Made in Canada vs Product of Canada: What Labels Hide

The real difference between Made in Canada and Product of Canada, explained.

Is It Really Canadian? Why Grocery Labels Make Buying Canadian Harder Than It Should Be

Canada’s biggest grocers want you to believe you’re supporting local. Their own labels don’t always back that up.

Key Takeaways"

• Product of Canada” and “Made in Canada” are legally distinct claims, and the gap between them is wider than most shoppers assume.

• Metro and Empire both rolled out their own Canadian identification systems, and CBC’s reporting found that the criteria weren’t clear even to the retailers using them.

• There’s no clean answer to what actually counts as “more Canadian,” and pretending otherwise misses the point.

• This is Part 1 of a three-part series building toward a real ask: a petition urging Canada’s grocery chains to make Canadian sourcing easier to see and choose.

The maple leaf on the shelf tag doesn’t tell you whether you’re looking at “Made in Canada” or “Product of Canada,” and the difference is bigger than it looks.

John Mackay has a system for grocery shopping. The 81-year-old from Tillsonburg, Ontario, checks for the maple leaf before anything goes in his cart. So when he spotted orange juice with pulp sitting under a red “produit d’ici” badge at his local Metro, something didn’t add up. Oranges don’t grow in Ontario. They don’t grow anywhere in Canada, not commercially, not even close.

He complained to Metro. Then he complained again. Nobody could tell him exactly why the badge was there, or whether it meant anything close to Product of Canada or Made in Canada, the two federal claims most shoppers assume are interchangeable and aren’t.

That’s the sentence this whole piece is built around: nobody could tell him exactly why the badge was there.

If a national grocery chain can’t clearly explain its own Canadian label, and can’t say whether it’s closer to Made in Canada or Product of Canada, what chance do the rest of us have standing in the aisle with sixty seconds and a shopping list? That’s the real question behind “buy Canadian.” Not whether people want to do it. Most do. The question is whether the system in front of them actually allows them to.

The Label Taxonomy Nobody Explains

Key Insight: A package can legally carry at least seven different origin claims, and they range from “virtually everything about this is Canadian” to “something happened here, once.”

Start with the two claims most people think they understand. “Product of Canada” is the strict one. Under Canadian Food Inspection Agency guidance, a food product can only carry that claim when all or virtually all of the ingredients, processing, and labour behind it are Canadian, meaning at least 98 percent of the total cost of making it happened here. The only wiggle room is for genuinely minor ingredients, spices, flavourings, additives under 2 percent of the product that Canada doesn’t really produce.

“Made in Canada” is a different animal, and this is where most of the confusion starts. For food, there’s no fixed percentage threshold. The rule is that the product’s last substantial transformation happened in Canada. The CFIA’s own example is that dough, sauce, and cheese become a pizza, even if each of those ingredients was imported. The catch is that a “Made in Canada” claim on food is legally required to include a qualifying statement, such as “Made in Canada from imported ingredients,” so shoppers aren’t misled. In practice, most of us skim right past that fine print.

Then there’s a second tier: Prepared in Canada, Processed in Canada, Grown in Canada, each permitted under CFIA guidance as long as the claim is specific and not misleading. A “Roasted in Canada” coffee bag says nothing about where the beans were grown. A “Grown in Canada” tomato says nothing about who processed it into sauce.

And underneath all of that sits a question the labels don’t even try to answer: who owns the company? A Canadian brand can be owned by a foreign corporation. A foreign brand can be manufactured entirely in Canada. None of that shows up on the package at all.

Reading grocery store Canadian food labels closely still won’t tell you which federal standard, if any, a store’s own maple leaf badge is actually based on.

When the Grocery Chains Tried to Help

Key Insight: Metro and Empire both built their own Canadian-identification systems in response to real demand, and CBC’s own investigation found the criteria weren’t clear even to the people running them.

To be fair to the grocery chains, some of them saw this confusion coming and tried to fix it themselves. That’s where Mackay’s orange juice ran into trouble.

Metro’s website shows a red circle with a maple leaf next to the words “produit d’ici,” roughly “product from here,” on items it wants to flag as Canadian. When CBC’s Marketplace investigated how these labels were actually being applied, the results weren’t reassuring. They found that a third of the products listed on Loblaws’ website were marked “Prepared in Canada,” and more than a fifth of the products on Loblaw’s online banner Voilà carried a “Shop Canada” logo. Thousands of products on Metro’s own site carried its Canada label, including, per Mackay’s complaint, orange juice made from fruit that has never grown in this country.

