Canadian labelling rules do not travel, and the ones that do are not the ones you expect

Most Canadian food businesses arrive at exporting with a label they are confident in, because it has survived years of domestic scrutiny. That confidence is the problem. A label built to satisfy the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations and the Food and Drug Regulations is built for a different regulator asking different questions, and almost none of the work transfers.

The reverse assumption is just as common and just as costly: that because the product is leaving, Canadian rules no longer apply at all.

Both are wrong in ways that cost a print run.

What Canada actually asks of an export pack

The core Canadian consumer labelling requirements exist to inform a purchaser in Canada. A product manufactured in Canada and sold in Vietnam is not being bought by a Canadian consumer, and the Canadian consumer regime is largely not the operative one for what appears on that pack.

What does follow the product is the export certification regime, and that is a different body of rules with different content. The CFIA's per-destination requirements tell you what has to appear on the pack and the shipping container for that destination, because Canada has negotiated it with that destination or because the destination demands it as a condition of entry.

Those requirements are specific, and they are not intuitions about good labelling. On this route a destination can dictate what goes on the outside of the carton, in which languages, and which dates have to be legible on it. Indonesia and Malaysia both do, in different ways and for different reasons, and our article on shipping container labelling lists what each of them asks for.

Neither of those is a rule about the consumer pack. They are rules about the carton, which is exactly where nobody looks.

The shipping container is a labelled item

This is the single most useful reframing for a first-time exporter. In domestic trade a shipping container is packaging. In export it is a labelled item with its own requirements, sometimes more prescriptive than the retail pack inside it.

Canada's own rules already hint at this. A shipping container going to a business or an institution sits largely outside the bilingual requirement, so long as it is not resold to consumers at retail, and our article on shipping container labelling carries the condition in full.

But a handful of expressions on certain foods prepackaged in shipping containers must still appear in both official languages, and the ones that bite are the cold chain instructions on low-acid product in hermetically sealed packages. Our article on bilingual labelling quotes the requirement and the regulator's own examples, in the form they have to be printed.

So even domestically, the carton is not simply outside the regime. For export it is often the item the destination inspects first, because it is what an official sees on a pallet without opening anything.

Three destination requirements Canada has no equivalent for

The rules that catch exporters are not the stricter versions of Canadian rules. They are the ones with no Canadian counterpart at all, so there is no existing process that would catch them.

**A second language, chosen by the destination.** Canada requires English and French for mandatory information on consumer prepackaged food. A destination requiring Bahasa Indonesia is not asking for more of the same thing: it is asking for a language your artwork process has never handled, translated by someone who knows the regulatory vocabulary, not the marketing one.

**A registration number issued by a foreign authority.** Several destinations require a number on the pack that does not exist until a filing succeeds, and the filing is often made by the importer, not by you. There is no Canadian analogue to waiting on a foreign agency before artwork can be finalised.

**A third party's name and mark.** Malaysia's trade descriptions order requires the importer or manufacturer to mark the certification body's name on the goods and to affix the prescribed logo. Your certifier's identity becomes a permanent feature of your packaging, and changing certifier becomes a print run.

None of those three is hard. All three have lead times measured in months, and all three are invisible to a label review that checks the pack against Canadian requirements.

Country of origin is the one that surprises people

Canadian exporters generally expect to say where the food comes from and are pleased to. Two complications sit underneath that.

The first is that origin claims are regulated, not descriptive. Canada has rules about when "Product of Canada" and "Made in Canada" may be used, and they turn on where the ingredients came from and where the last substantial transformation happened, not on where the company is. A product assembled in Canada from imported ingredients may not be entitled to the claim its marketing department has been using.

The second is that the destination has its own view, and it is the one that governs the pack. A claim permissible in Canada is not thereby permissible elsewhere, and a claim the destination requires may be one Canada's rules would phrase differently.

The practical position: settle what you are entitled to say under Canadian rules, because that is the floor of what is true, and then check separately what the destination requires and permits. They are two questions with one answer only by coincidence.

The claims you already make are the riskiest part

Mandatory particulars get checked because they are on a list. Claims do not, because they were signed off years ago by marketing and have been on the pack ever since, and nobody rereads a pack they have looked at a thousand times.

Every claim on an export pack is a statement made to a regulator who has not previously assessed it, under rules that differ from the ones it was cleared against. That covers nutrient content claims, health claims, method-of-production claims such as organic or grass-fed, and origin.

Three failure modes recur.

A claim permitted in Canada that the destination does not recognise, where the pack has to lose it. A claim that requires a certification the destination accepts, where our organic claim is a claim about a Canadian certification and its standing abroad is its own question. And a claim that is permitted but triggers a registration requirement, so that saying something optional moves the product into a category needing a filing nobody planned for.

The last one is the expensive surprise, because the company chose to say something and thereby chose a regulatory pathway without knowing it.

What a label review should actually check

A useful review is not a proofread. It is a comparison against a specific destination's mandatory particulars, and it has a shape:

• The destination's own required particulars for this commodity, from that destination's authority or from the CFIA's requirements for it
• The language requirements, including which elements must appear in which language
• Any number, mark or third-party name that has to appear, and who is responsible for obtaining it
• The shipping container requirements, separately from the retail pack
• The claims: origin, nutrition, health, method of production, each tested against the destination, not against habit
• What Canadian rules still require of the exported product, which is narrower than domestic but is not nothing

That list is boring, which is the point. Every item on it is a thing that has stopped a shipment, and every one is cheaper to check than to discover.

Who owns the label, once there is an importer

A domestic pack has one owner. An export pack usually has two, and the division is rarely written down.

You control the artwork, the claims and the facts about the product. Your importer controls the entry, frequently holds the registration the pack depends on, and is the party the destination authority will contact.

In several markets the importer or distributor is the one legally obliged to ensure the marking is correct, which does not transfer the obligation away from you commercially: an importer penalised over your pack is an importer with a claim against you.

Two things are worth settling in writing before the first order. Who signs off the final artwork against the destination's requirements, and on what basis. And who pays when a requirement changes and stock has to be relabelled or reprinted, because it will happen at least once in a long relationship.

Neither conversation is comfortable at the point of a first order. Both are far less comfortable afterwards.

Do it before the artwork, not after the shipment

The sequence that works is unglamorous and rarely followed, because the pressure runs the other way: a buyer is interested, a launch date exists, and packaging has the longest lead time of anything in the plan, so it gets ordered first.

Ordering artwork before the destination requirements are settled is how a company ends up holding a pallet of packaging it cannot use, having also lost the weeks it takes to reprint. The alternative costs a fortnight at the start of a project, when a fortnight is available.

We review label artwork against the destination market's mandatory particulars before it goes to print rather than after a shipment is held, and the items that most often come back are the three with no Canadian equivalent: the language, the number somebody else has to obtain, and the third party whose name goes on your pack.