Food Safety a Priority
At Maple Leaf Foods, we do our best to minimize the presence of bacteria that can cause foodborne illness in our manufacturing plants.
Our goal is to provide consumers safe, great tasting food that’s made in a safe work environment every single day.
We follow Global Food Safety standards
We adhere to the highest food safety standards set by the Global Food Safety Initiative. All of our manufacturing plants are audited annually by an internal food safety audit function and a third-party auditor to identify and correct any problems.
We continuously monitor the effectiveness of our efforts through aggressive testing of our manufacturing environment and our products.
We regularly swab, test, and sanitize all our production areas, including manufacturing equipment, as a preventative measure to maintain product quality and safety.
We conducted more than 430,000 tests in 2025 to measure product quality and safety, including the detection of allergens, microorganisms, and pathogens.
Educating the industry about food safety
As part of our unwavering commitment to food safety leadership, Maple Leaf Foods proudly hosted its 15th annual Food Safety Symposium on October 21, 2025. This year's theme, “How Many Mor Wake-Up Calls? Confronting the Listeria Threat – Reclaiming Control Before the Next Crisis” focused on practical insights, real-world case studies and open discussion. The symposium underscored the importance of avoiding complacency, strengthening accountability and maintaining vigilance to help prevent future incidents.
Food safety and sanitation is very important to us
Sanitation is a foundational and critical part of our food safety strategy. We practice scrupulous sanitation, as we dedicate hours each day to a top-to-bottom cleanup of our manufacturing equipment and of our plants. We disassemble equipment used in our plants to chop, blend, slice, and package products so that we can clean every inch with hot water, soap and disinfectant.
Our team members wear extensive protective equipment to ensure that our plants are sanitary, including gloves, boots, aprons, hair nets, hard hats and face coverings. And they wash their hands and boots multiple times each day to maintain cleanliness.
Our disciplined and standardized approach has also delivered operational benefits, including reduced water use and less equipment wear related to sanitation activities — all without compromising hygiene standards. We continue to look for practical ways to improve efficiency, reduce resource use and manage costs across our sanitation processes in our facilities
Our Food Safety Strategy
We’re pursuing a world-class food safety and quality culture. We’ve developed a food safety strategy that includes:
- plants designed in ways that optimize food safety
- comprehensive food safety training to empower our people
- an industry-leading sanitation program to ensure our plants are as safe as we can make them
- a microbiological testing program that seeks to target and destroy bacteria and other hazards before they pose a risk
- a company culture that puts food safety first every single day
Managing food safety by measuring and reporting
We believe deeply that you manage what you measure. . We have two well-established metrics: the Food Safety Incident Rate (FSIR) and a Quality Incident Rate (QIR). For FSIR, we measure a number of factors including recalls, pathogen occurrence, regulatory non-conformance incidents, and consumer complaints for food safety-related issues. For QIR, we measure quality recalls and withdrawals and consumer complaints for quality.
These two indexed values are calculated each month for every manufacturing site. Sites compare their performance to inspire further progress and to learn from each other.
We continuously seek ways to improve our program. We’re pleased that our food safety and operational teams have exceeded our goals every year since they were originally established!
Integrated Report
We’re documenting and calculating all the changes we’re making. See our progress in our 2025 Integrated Report.