Empire, which owns Sobeys, has been rolling out similar initiatives: shelf tags with Canadian and provincial flags, digital screen call-outs, and dedicated end-of-aisle displays. In the company’s own words, it intends to leverage every communication channel it has to help shoppers make these choices.

None of that is ‘nothing’. It’s a real response to real demand. But intention and clarity aren’t the same thing, and right now a shopper has no reliable way to know whether a given maple leaf on a shelf tag means “98 percent Canadian content” or “the juice was bottled here.” That’s not a shopper problem. It’s a system nobody was required to define consistently, applied by companies that are, not coincidentally, also trying to sell you more groceries.

If a national grocer can’t explain its own label, someone should be checking.

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The Question Underneath: What Does “Buy Canadian” Even Mean?

Key Insight: A tomato grown in Ontario and turned into ketchup by an American-owned company isn’t obviously more or less Canadian than a Canadian-owned company importing its ingredients, and pretending there’s a clean answer here is its own kind of dishonesty.

Here’s a version of the question that has real teeth. Say a jar of ketchup is made in Leamington, Ontario, from tomatoes grown by Canadian farmers, but the company on the label is Heinz, headquartered in Pittsburgh. Now compare that to a Canadian-owned company manufacturing a similar product here, using imported tomato paste because Canada’s growing season can’t meet national demand on its own.

Which one contributes more to the Canadian economy? The Heinz jar keeps Ontario farmland in production and Ontario workers on the line, and its profits mostly leave the country. The Canadian-owned option keeps ownership, taxes, and reinvestment decisions here, on a product that leaned on imported inputs to exist at all. There’s a real case for either answer. Steelman both, and you still don’t land on a clean winner, because “Canadian” was never just one thing. It’s ownership, or it’s labour, or it’s inputs, or it’s some combination the labels were never designed to communicate.

That’s a genuine dilemma, not a rhetorical one, and it deserves better than a bumper sticker answer, because the campaigns and petitions built on top of “buy Canadian” only work if they’re honest about which version of Canadian they’re asking for.

Two jars can look identical on the shelf and still answer completely different questions about what “made in Canada from imported ingredients” actually means.

The Grocery Aisle Test

Key Insight: Once you know the actual thresholds, the label usually tells you more than it seems to. You just need to know which question it’s answering.

None of this means the labels are useless. It means they’re answering narrower questions than shoppers assume. A quick way to read them:

• “Product of Canada” or “100% Canadian”: the strictest claim available, virtually everything about the product happened here.

• “Made in Canada” with a qualifying statement: the last step happened here, but check what the qualifier says about the ingredients.

• “Prepared in Canada,” “Processed in Canada,” “Grown in Canada”: true, but narrow. They tell you about one stage, not the whole product.

• A store’s own Canadian badge, like Metro’s maple leaf or Empire’s flag tags: a useful starting point, but not equivalent to the federal claims above, since the store sets its own criteria.

None of these labels tell you who owns the company. For that, you’re on your own, at least for now.

Every aisle in this photo has its own version of this problem, and none of it gets solved by a shopper with sixty seconds and a shopping list.

John Mackay’s orange juice complaint never really got resolved. Metro didn’t pull the product or explain the badge in a way that satisfied him, and there’s nothing to suggest the badge criteria have changed since. That’s not really a story about orange juice. It’s a story about what happens when a good instinct, the desire to support Canadian producers, runs into a labeling system that nobody was ever required to make legible.

Forty million people are being asked to make that call one grocery run at a time, using a badge system that even the retailers can’t consistently explain. That’s not a reasonable ask. Somewhere between the shopper and the shelf, someone has to define the terms. Over the next two pieces in this series, we’ll look at how much room there actually is for a shift toward Canadian sourcing, and what it would take to get the grocery chains to make good on the flags they’re already putting on shelves.

Part 2 looks at the actual dollar numbers behind “buy Canadian.”

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Editor’s View

I’ll be honest about where I land on this one. I don’t think Metro or Empire set out to mislead anyone with these badges. I think they moved fast because demand came in quickly, and clarity was left for later. That’s not malice, but it’s also not good enough for a claim sitting next to a price tag. My prediction for this series is that the label piece is the easy part. The harder argument comes in Part 3, when we ask five organizations that compete with each other, four national chains and one member-owned co-operative, to agree on a shared standard. That’s not a group that agrees on much easily. But if the flags are already on the shelves, the standard is the only thing left to argue about.

Publications Consulted

Canadian Food Inspection Agency (origin claims guidance and FAQ), CBC News / Marketplace, The Globe and Mail, Competition Bureau of Canada, Retail Council of Canada, Metro Inc. and Empire Company Limited corporate statements.