Taste of Place Labeling
Wed, Jun 10, 2009
Dairy Farmers of Canada's new logo
This is the new Dairy Farmers of Canada label. “100% Canadian Milk” under the happy blue cow gives a clear message. It’s a simple and wonderful difference. DFC, through their new branding initiative, has made it just that little bit easier to select a Canadian product among Canada’s convoluted product origin labeling.
What do you think about Taste of Place Labeling? It’s an interesting situation.
Where would you draw the line?
Traditional, derived-from-place foods, like maple syrup, fiddleheads and wild blueberries are easy to identify as Canadian. The second level of this labeling, would be processed products, made of local ingredients, with a sense of place tied to the product, Oka cheese, dried Newfoundland salt cod, smoked BC salmon, VQA wines, among others.
Then there are foods that are tied to the longer-term history and tradition of a place, without many or most the ingredients originally coming from Canada, such as our gorgeous butter tarts made of imported sugar, Rogers’ Chocolates and Murchie’s teas out in BC, and so on.
There are foods more recently introduced to our Canadian multicultural palate, that can be made completely with local ingredients, such as salsa, steamed char sui bao buns, and lamb kebab with sumac. They don’t fit the traditional Canadian mold, but they could easily contain only Canadian ingredients.
And lastly, there are food products and cultures tied to a Canadian place, however much of the food is imported. Think Toronto’s Kensington Market, or Vancouver’s Chinatown as a few examples.
Should “Made in Canada” mean only the commodities, or should it mean the cultural identity of the product? And if it incorporates the cultural identity, what would differentiate it from some generic, non-descript product also made partly of foreign ingredients. I’m thinking of ketchup, but I’m sure someone in Leamington will write in to rebut my statement.
I lived in Iowa for almost five years. During my time there, the state government ran an interesting experimental program using taste of place labeling in stores and on product packing, all for promoting locally produced products. I thought it was a brilliant marketing strategy, and I reveled in the variety of interesting local foods. And a couple years after starting, the program was quietly terminated. What happened that made the program unsustainable? Was the labeling initiative funded by the processors, or by the government, and did that make the difference in its sustainability?
How would you differentiate Canadian products in the marketplace?
Strange. I didn’t know Iowa tried local labeling, and I really wonder why it didn’t fly. Perhaps it was too expensive to keep certain products separate from others?
I would like to see country or state (or province?) of origin for just about everything. I think each person’s reasons for wanting such a label are different, and perhaps not everyone is so concerned with cultural identity – especially since we are all a blend of cultures to some extent.
Most people know what foods are associated with local identity and those aren’t always the same as the items that are grown there, as you said with the butter tarts (which sound delicious just from the name!). Perhaps two different labels would be in order? Ah, I sometimes wonder if there is enough room on everything for all of the labels I would want to see.
Identity preservation, no matter where it is done is going to be difficult. There has been a major push for more stringent identity management, in particular for genetically modified crops, and livestock. Consumers are demanding more information, but regulators, and food processors also need tracking capabilities for health and sanitary practices. Thinking of the BSE scares in Canada, a few years back, having an enhanced identity management program would have helped solve the problems faster. But that said, so many processors are dealing with megaton quantities of commodities, once blended together, it becomes near impossible to track back. Think ground beef…
I was trying to check out Agriculture Canada’s program, called “Brand Canada”. I work at Agriculture Canada, and am still having trouble logging into the site. If just accessing information about national branding is difficult, no wonder individual commodity boards are generating their own labeling systems.
Oh yes, when I come to Iowa again, I will make sure to bring a load of butter tarts for you and the gang. Cheers!