Why food recalls have increased so drastically in the last decade in Canada

Article By Laura Brehaut Published August 20, 2025
Article Source: https://nationalpost.com/life/food/why-food-recalls-have-increased-so-drastically-in-the-last-decade-in-canada

From Dubai chocolate to romaine lettuce, food recalls have never been higher. Here's why that's not necessarily a bad thing

Last year, it was plant-based refrigerated beverages. This summer, it’s Dubai chocolate, which went from viral fame to plain old virulent, with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) recalling several brands due to Salmonella contamination.

It’s not your imagination — there are more food recalls today than a decade ago, though the number has stayed relatively stable over the past five years. Experts say the reason why comes down to a couple of key factors: improved detection methods and regulations that modernized Canada’s food safety system.

When Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab (AAL), posted a graph of the number of food recalls in Canada since 2011 on social media last week, some of his followers expressed surprise and concern. The graph showed a dramatic jump from 45 recalls in 2018 to 259 in 2019, remaining well above 100 ever since (with two years surpassing 250).

Our food safety culture is “very strong,” says Charlebois, pointing to Canadians’ reluctance to eat perfectly edible products past their best-before dates. Food recalls don’t necessarily mean that our food system is unsafe — he sees them as a sign that it’s maturing in a positive way.

“People tend to become quite nervous as soon as they see a metric that would suggest, perhaps, that things aren’t going in the right direction, but they are in terms of food recalls.”

Some recalls, such as the recent outbreak of Salmonella infections linked to various brands of pistachios and pistachio-containing products, such as Dubai chocolate, cause illnesses and hospitalizations, but many others are preventative. Though recalls due to microbiological hazards were the most prevalent from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2025, they can also result from allergens, extraneous material, chemicals and other reasons.

“Even in a modern, effective food safety system such as Canada’s, risks cannot be completely eliminated. When unsafe food enters the marketplace, the CFIA works with the company to ensure that the public is informed and that the recall was effective at removing products from the market,” the CFIA said in an email to National Post.

“Consumers can help protect themselves and their families by following safe food handling practices at home and staying informed about food recalls by signing up for food recall notifications.”

Keith Warriner, a professor at the University of Guelph’s Department of Food Science, highlights that the means of detecting outbreaks are much better than they were 10 years ago, “if not five years ago.” Sophisticated surveillance systems and advanced techniques, such as whole genome sequencing, have made it easier to identify risks.

Companies are also doing more testing, which increases the likelihood of finding something warranting a recall, says Warriner. “Even though no outbreaks are involved, they’ll do it as a precaution. And you’ll see microgreen producers, for example, they’ve had quite a few recalls of Listeria. Even though there’s been no real outbreaks of Listeria with microgreens, they preempt it because they do a lot of testing.”

Not only has the science improved, but the Safe Food for Canadians Act and Food Safety Modernization Act in the United States were instituted, which Warriner says put the onus on risk management.

The Safe Food for Canadians Regulations came into force in January 2019, marking what Charlebois calls a turning point, “allowing the entire industry at all levels, whether it’s municipal, provincial or federal, to run more rigorous food safety systems.”

Charlebois credits the regulations for the 476 per cent increase in food recalls — classes I (high-risk), II (moderate-risk) and III (low-risk) — the AAL identified from 2018 to 2019.

In 2011, less than 10 per cent of contaminated items could be source-attributed (identifying outbreaks and tracing them to products), says Warriner. Today, that number has increased to roughly 25 per cent. However, the question of whether food is safer now, with 131 recalls so far this year, than in 2011, when there were only four, is a debating point.

“One could say that an increased number of recalls means we’re detecting more, and therefore it’s a successful food safety management system because the net is getting tighter. But another way of looking at it is saying, ‘Well, we’ve got all this knowledge. Surely recalls should be going down,’” says Warriner.

“Testing doesn’t improve food safety. It just makes you much more aware of a problem. Whereas the interventions, i.e., actual things to decontaminate products, have lagged behind. So, the famous saying from Frank Yiannas (former deputy commissioner of food policy and response at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration), ‘When detection outpaces control, you’re in trouble.'”

Testing is necessary to detect risks, but controlling them needs to be more than words, says Warriner. He references LGMA (the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement), which was established in Arizona and California in the wake of the 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach. The agreement was intended to tighten up the industry, “but it all just became words and gestures (rather) than actual control. And that’s going to be 20 years old next year.”

There’s also room for improvement in how the CFIA communicates food recalls to the public, says Charlebois. AI could make the process more precise and proactive by using targeted methods to identify and monitor risks. Implementing AI might mean even more recalls, affecting a smaller volume of food and reducing food waste as a result.

“I think it’s reassuring to see the number of recalls we’re seeing right now. But one has to think about the costs incurred in the industry because, as consumers, we eventually pay for these recalls. So, how do you make these recalls more efficient?”

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