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Is this not illegal?
Yep mom works in a grocery store. Can confirm. It runs afoul of Food and Drugs Act (FDA) and Safe Food for Canadians Act (SFCA) which govern handling/sale of food in Canada. They prohibit the "labelling, packaging, treating, processing, selling, or advertising of any food in a manner that is false, misleading, or deceptive, or is likely to create an erroneous impression regarding its character, value, quantity, composition, or merit". Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) can do a ton of things about it but honestly just ask for the produce manager to change the sign. If they give you flak take a picture and copy corporate with your location. Ask corporate if this needs to go to CFIA? It'll get fixed fast. You can't fuck about with food.
It shouldn't be up to the customer to police this. The CFIA needs to be doing a few more spot checks to ensure compliance.
Although I suppose any fines are effectively going to get passed on to the consumers anyways. :/
I agree completely, but please don't shoot the messenger when I say what comes next: I want to just be completely clear with you I only know this because my mother has actually been facing this issue for a good chunk of my life so for once I can actually give some useful context on why this happens and the vast majority of the time it's not malicious or meant to deceive.
to start lets set the context for how they even get the info for the signs. every week your grocery store department manager gets an order sheet with items with items they can choose to buy and some items with preset quantities sent to them that they can not refuse or reduce quantities of. these may be sale items, basics or seasonal items corporate says they must sell or you will have to throw them out and count as waste on your departments sales sheet. some of these items have info already on them about country of origin some do not. This is because corporate may have ordered 10 tons of watermelons 3 tons from the USA, 7 tons from Mexico. these end up stacked all together in the warehouses and depending on how much is ordered by each store or to be honest dumb luck you may end up with partial loads of mixed quantities because to the folks in the warehouse watermelons are watermelons. these get loaded on trucks that get sent out to multiple stores where adriver has a spreadsheet that simply says 1 watermelon pallet for each store except store in bigCityCanada which ordered an extra. the truck driver doesn't even look at the pallets they unload the first pallet they get to to the first store they were assigned to drive to that day. that means that no one has a clue what they actually have till it gets to the store. the grocery clerks get the load and say "ok this pallet is watermelons that are from Mexico" because that's what the box says on top and no one is digging through a pallet of watermelons. the grocery store manager runs around like a chicken with there head cut off writing down country of origins so they can rush back to there office to update all there price signs with country of origin info and print them because it's 6AM and they open at 6:30AM and having product on the floor without a sign is a CFIA violation as well and depending on the grocer a Scanner Price Accuracy Code violation which means at minimum you get the product for next to nothing or free. If you take products onto the floor with people there you can get angry or even worse you can possibly hurt customers(as you can imagine corporate hates this a lot). now understand that this is happening to multiple departments all at once with usually just one tired out computer and printer in a cramped back office barely big enough for a chair and one other person to stand next to you. now customer walks onto the floor after the first couple boxes are sold and now only the other countries watermelons are left. no one is paying attention because all the workers are doing now is dealing with customers being borderline demons rooting though produce dmaging products and moving stuff around they must reorganize and spot fill to make the shelves look pretty and full so products sell. that's why I say just ask the produce manager first 9 times out of 10 they don't know or haven't noticed because they are focused on selling as much as possible and keeping customers happy. you saying I'm not happy the signs don't match should be enough to make them go(internally) "FU*K the coo is wrong corporate will write me up for that and I can get fined!" and send them scrambling to reprint the price sheet.
is this an excuse? not really this is just piss poor organization and control in the warehouse and ordering practices to get the best deal that just bubbles down to screw over local grocery stores and mislead consumers. but please be kind to the grocery store workers they are doing there best and dealing in a very low margin market with people that look down on them even though they help put the food on your plate every day. at least give them a chance to do right if there is a mistake(My mom's really trying, she doesn't want to buy American either but corporate makes that decision not her).
Thank you for the very interesting peak behind the curtain!
I generally make it a policy to try my best to never be angry at workers who aren't in the top 1% of income distribution. Usually problems like this arise because corporate has bad policies which result in workers unable to adequately address the situation.
They probably don’t have to go far. I haven’t seen any store that hasn’t mislabeled.
They likely shove a bunch of melons from Mexico in the same box and hope people won't notice. But I agree, at the very least semi-decent places would list both countries on label, at worst that should be reportable leading to a fine or something.
That happens a lot I find. Apples for example. Sign says “Product of Canada” and then it’s mostly US apples and a few Canadian ones mixed in. Not just on top but literally mixed throughout. This isn’t a case of we got a new shipment and the few (Canadian) left were placed on top of a new (US) delivery! It’s intentional.
Also, lemons always came with stickers. I used to hate these when washing and zesting. Total pain in the ass. Now ZERO lemons (because US) have stickers but all limes (Mexican) do! I wonder why 🤨
The packer is from the Imperial Valley in California (the very southern portion). They have producers in both Mexico and the U.S. (some of the same farmers grow on both sides of the border).
It's common to get a mixed load from two countries.