The most serious overhaul of the Canadian food safety regulations ever is coming with introduction of the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SFCR). The SFCR establishes a set of new rules for food businesses in three areas: licensing, prevention and traceability.
Under the SFCR’s licensing requirements, in general, a business that is involved into food manufacturing, processing, packaging, grading, labeling, or international and interprovincial trade is required to obtain a licence from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), a regulatory agency that overseas food businesses compliance with the new regulations. The intraprovincial trade is exempt form the licensing requirements.
The CFIA requires the following information to be provided by the importers:
- name, address, and import licence number of the importer
- name, and address of the foreign vendor
- country of origin
- first food delivery location address in Canada
- description and quantity
- health risk information
- some additional information for live or raw shellfish
In case of the egg and meat products, the above information should be provided before or at the time of the import.
The Phase 1 of the new SFCR is coming into force on January 15, 2019 .