Canada's new nutrition labels on fewer items after food industry lobbying
This article was published in the British Medical Journal on 25 Feb. 2026.
How food industry lobbying restrained Canada’s new nutrition labels
Canada has a new nutrition label for packaged foods in 2026. But shoppers will see it on fewer products than planned after persistent lobbying by the food industry, reports Marty Logan
On New Year’s Day, supermarket shoppers in Canada started to see a new symbol on their food items. Known as a front-of-package label (FOPL), it features the image of a magnifying glass alongside the words “High in . . .” to signal foods with excess sugar, sodium, or saturated fats. In most cases that means over 15% of the daily recommended amount.
Food products must display the label as of 1 January 2026, after the government agency Health Canada adopted the regulation as part of its healthy eating strategy.1 Health Canada says that the FOPL is needed to cut health risks linked to frequently eating foods high in saturated fat, sugars, or sodium, including stroke, obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and some types of cancer.
After years of consultation the final FOPL was published in July 2022. Health Canada says that it set a deadline of 2026 to give the industry time to transition.
During earlier consultations, food makers lobbied to have products exempted from the FOPL. Ground meats were ultimately exempted under Health Canada’s final rules. Meat producers had argued during consultations that these should be treated like other single ingredient meats.
Dairy farmers, meanwhile, argued for their products to be exempt because they are major sources of vitamins and minerals. They also convinced Health Canada of this—a decision criticised by some experts. By expanding the exemptions for dairy, the agency was contradicting its aim of improving people’s health, said one group of researchers. They wrote in a 2024 paper, “Expanding the exemption criteria will allow dairy-related products with little health benefits to be reflected as ‘healthy’ (ie, not display a ‘High in’ nutrition symbol), blunting the potential impact that FOPL regulations could have on improving the diets of Canadians.”
Food makers say that they support the Canadian FOPL as an information tool. But they’re unhappy at the costs—estimated in billions of Canadian dollars—of introducing the label and, in some cases, reformulating foods so that they no longer require it.
Michi Furuya Chang, executive vice president of public policy and regulatory affairs and head of division strategy at Food, Health and Consumer Products of Canada, says that her organisation “encouraged government to look at the cumulative regulatory burden of all of the initiatives.”
She adds, “When you get a labelling change or a regulatory change every five months or every year, the cost of making those changes and reformulations simply isn’t feasible in a 12 month cycle. It doesn’t take into consideration the reality. A product development cycle in general is about 28 months.” Chang says that her organisation’s members manufacture about 80% of the items on supermarket shelves.
A review by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that, as of May 2022, 44 countries had introduced simplified front-of-pack nutrition labelling schemes, some mandatory and some voluntary. But mandatory ones are more effective, says Lindsey Smith Taillie, professor in the Department of Nutrition of the Global Food Research Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
She tells The BMJ, “It’s really important that these labels are mandatory, for a couple of different reasons. First, if they’re not mandatory, one of the go-to strategies of the food industry is to claim that they’ve already invented and are using their own labelling system. But typically, they’ll use a system that we know to be ineffective and that consumers don’t understand or don’t use.
“Second, what will happen is selective implementation of a voluntary labelling system. For example, in countries such as Australia, which has the voluntary health stars rating system, some studies have shown that it tends to be selectively implemented on healthier products or products that achieve a higher rating, because of course companies would rather put it on foods that are going to score well.”
A report published in January 2026 by the consumer organisation Foodwatch found that when stricter criteria were applied to voluntary front-of-package labels (FOPLs) in Germany—downgrading “many previously favourable ratings” of foods—manufacturers stopped participating.
The UK has had voluntary FOPLs since 2013, using a traffic light symbol to signal a food’s nutritional value. In January the campaign group Which? urged the government to make those FOPLs mandatory to help tackle the “obesity crisis.”
Switching to mandatory FOPLs would prevent or postpone 57,000 deaths, a recent study in the Lancet found. A mandatory system using “stop” sign symbols instead of traffic lights, such as those in place in Chile and other Latin American countries, would almost double that figure to 110,000, the study estimated.
From 2016 to 2022 Health Canada engaged with more than 200 stakeholders on the FOPL, a spokesperson told The BMJ. None was more successful than the dairy industry. Dairy producers actually got two, progressively larger, exemptions, says Mary L’Abbé, professor emeritus in nutritional sciences in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto.
