and linking with other modernization initiatives.

Context

CFIA is continually evolving to meet the challenges of a complex and ever-changing food environment, one that continues to promote food safety, consumer protection and a fair and secure marketplace. As safe as our food supply is, we must always strive for improvement.

In Canada, responsibility for food labelling at the federal level is shared between Health Canada and CFIA:

Health Canada is modernizing its food regulatory framework as part of The Regulatory Roadmap for Health Products and Food.

Why modernize food labelling

We have seen a number of changes in the area of food labelling. For example:

With these changes that are taking place, we recognize the importance to strive for a balance between consumer, industry and government needs.

Key areas

The Food Labelling Modernization initiative focusses on specific areas of food labelling that fall under CFIA's responsibility.

Specifically, this initiative focusses on the following 4 key areas that are important to the foundation of our food labelling system:

  1. roles, responsibilities and partnerships
  2. regulations
  3. policy and program development
  4. service delivery

Guiding principles

The following principles are guiding this initiative:

Focus

The overall focus of the Food Labelling Modernization initiative is on:

Details of what is in the initiative's focus are in the 2013 Phase I discussion paper. They are broken down according to the initiative's four key areas and include examples.

If we receive comments on other issues that fall outside the focus, we direct such comments to the appropriate organization that holds responsibility for them.

Consultation

CFIA launched the Food Labelling Modernization initiative in 2013 and engaged with stakeholders through a multi-phase consultation approach:

Stemming from those consultations, proposed changes to labelling requirements in the Food and Drug Regulations and Safe Food for Canadians Regulations were pre-published in the Canada Gazette, Part I on June 22, 2019. CFIA is consulting on these proposed changes for a 75-day period. The consultation ends on September 4, 2019.

To get a balanced understanding of views, CFIA's consultations have included a wide range of stakeholders, including:

Additional information

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