What the Philippines Requires of Canadian Food, by Category

The licensing and registration pages on this site cover what your importer must hold. This page is what has to be true of the goods, category by category, read from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's export requirements for the Philippines.

Two of the rules below have nothing to do with the product's quality and everything to do with how a consignment is presented. Both detain containers.

A label that names the wrong country

Labelling that reflects a previous country of destination other than the Philippines is prohibited, and CFIA states the consequence directly: it will cause the product to be detained. That has been in force since 12 March 2018.

This is a re-routing rule, and it catches the exact situation where a plant is trying to be helpful. Stock produced for another market, relabelled or over-stickered for a Philippine buyer, still carries the original destination somewhere on the carton. The Philippines treats that as a defect in the consignment, not a cosmetic matter.

Consignments you may not mix

A single Philippine shipment may not mix commodity types, nor products that attract different tariff rates. Our article on Philippine meat import rules gives the CFIA's own examples of each.

That is a loading decision made at the plant or the consolidator, usually by someone who will never read a tariff schedule. It needs to be a written instruction, not an assumption, particularly for mixed LCL consolidations.

Meat and poultry

Eligible: beef meat, beef tongue with tonsils removed, beef cheek meat with lymph nodes removed, bison meat, pork, and poultry meat. Horse meat is not eligible. The slaughter or cutting establishment must operate a quality assurance programme ensuring that all visible lymphoid tissue has been removed.

Every label for meat must carry an expiry or best-before date together with the manufacturing and packaging dates, and for beef and bison the production or slaughter date as well. The National Meat Inspection Service reissued that requirement in Memorandum Circular 07-2021-018 on 27 July 2021, which CFIA flags as a reason to work closely with the importer on date marking.

Documents travel on form CFIA/ACIA 1454. Annex B covers meat products derived from cattle or bison. Annex C covers pork and pork products including offal, and tariff codes must be declared on it.

For poultry, the additional certification section carries one of two attestations, and choosing between them is a commercial decision as much as a veterinary one. One rests on the disease status of the region the birds came from, which can change without reference to you. The other rests on a cooking step you control. Our article on Philippine meat import rules gives both wordings and the temperature.

The importer makes the arrangements with the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Industry, which administers meat import requirements, under Department of Agriculture Administrative Orders 26 of 2005 and 24 of 2010.

CFIA notes twice on the same page that non-compliance may result in cancellation of the producing establishment's approval by the Philippine authorities, which is an establishment-level consequence, not a consignment-level one.

Fish and seafood

All fish and seafood products are eligible, on a Certificate of Origin and Hygiene, CFIA/ACIA 5003. Approval must be obtained before import from both the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources and the Philippine FDA, which is two agencies rather than one.

Maximum permitted levels for metals, in parts per million: arsenic 3.0, lead 0.5, mercury 0.5 as methyl mercury, and tin 200.0.

Labels must be marked in English, Spanish or Filipino, showing the brand name, trade mark or trade name, the physical or chemical composition, the weight or measurement in metric units, the name and address of the packer or seller, and the country of origin. Metric units are worth noting for a Canadian plant that runs imperial for the domestic market.

One caveat on this category: CFIA's fish and seafood page for the Philippines records a last update of 30 April 2018 and a modified date in 2019, considerably older than its meat page. Treat the figures as the position Canada records and have your importer confirm the current Philippine limits.

Milk and dairy

Canada is authorised to export dairy products, and the certificate is health certificate CFIA/ACIA 5813, signed by the CFIA official veterinarian and official inspector. Unlike several other markets on this site, Canada does have a negotiated certificate with the Philippines; the certificate is issued on commercial risk, and requests for additional statements go to CFIA's Food Import Export Division.

CFIA knows of no approved-establishment list and no product registration information for dairy. Manufacturing must be under official CFIA oversight and licensed under the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations, with a manufacturer's declaration accompanying every export request. An import permit may be required, and halal certification may be required, with CFIA not involved in the latter.

Product already exported includes cheddar and cheddar types, processed, specialty and fresh cheese, cheese powder, condensed milk, skim milk powder, buttermilk powder, whey powder, yogurt, ice cream and novelties, and others such as lactose and milk albumin.

The order to do this in

Settle the date marking and the destination-country question with the plant before the first production run, because both are executed on the packaging line and neither is fixable at the port. Give the consolidator a written instruction about what may not share a container. Confirm which of the two poultry attestations applies to your product.

And for seafood, get the current Philippine contaminant limits from the importer instead of relying on a page Canada last revised in 2018.