Selling Food in Canada: US Label Requirements

If your product already sells in the US, it is tempting to assume the label is most of the way there for Canada. It is not. Canada runs its own labelling system under the Food and Drug Regulations (FDR) and the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SFCR), enforced by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) with the nutrition rules set by Health Canada. Several things a US-compliant label gets right are simply not acceptable north of the border.

This guide walks through what has to change, in plain language, and where US brands most often get caught. It is a starting map, not a substitute for a compliance review. The rules have exceptions, and the exceptions have conditions.

The US Nutrition Facts panel does not transfer

This is the one that surprises people most. The US Nutrition Facts panel and the Canadian Nutrition Facts table (NFt) are two different formats, each defined by its own regulator down to the wording, the order, the units, and the rounding. You cannot print a US panel on a product sold in Canada and call it done.

The Canadian NFt lives in FDR section B.01.401 and the prescribed templates that go with it. It carries bilingual headings (“Nutrition Facts” and “Valeur nutritive”), a different nutrient list and order, Canadian Daily Values, metric units, and Canadian rounding conventions that do not match the US ones. The serving size is set against Canada’s Reference Amounts, not the US RACC system, so even the per-serving math can land differently. If you have not seen the structure of a regulated nutrition table before, our FDA Nutrition Facts panel guide shows how tightly these tables are specified, and the Canadian one is specified just as tightly in its own way.

The practical takeaway: budget for a Canadian NFt to be rebuilt, not translated. A US panel with French added underneath is still the wrong table.

Most of the label has to be bilingual

Canada has two official languages, and most prepackaged consumer foods have to show their mandatory label information in both English and French. This sits in FDR B.01.012 and in the SFCR (around sections 205 to 207), and it covers far more than the product name.

The bilingual requirement reaches the common name, the list of ingredients, the allergen information, the Nutrition Facts table, storage and preparation instructions, and most other mandatory statements. “Keep refrigerated” needs its French equivalent. “Contains” needs “Contient.” The ingredient list needs French ingredient names alongside the English ones.

There are narrow exceptions. The dealer name and principal place of business may appear in only one official language, and there are limited carve-outs for certain specialty foods, local foods sold in specific areas, and test-market products, each with its own qualifying conditions. Quebec adds its own provincial French-language requirements on top of the federal floor, which is worth knowing if you sell there. Treat the default as: if it is mandatory, it is bilingual.

A common failure here is machine-translating ingredient names. Canadian ingredient nomenclature is prescribed for many ingredients, so “sugar/sucre” is fine but a loose translation of a specialty ingredient can be wrong even when it is grammatically correct.

Units go metric

US labels lead with imperial measures. Canadian labels are metric. Net quantity is declared in metric units (grams, millilitres, or count), and the Nutrition Facts table expresses everything in the metric units the FDR prescribes. You can show Canadian (formerly imperial) units as a secondary measure in some cases, but metric is the mandatory one, it has to be declared first, and it has to be present and correct. A label that declares only ounces or fluid ounces is not compliant in Canada.

The allergen list is not the same as the US one

Both countries require major allergens to be declared, but the lists are not identical, and assuming they match is a real risk. The US recognizes eight major allergens under FALCPA, plus sesame as the ninth under the FASTER Act, which took effect January 1, 2023. Our allergen labeling guide covers the US side in full.

Canada’s priority allergens are set under the Food and Drug Regulations and include peanuts, tree nuts, sesame seeds, milk, eggs, fish, crustaceans, molluscs, soy, and wheat (and triticale), plus mustard, along with gluten sources and added sulphites that have their own declaration rules. Mustard is the one that catches US brands. It became a priority allergen requiring declaration in Canada effective in 2012 (the regulations were registered in 2011), and it is not a FALCPA major allergen in the US, so a US-compliant label can omit it entirely and still be fine in the US while being non-compliant in Canada. If your product contains mustard, mustard powder, or prepared mustard anywhere in the formula, it has to be declared in Canada.

Allergens must be identified by their specific source names from the regulations (for example “wheat” or specific tree nut names like “almonds”), either inside the ingredient list or in a “Contains” statement, and when you use a “Contains” statement it has to name every priority allergen present. Because the rest of the label is bilingual, the allergen information is too: “Contains: milk” pairs with “Contient : lait.”

The front-of-package nutrition symbol is now in force

This is the newest change and the one most likely to be missed by a brand working from an older Canadian reference. On July 20, 2022, Health Canada published amendments to the Food and Drug Regulations requiring a front-of-package (FOP) nutrition symbol on foods that are high in saturated fat, sugars, or sodium. The amendments came with a transition period that ended December 31, 2025, and industry compliance has been required since January 1, 2026.

The symbol is a black-and-white magnifying glass that names which of saturated fat, sugars, or sodium the food is high in, with “Health Canada / Santé Canada” beneath it. It is bilingual by design. Whether your product needs it depends on whether specific nutrients exceed the thresholds Health Canada set (broadly, a percent Daily Value benchmark for saturated fat, sugars, and sodium, with different reference amounts for some food categories and some prescribed exemptions). Products made, imported, or packaged before January 1, 2026 can generally still move through existing inventory, but new production has to comply.

For a US brand, the trap is twofold. First, the symbol is mandatory now, not coming soon. Second, whether you trigger it is a calculation against the Canadian NFt and the Canadian thresholds, so you cannot eyeball it from a US panel.

Who enforces all of this

Two bodies share the work. Health Canada sets the nutrition and safety policy, including the NFt format, the Daily Values, and the FOP symbol rules. The CFIA enforces labelling and can act when a product is misrepresented or non-compliant. A label that fails here can be refused entry, held, or pulled, which for an imported product usually means the problem surfaces at the worst possible moment, after the run is printed and the shipment is at the border.

What a US-to-Canada conversion actually involves

Put together, moving a compliant US label into Canada is not a translation pass. It is, at minimum:

• A rebuilt Nutrition Facts table in the Canadian format, with Canadian rounding and Daily Values
• Full bilingual text across the common name, ingredients, allergens, and instructions
• Metric net quantity and metric nutrition units
• An allergen review against Canada’s priority list, including mustard
• A front-of-package symbol assessment against the current thresholds

Skip any one of these and the label is non-compliant. If you want a single list to check against, the food label requirements checklist pulls the mandatory elements together. We also wrote a shorter walkthrough of the same conversion here: what your food label must change to sell in Canada.

The shortcut

You can learn all of this. Brands expand into Canada every day, usually the hard way, one rejected label at a time. The faster path is to hand it off.

That is what Complion does. You send us your recipe or your existing US label, and we build the Canadian version: the Nutrition Facts table in the right format, the bilingual ingredient statement and allergen declarations, the metric units, the front-of-package symbol assessment, and the print-ready artwork. Then our food-compliance experts verify the whole thing against Health Canada and CFIA rules before it reaches you. Your only step is sharing what you already have.

If you want a Canada-ready label without becoming an expert in the Food and Drug Regulations and the SFCR, book a free call to start.