Bonjour. Good morning.
Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to include me in your study. My name is Mark Loney. My daughter Rosalie is here with me.
Our family owns an independent grocery store in northwestern Ontario. For the past 15 years, to complement a retail grocery business, we have been exporting food products, primarily Canadian jam, to the United States. As part of a back haul, we bring food products back into Canada from the U.S. to sell in our store, and this is the product here.
“Product of Canada” is the primary selling point to the jam we sell in the U.S. The perception in the market is that Canadian jam is much superior to American jam. Early in 2007 we got the bad news that the brand we used to sell, Malkin's, was being discontinued due to factory closure. When we heard this news we were taken aback, because this was a large part of our business. After some discussion, we decided to try to retain this business by designing our own jam label. We chose Last Mountain Berry Farms of southeast Saskatchewan, a small family owned business similar in size to ours, to produce the new jam for us. We decided to try to design one label good for both the U.S. and Canadian market. This was important to us as it would save thousands of dollars in segregation costs due to labelling, logistics, warehousing, etc.
We're encouraged in our endeavour by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA. Their system was designed with small business in mind. They did what they could to move our American label as close as possible to Canadian regulations. We were pleased with how fast and efficiently we were able to have our product for sale in another country. We have been selling there for ten months. We are still not able to sell in Canada.
I think you have a handout now, and I want you to look at it because you'll be surprised at how close the Canadian label and the U.S. label are to each other. This is primarily due to what FDA has done for us, not CFIA. Not only will you see all the French requirements but also both metric and imperial measurements. Regulations on both sides of the border are vague and open to interpretation. USFDA used interpretation to our advantage. As long as the relevant information is there in a readable format and there's truth in the label, they're satisfied.
This is not how the CFIA operates. Food imported into Canada does not go through the registration process. We naively thought this would be the case for jam. To our amazement, it was not. CFIA presumes that foreign product is compliant, and it can be sold the same day it enters our country. Domestic product, like our jam, is presumed non-compliant and is illegal to sell unless it goes through the label registration process.