Why food recalls have increased so drastically in a decade in Canada

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. Article content Article content

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