Canadian grocery supplier onboarding and the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations converge on one question. Light Engine answers it from records the farm already keeps — and times the rehearsal so you can quote your own number instead of ours.
Every claim on this page is quoted from a source we read. Where a retailer publishes nothing we could read, we say so rather than guess.
GS1 Canada states that a GS1 licence is “the foundation for selling to Canadian retailers,” and that each unique product needs its own GTIN — every size, flavour, format and packaging variation counts as its own.
Source: GS1 Canada, Grocery Checklist
The same checklist tells suppliers to register for the ECCnet Registry and load product data through ProSYNC, selecting the Retail Trading Partner Services Bundle for the retailer they are selling to. GS1 Canada names Sobeys, Metro, Whole Foods Market, Loblaw Companies, Walmart Canada and Costco Canada on that page.
Source: GS1 Canada, Grocery Checklist
GS1 Canada’s traceability standards pair the GTIN with a lot number — Application Identifiers (01) and (10) in a GS1-128 barcode — with an SSCC identifying the logistic unit. The stated purpose is to enable “targeted and effective recall of dangerous products from the market.”
Source: GS1 Canada, Traceability Standards
Retail onboarding sits on top of the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations, not beside them. The CFIA’s own wording is short.
The CFIA defines traceability as “the ability to track the movement of a food product, one step forward and one step back in the supply chain.” Both directions, not one.
Source: CFIA, Traceability requirements under the SFCR
A traceability document has to carry the common name, a lot code or unique identifier, and the name and address of the location — plus who you received from and who you sold to, with dates. The CFIA says to keep those documents for two years, on paper or electronically.
Source: CFIA, Traceability requirements under the SFCR
The requirements apply to businesses that “grow and harvest fresh fruits or vegetables to be exported or sent across provincial or territorial boundaries.” If you ship out of province, this is you — not only your processor.
Source: CFIA, New traceability requirements
Each item below is a running endpoint or screen in the product today. Nothing here is planned work.
Seeding, transplant, harvest, QA result and despatch land against a lot code as they happen, so the trace record is a by-product of running the farm rather than a separate binder someone has to remember to fill in.
Give it a lot code and it answers what went into that lot and where the lot went — the one-back and one-forward the CFIA asks for, as one query instead of two afternoons of paperwork.
When the call comes from upstream — a supplier reporting a bad batch — you can go the other way and list every lot that came off it, across every flush and every zone. A batch that produced nothing says so plainly rather than looking like a missing record.
Run the drill and the screen clocks it. We are deliberately not printing a number here — your farm, your records, your time. Run it once and you will have a figure you can put in front of a buyer and stand behind.
Who ran it, on which lot, when, how long it took — and what was missing. The gaps the drill exposed are written down verbatim, so a drill that found four missing record types says so permanently. That is the half an auditor actually reads.
The drill result exports as a single printable packet carrying the trace report, the elapsed time and the recent rehearsal history — the artefact to attach to a supplier questionnaire or put in front of a certification body.
A date-ranged export of the trace ledger as CSV or JSON, carrying producer name and address, seed source, harvest date, weight, zone, QA result, customers and the retention date for each record.
Water tests, sanitation, inputs and the rest captured as CanadaGAP V9 input records, validated so a record that looks complete but carries no evidence is rejected instead of filed.
Light Engine renders the lot code as a Code 128, Code 93, EAN-13 or UPC barcode image for your own labels and internal scanning.
A traceability page that claims everything is a traceability page you should not trust. Here is the boundary, so nothing surprises you during onboarding.
Each page below states only what we could verify from a source we actually read, and names what we could not. GS1 Canada’s grocery checklist covers all four.
Named on GS1 Canada’s grocery checklist. Supplier portal onboarding.
Read the verified requirements →Named on GS1 Canada’s grocery checklist.
Read the verified requirements →Named on GS1 Canada’s grocery checklist.
Read the verified requirements →Named on GS1 Canada’s grocery checklist and its produce case-labelling guidance.
Read the verified requirements →GS1 Canada’s checklist also names Whole Foods Market and Costco Canada. The same farm-side records apply.
Light Engine keeps the lot records, answers the recall query both directions, and turns the rehearsal into evidence you can hand a buyer.