The original version of the FOPL regulations, from 2018, said that dairy products with over 15% of the recommended daily amount of sugar, sodium, or saturated fats would have to be labelled. But the final version, published in 2022, specified that dairy products high in one or more of these substances could be exempted if they were also an “important” source of calcium, which is considered a “shortfall nutrient” lacking in many Canadians’ diets. “Calcium is low in our country, and I can see the reason for doing it—it was a trade-off,” L’Abbé tells The BMJ.
In 2024 the Canadian government published a marketing authorisation reducing the amount of calcium required for an exemption.10 “They lowered the calcium level to 5%,” says L’Abbé. “In labelling, that’s the minimum level you can have in order to say something is a ‘source of’—not a good source or an excellent source, just the bare minimum.” She adds that she was not aware of any public consultation before the marketing authorisation was issued.
Health Canada says that exempting dairy products from the FOPL because they also contain much needed calcium is good policy. Alfred Aziz, director of Health Canada’s Bureau of Nutritional Sciences, says, “Like any regulation, there is a balancing act. We’re trying to resolve an issue by providing Canadians with information about foods that are high in sugar, saturated fat, and sodium, but we have to be careful about unintended consequences. We don’t want to exacerbate the issue of calcium for Canadians. We know that it’s a nutrient that Canadians are not consuming enough of.” Health data suggest that about 12% of Canadians aged over 40 have had osteoporosis diagnosed.
Health Canada estimates that the 2024 decision could exempt as many as 538 cheese products and 21 yogurt products from the FOPL.10 The national producer group Dairy Farmers of Canada, which met numerous times with Health Canada to discuss the FOPL, didn’t respond to The BMJ’s requests for comment.
Everyone who is paid to lobby a Government of Canada office is supposed to sign up to its lobbying registry, but that process is opaque, says L’Abbé. “We just see that there was a meeting, but lobbyists register for five different topics,” she says. “We don’t know whether the topic of the meeting was the food guide, front-of-pack marketing to kids, or something else.”
Various studies have found that industry stakeholders were more active lobbyists than non-industry players and that they focused on the FOPL rather than other food issues. For instance, one 2025 study found that from October 2016 to June 2018, industry figures had 56% of all interactions with Health Canada about the healthy eating strategy versus 42% of non-industry figures, while 2% involved both. Industry initiated 94% of its interactions with Health Canada, while non-industry initiated just 49%. A preferred industry strategy was to present evidence to back its claims on diet and related issues, including citing publications.
Further, the same study found that of 75 identified citations, only 54 were found online, and none that were stated as being “available upon request” were received when requested. “Of the identified citations, 9% were unpublished, 35% were not peer-reviewed and 43% were either fully or partially funded by industry,” the study authors wrote.
Health Canada says that, to ensure transparency as it developed the healthy eating strategy, it created a separate website to publicly document its engagement with all stakeholders. Since 2016, Health Canada has posted hundreds of entries documenting meetings and correspondence related to the healthy eating strategy.14 Each website entry lists who at Health Canada the stakeholders interacted with, the topics on the meeting’s agenda, and what materials were discussed. These included officials from the Bureau of Policy, Intergovernmental and International Affairs at the Food Directorate; the Director General’s Office of the Food Directorate; and the Assistant Deputy Minister’s Office.
Aziz says, “Any member of the public could request the documents that were posted [to see] the type of engagement and consultation that we’ve been having with different stakeholders. If something changed during the policy development process, they could go back and look at the information and be able to trace it back to the information that was presented at those engagement sessions.”
L’Abbé acknowledges the effort. But she points out that stakeholders wanting to influence policy development could have engaged with other government offices that don’t record interactions as transparently. She notes that stakeholders can also lobby other departments—for example, the agriculture department—where public disclosure practices may differ.
One civil society organisation that participated in creating the FOPL is not alarmed. “The issue is that civil society doesn’t have the capacity to have the number of meetings that the food industry has . . . and therefore they generate more meeting requests,” says Manuel Arango, the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s director of health policy and advocacy for Canada. He tells The BMJ, “It’s not because the government is favouring industry. If we had more people and we requested more meetings, we’re very confident that the government would give us those meetings.”
His organisation strongly supports the FOPLs, Arango adds, partly because they will help certain groups make more informed choices. “Seniors, new immigrants who don’t have a good grasp of English or French, people with poor eyesight, people with low literacy—those are the people that FOPLs are going to help,” he says. “So, it’s really important from an equity issue as well.”
Already, some manufacturers are adjusting their activity in response to the FOPLs, says one expert. Sylvain Charlebois, food policy expert and a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told CBC News, “I met a company last week, a snacking company. From now on, their policy is if they’re looking at launching a new product and that product has to have a front-of-package label, they’re not launching it.”