Jul 10
6
None dare call it fascism – No French on labels costs grocer $20,000
National Post – July 3, 2010
No French on labels costs grocer $20,000
By Katherine Laidlaw, with files from Canwest News Service
Deb Reynolds stood in her shuttered grocery store, surrounded by boxes filled with cheeses, jam, pickles, beef and baked goods, watching in shock as her staff loaded the crates from her west Vancouver shop into a truck two weeks ago. She was disposing of $20,000 worth of food, after a surprise visit from two inspectors with the on June 17 when she says they deemed a third of her store’s stock unsellable because the labels weren’t printed with French translations or were missing nutrition tables.
Ms. Reynolds says the two inspectors removed 108 items from her shelves at Home Grow-In Grocer, a 14-month-old shop that carries only food grown or produced in B.C., including by micro-farmers in Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and the Okanagan/Similkameen Valley.
“They were there for six hours,” she said. “They were picking up every jar, every bottle, every package, taking pictures of the labels, writing notes.”
They handed her seven pages of infractions, she says, all relating to labels missing bilingual information or nutrition tables. The inspectors flagged 11 suppliers in the small shop, which Ms. Reynolds says sells 300 dozen eggs a week. One dairy supplier, for example, was pulled because their labels read “feta” or “Monterey Jack” but not “cheese.”
But Keith Campbell, supervisor of food investigations for the CFIA, says the inspectors seized only one product, worth $100 and not $20,000, a yogurt made from a dairy supplier that consistently hasn’t been complying with the rules. …
Mr. Campbell acknowledged, however, that Ms. Reynolds’ store was used as a way to get complaince from the dairy supplier. The inspectors were simply looking for a place carrying food from that supplier, which he declined to name, and found her store on the Internet. …
The CFIA requires suppliers to label products in both English and French, save for a few exceptions including food produced locally. If less than 10% of the residents in the area speak one of the official languages, that language doesn’t need to be printed on food labels.
Read the complete article here.