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The first in our miniseries on GAP certification. Join us as a BC farmer takes us through her effort to become GAP certified—the process, the expense and the pain points. (And, learn about how she’s modified her carrot production to be able to sell more carrots for a lower price to retail stores!)
Prefer to listen? Tune into the journey on the Organic BC podcast. New episodes and articles released weekly.
Small and medium scale farmers have been talking about GAP, worrying about GAP, and cursing out GAP because of a perception, or maybe the reality, that GAP requirements unfairly exclude them from retail supply chains because it’s too expensive and unaccommodating to the systems typical of smaller diversified farms.
Meanwhile, access to retail supply chains for small, diversified farms is something that some food security advocates believe is important for building diversity and resiliency in our regional food system.
But there’s some good news: A project is underway in the North Okanagan that aims to demystify the GAP certification process and open new wholesale market opportunities for small to medium scale farmers.
CanadaGAP and GlobalGAP, or Good Agricultural Practices, are programs that certify the food safety practices of farmers and other participants in the fruit and vegetable supply chain.
It all started with a piece of federal legislation called the Safe Food for Canadians Act, which became law in 2012 and took effect in 2019. With the goal of modernizing food safety rules in Canada, the Act set out new requirements for food safety, traceability, and labeling for operators who sell food destined for grocery store shelves.
But, nowhere in the Safe Food for Canadians Act does it say that a farmer must have GAP certification to sell their food to a distributor or grocery store. And if you obtain GAP certification, you’ve already met all the requirements of the Act.
Distributors in grocery stores know this, and so for them it’s easier, cheaper and less risky to require suppliers to hold GAP certification than it is to independently document that each of their suppliers is satisfying Canada’s food safety regulations.
The problem—and the reason there’s been a GAP discourse among small-scale farmers over the last 12 years or so—was summed up well by Brody Irvine, a buyer for an organic food distributor called Discovery Organics, in an episode of the Organic BC podcast.
“CanadaGAP is pretty robust and great, but it’s very much focused on, or has at least historically been written and focused on, mono-crop conventional farming, which doesn’t have a lot of flexibility or even understanding in terms of organic production methods,” he explained. “Ultimately, my main concern is that in the race to become compliant with these new food safety standards, it’s going to become unprofitable or untenable for small or medium scale farmers to keep up—to be able to survive, especially if they’ve built their model around selling to wholesale retail.”
“It’s counterintuitive to the intention. We want safety within our food supply chain in Canada, but we certainly don’t want it at the expense of a small to medium size farm.”
So, to sum up the gap discourse in a word: exclusion.
To help uncover the true narrative around GAP certification for smaller diversified farms, we followed the efforts of a North Okanagan mixed veggie grower, Emily Jubenvill of Shuswap Organics, to preserve her farm’s access to retail supply chains for its carrots and beets.
The writing is on the wall for Emily: If she wants to continue selling root vegetables to distributors and retailers, she’s going to need to have GAP certification. So, she went through the process of getting GAP, and we documented it.
Emily’s journey was supported by Sacha Investments, a US-based private bank that has allocated some of its capital to what they call “impact investing” in British Columbia and Alberta. The vision behind this capital is to manifest a new paradigm around what we need to live a good life and to invest in areas that provide those fundamental basic daily needs: adequate shelter; good, clean, nutritious food; clean air; and water.
In this instance, Shuswap Organics is aligned with Sacha’s ambition to support regenerative organic farming. Sacha is working with Emily and other aligned food producers that Shuswap Organics aggregates with to scale their farmland and get their products into larger distribution networks.
But first, that requires GAP certification and investigating whether it’s a barrier or not.
And this is where Emily’s journey begins!
Shuswap Organics in located in Grindrod, in the North Okanagan, and currently has six acres of organic mixed vegetable production. After COVID and starting a family, Emily and her partner Owen found themselves only selling wholesale to restaurants, stores and institutions—a move that made their lives as farmers and parents much more manageable.
One of the things they noticed is that opportunities are available even for small and medium sized growers to get into some of the bigger wholesale markets. But, they also noticed a potential hurdle: GAP certification is required, which has traditionally been a challenge for diversified small-scale farms.
First, there’s the cost. Even though you don’t need to certify every crop on your farm (you can just pick one that requires it, like if you’re growing enough of it to sell to a major grocery store), annual inspection and certification costs can run thousands of dollars. And then there’s the headache of recordkeeping and training your employees on food safety so everyone’s on the same page.
There have also been mixed messages about how state-of-the-art your facility needs to be in order to achieve GAP certification, but it’s not as rigid as some people assume.
Another challenge in the North Okanagan specifically is that the region has a low number of purchasers along with saturated farmers’ markets.
“It’s not an easy win for a new farmer to come in and be successful,” said Emily. “We need to grow the pie for everybody in order to make room for new farmers and help existing farmers thrive.”
And so she asked, “If we’re working together, can we get into those markets and help build access essentially to a new market that helps our farms do well and thrive?”
Emily’s vision is this: to get a bunch of local, small-scale carrot suppliers together to pool their carrots and sell them wholesale.
“The volumes that we’re talking about from these supplier farms don’t warrant the potential investment [to GAP certification] or changes to their established systems,” said Emily.
To kick off the project, Shuswap Organics first needs to obtain GAP certification themselves. Then, their network of farms would sell their “dirty” produce to Shuswap Organics, straight from the fields. This way, the supplier farms wouldn’t need to get their own GAP certification—they would only need to handle food safety in the fields to harvest, and then from that point on, the responsibility of the washing, packing, and all other food certification would lie with Shuswap Organics.
This simpler approach to GAP certification would reduce the cost of participating for those supplier farms because they would have reduced infrastructure upgrades and shorter inspection times, and, because GAP recordkeeping aligns closely with that of organic certification, there shouldn’t be too much of a shift in administrative burden, or practices they’re using in the field.
And, it could put local-only carrots on the shelves of stores year-round, in the North Okanagan and beyond.
“My hope in doing this project is that we can show that a very rudimentary packhouse facility and infrastructure is enough as long as you’re using it the right way, and that you’re doing the record keeping that you need to do to get GAP certified,” said Emily. “You don’t need to have stainless steel everything, concrete floors everywhere. You can do it on a more rudimentary scale.”
“And, being able to document that process so it’s helpful for other farms who may want to be suppliers or who are in other parts of the province and are juggling with these issues as well,” she added. “Just a real attempt to demystify the process and break it down into farmer hacks.”
Find out in part two of our series, In Pursuit of Gap Certification! Coming soon.
