In January 2019, the Safe Food for Canadians Act/Safe Food for Canadians regulations (heretofore identified as SFCR) came into force across Canada and brought a more streamlined process to food safety practice in Canada. Food trade and production processes have evolved rapidly in recent decades, as Canada imports and exports food products; therefore it is critically important to remain aware of the latest advances responding to a range of challenges and opportunities in the food safety value chain. Looking through the optics of the recent SFCR framework, this paper places the spotlight on leading domestic and international research and practices to help strengthen food safety policies of the future. By shedding some light on new research, we also draw attention to international developments that are noteworthy, and place those in context as to how new Canadian food safety policy and regulation can be further advanced. The paper will benchmark Canada through a review study of food safety best practices by juxtaposing (i) stated aspirations with, (ii) actual performance in leading Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) jurisdictions.

It is well known that many consumers believe local foods are more expensive than comparative products coming from other markets. The aim of this study was to measure the price competitiveness of products certified by the Aliments du Québec program, a well-known program in the Canadian province of Quebec. Using machine-learning, artificial intelligence and targeted data mining, the report identifies local products and comparator products, to consider whether locally certified products are more expensive than comparative products coming from outside Quebec. Uncertified products used as comparative products come from anywhere around the world, outside of the province of Quebec. For this study, a total of more than 350,000 discrete price data points were analyzed in the Winter 2022. Local product prices were examined relative to the prices of comparator products. In total, there were 48 subcategories considered. In 70.83% of the subcategories, the local product was either as expensive (similar price) or less expensive than the comparator product. Results challenge the popular belief that local food products are often more expensive. This study also provides limitation and future research paths.

While food innovation is heavily influenced by the myriad of policies, regulations and other environmental factors within a country, globalization means that food innovation is also a matter of international competitiveness. This benchmarking exercise uses 24 variables to compare the different innovation environments across ten countries: Canada, the US, Mexico, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and Australia. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected from publicly available sources only to measure each variable and ultimately provide a ranking. Qualitative data was evaluated using thematic coding to establish baseline practices and then compare each country to the baseline. Quantitative data was evaluated by constructing an average to which each country was compared. Countries whose data showed they met the average were awarded two points, and those who performed above or below average were either awarded an additional point or saw a point deducted. A final ranking was established from the scores across all four pillars, and the ranking was weighted to account for lacking data. The final weighted ranking saw the UK rank first, followed by the US, Germany, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Japan, Mexico, France and finally, Italy in tenth place.

The price of food has been affected in recent months in response to events such as the war in Ukraine, energy costs, inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change. Indeed, supply problems, as well as the repercussions of global issues, have had an impact on grocery bills. Just between September and October 2022, the price of food increased by 11.4% and 11% year-to-year. In addition, with the pandemic, buying locally has become a key factor for some in choosing which products to consume. This second edition of the report aims to answer the question Does eating local in Quebec cost more? More precisely, our objective was to identify if local products in the food sector, especially in Quebec, were competitive in their price points compared to foods coming from other regions of the world. To answer this, we used AI and machine learning to harvest data from 99 local products and 335 comparable nonlocal products, totaling 198,990 data points and 3745 prices across six data collection dates. The results showed that a total of 25 categories displayed an advantage for the local product or a neutrality, out of a total of 45 categories identified. Our results demonstrated that 55.6% of the categories that contained the local foods analyzed were price competitive with comparable products or less expensive than them.