The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has suspended the licence for Vegeat Foods Inc. of Blainville, Que., effectively putting it out of business until it comes into compliance.
The CFIA said it has failed to identify and analyse hazards and to develop and implement a preventive control plan, and failed to provide the inspector with the requested information.
The company makes ready-to-eat plant-based foods.
Loblaws and Sobeys, Canada’s largest supermarket chains, have once again been caught by CBC News charging too much for meats.
The issue is including the weight of packaging in prices, a practice that breaks Canadian rules which are supposed to be enforced by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
It seems the CBC reporters are better at detecting weight-related meat pricing errors than the government inspection agency.
After CBC’s shoppers found similar weight issues last year the grocers said they had taken steps to rectify pricing.
"People are getting ripped off," said Terri Lee, a former inspector with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Lee, who spent 24 years with the federal food regulator before retiring in 2021, estimates mis-weighed meat costs Canadian shoppers millions of dollars a year.
"Obviously, these retail stores are not to be trusted that the weight on the package is accurate," she is quoted by CBC News..
Over the past two months, CBC visited 17 Loblaw-owned or Sobeys-affiliated stores in the Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax areas, targeting packaged fresh meat sold by weight.
In all, CBC purchased and documented 32 underweight meat products from seven stores: two Safeways and a Thrifty Foods in North Vancouver (owned by Sobeys); two Farm Boys in the Greater Toronto Area (owned by Sobeys' parent company, Empire); and two Real Canadian Superstores in the Halifax area (owned by Loblaw).
The CFIA is also responsible for inspecting scales at meat-packing plants used in calculating what’s owed to farmers.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union and JBS USA have a tentative deal to end the strike that began more than two weeks ago.
The facility is the largest beef-packing plant in North America and employs about 3,800 union members.
The two-year agreement increases hourly wages by 70 cents an hour this year and by 40 cents next year.
He is chief executive officer of Mycionics Incorporated of Kitchener.
There is keen interest from mushroom farms because picking mushrooms by hand is hard work and staff turnover is a constant issue.
Glibertic’s robots have visual sensors to detect which mushrooms are at the desired stage for harvesting and other sensors to guide gentle pincers to pluck the mushrooms.
Rural wells west of Kitchener are running dry as the city is desperate to find more water.
Construction plans are on hold because of the water situation which has caught city politicians by surprise. No building permits for high-rise residential developments are being approved. The two top officials in charge of water quit just before the crisis emerged into the public eye.
Now there are calls for an inquiry and the Waterloo Region staff and politicians are scrambling to fix some facilities that have long needed maintenance and repair work and to find more water sources.
During the uproar, Wilmot Township learned that Kitchener has been taking more water than they knew. The Region has responded by scrapping a commitment to limit how much water it draws from township wells.
Chicken farmer Alan Drost is convinced that the city wells have depleted water he was drawing from his farm well at Petersburg. He has to scramble to truck in water for laying hens and now has installed a large water storage tank.
Clarke Rieck, owner or Lyndon Fish Farm, is worried that his spring-fed lake may run short of water. He said if that happens, he will need to invest about $4 million in a fix.
His operation is a fish hatchery and recreational fishing for about 7,000 visitors per year.
The farm where I grew up has some of the headwaters for that operation.
A number of non-farming rural residents say they have been experiencing water issues that they suspect are related to the city wells – issues such as lowering water levels in their wells and discoloured water.
The water issue is not new. For at least 50 years there has been talk about building a pipeline either south to Lake Erie or north-west to Lake Huron. Either would make water much more expensive.
When Maple Leaf Foods was looking for a site to build a new meat-packing plant, it looked closely at Kitchener and rejected that option because of the water issue. It built the new plant in Hamilton.
Rural water issues are far from new. A beautiful trout stream on the Stewart Cressman farm south-west of Kitchener dried up when a city well was opened nearby about 60 years ago.
When I was a little gaffer, I fished for trout in that stream.
Cressman, who was chair of the Agriculture Research Institute of Ontario, a director on the Ontario pork marketing board and now is a Wilmot Township farmer, is watching one of his children running a produce business on the farm. It obviously depends on a reliable source for irrigation water.
It has obtained a copy of a letter Maple Leaf sent to its clients and said it got confidential information from a Tree of Life source.
Josh Kuehnbaum, Maple Leaf Foods senior vice-president of sales and customer business development, sent a letter informing customers it is introducing a “temporary fuel surcharge” of 11 cents per kilogram on its prepared meats and poultry shipments.
“This is not a permanent price increase, but rather a temporary adjustment tied directly to fuel cost movements,”. Kuehnbaum‘s letter said.
The surcharge may “move up or down in line with fuel prices,” he wrote.
Olymel’a spokesperson Stéphanie Couturier said it is assessing the situation.
The Globe and Mail said some smaller, independent grocers say they have received multiple fuel-surcharge notices from their suppliers in the past couple of weeks.
After that, the impact rises to 25 to 45 cents. If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed or uncertain until August, he estimates ground beef prices will rise by 75 cents to a dollar a pound.
He said the war has increased to cost of fertilizer to grow corn for cattle and diesel prices are up.
“And when we look at meat in particular, that’s brought to our distribution and our supermarkets by refrigerated trucks, which use more diesel than non refrigerated trucks, and then the plastic packaging and everything else,” Lempert told Meatingplace magazine.
Australia was the biggest foreign supplier of beef for hamburger iand it is among the most vulnerable economies to the Hormuz crisis, he said,
Authorities there, as well as ranchers and other business people, are already warning that they could run out of transportation fuels as early as mid-April.