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RBC Thought Leadership report affirms Flokk traceability regulation reform initiative

2min read

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On 2025-02-25, RBC Thought Leadership released their report Food first: How agriculture can lead a new era for Canadian exports. This report is timely and important, and we encourage every Canadian to read all of it.

But we would like to draw your attention to item 5, “Global marketing” from the section “Five keys to unlocking Canada’s export potential”:

(G)aining market share requires robust inspection and control services that ensure food safety and agriculture production’s protection against new diseases and pests. Canada has a strong reputation, but also must come to grips with a dilemma: even though we allocate 40% of that agriculture support services budget to inspection and control, we still face market access issues and duplicative inspections. One approach would be to pick the top five products for export potential and develop priority market assessments, such as Europe for seafood. Pooling public-private resources, the federal government could work with industry associations, companies, and provinces in region-specific, agile taskforces to promote exports and inform regulatory bodies on what’s needed to support growth. (emphasis ours)

This recommendation:

  • is critical to sustaining and expanding access to export markets
  • delivers regulatory reform, fundamental to resolving Canada’s productivity crisis
  • eliminates, or overcomes with technical solutions, interprovincial trade barriers
  • releases much of the 40% currently being incurred completing compliance paperwork
  • mobilizes new solutions that reduce costs, while improving outcomes, of Canada’s domestic food safety system
  • builds Canadian AgTech and FoodTech companies whose solutions, proven at scale, would be marketable globally, and
  • is affordably, and immediately, executable

This recommendation is also exactly mirrors the program Flokk initiated a month ago with our discussion paper Time to pull this calf ourselves: Canada’s beef industry must find our own path to livestock traceability.

Flokk Systems is keen to engage, and work, with Canadian individuals and organizations ready to pursue this opportunity