Ready to Resist

Living in interesting times is nothing new for the Canadian Produce Marketing Association (CPMA), one of the country’s strongest and most influential industry groups that’s been around for a remarkable 99 years.

But even accounting for that longevity, it is fair to says that it’s been some time since the venerable Ottawa-based association’s relatively large and highly diverse membership—accounting for about 90 per cent of all fresh vegetable and fruit sales in Canada—has faced the sort of grave existential challenge to its future prosperity as implementation of the pending federal ban on single-use plastic packaging.

While the ban may or may not be good politics for the federal Liberal government struggling in the polls, it is an exceptionally bad policy at the worst possible time and for all the wrong reasons, according to CPMA’s long-time president Ron Lemaire.

“If you were to eliminate plastic packaging from our supply chain for fruit and vegetables, the cost of these products to the consumer would rise by 34 per cent, along with a 50 per cent rise in food waste and 50 per cent rise in greenhouse gas emissions,” says Lemaire, citing CPMA-collected data and research.

“On top of that you would have total elimination of the entire categories of value-added products like fresh-cut salads and pre-cut produce, which would lead to lower overall consumption of fresh produce,” according to Lemaire.

Such outcomes would be absolutely devastating for a critically vital food category that has experienced some of the highest price increases recorded during the dangerous inflationary spiral unleashed in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic.

For an industry struggling to come to grips with extraordinary operating cost rises throughout its entire supply chain, adding the burden of replacing all of its existing single-use plastic packaging with entirely new and largely untested alternatives would be a missive blow to its fledgling recovery, Lemaire asserts.

The biggest problem with the government approach, Lemaire says, is its tendency to look at the different sectors impacted by the pending ban—scheduled to come into effect at the end of 2025—in isolation rather than in the context of the country’s highly-integrated food-distribution system, where any radical changes to existing and long-established industry practices will reverberate through other food sectors.

Says Lemaire: “Food inflation is a complex system that needs to take a holistic integrated approach to change.

“You cannot look at one singular element within the food system and change one piece to find a solution for everything,” he states.

“So any change to our [produce] packaging strategy will dramatically impact the availability of product, the cost the product, and food security in our country.”

As Lemaire points out, the runaway food inflation in the fresh-produce category has already manifested itself in lower consumer sales and demand due to the rising prices and production costs, which will ultimately have an adverse effect on the consumers’ health and nutrition.

“After the pandemic, we have seen food inflation impacting our sector in a big way,” he says, “with consumption declining through most of last year, before a slight rebound at the end of 2023.

“We’re hoping that 2024 will show some notable consumption growth to bring us back to where we were before the pandemic, which is just under four servings of fruit and/or vegetables per day.

“Ideally we would like to see it rise to between four and five servings a day,’ says Lemaire, while acknowledging that the price of fruits and vegetables still has to come down a fair bit to make that goal realistic.

However, that goal will become a lot more elusive if the government proceeds with the implementation of its single-use plastics ban by the end of next year.

Not only would this continue to fuel further public anxiety over food security and affordability, Lemaire says, but it would also have major economic repercussions for a key Canadian economic growth engine that contributes about $15 billion to the country’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) each year, while providing full-time jobs for an estimated 185,000 Canadians.

Simply replacing plastic with paper-based materials is not the answer, Lemaire asserts, noting that the cost of fibre-based packaging for price industry application increased by 27 per cent over the last year.

“The cost of all the major production inputs in our sector are all at higher-than-normal levels,” he says, “and these things all play into the end price of food for consumers at the retail level.”

The biggest irony of the current situation, according to Lemaire, is that the amount of plastic packaging found at the grocers’ produce departments accounts for just 2.9 per cent of all plastic packaging in Canada, which makes the government’s move to ban all single-use plastic in the sector a disproportionately punishing policy.

“It’s a drop in the bucket compared to other sectors,” Lemaire states.

“Every consumer that walks into a produce department thinks they are a sustainability specialist,” Lemaire remarks, “but very few of them understand the relationship between packaging and produce—specifically 90 per cent of all the things that plastic packaging provides in terms of product protection, shelf-life and other attributes taken for granted that actually occur well before the consumer even sees or touches the product.

As CPMA’s packaging specialist Don Duguay explains, “What consumers see at the store level provides a very narrow understanding of the key functions that packaging provides from the field level on through the entire supply chain before making it onto the shelf.

“So for the government to focus largely on the absence or presence of plastic at the store level provides a very narrow perspective on the overall role that plastic packing plays in the framework of sustainability of the entire produce supply chain,” Duguay states.

“When you think about food affordability, food availability, food, safety, food waste and all those other important factors—they all depend on the choice of packaging used to move that product through the supply chain.”

As Duguay contends, many of these supply chains require the use of plastics due to the lack of feasible affordable alternatives capable of delivering the same shelf-life and product protection properties that plastic packaging provides to keep the overall product costs at affordable levels.

“You really have to look at all the attributes that packaging has to deliver in terms of food safety, food quality, conveyance and distribution requirements, and so on,” adds Lemaire.

“So if I’m packing strawberries in some field in California, I need to ensure the package I put that strawberry into is going to be able to navigate the logistics of getting all the way 5,000 kilometres to a consumer in Canada, while maintaining the same level of freshness and quality as when it left the field and entered the cold chain.”

As Lemaire points out, the fresh-produce industry is well aware of the need to improve its environmental performance and has in fact achieved impressive results in that area without heavy-handed government regulations.

“Since we started working on packaging at the CPMA, we have seen a 17 per cent reduction in the total packaging mass,” Lemaire states, claiming that more responsible and efficient use of new-generation plastic packaging materials is one of the key factors behind that trend.

Says Lemaire: “I would argue that we are already implementing a sound plastic reduction strategy through the good governance and direction our industry is taking on lightweighting alternative materials where possible, and the option of selling in bulk where feasible.

“It’s all good to look at alternative materials for different product types: some may work for some markets, but some may not,” Lemaire remarks.

“But the key we have to look at here is making sure that the packaging meets the market needs in terms of price and product quality.

“So if you have a product with high moisture content that needs to control respiration, plastic may be your only choice,” he notes.

“There is no silver bullet, and there is no one solution that fits all applications,” Lemaire says, “which is where the government falls short.

“The government seems to think that an elimination strategy and a bulk strategy for produce is a simple approach,” says Lemaire.

“But following that approach removes access to certain products from the market, while also driving up costs and waste,” he asserts, pointing to widespread confusion over the circularity and viability of biodegradable plastics that cannot be disposed of in proper composting facilities due to Canada’s weak and patchwork-like recycling infrastructure.

“The bigger issue is how do we leverage these great technologies in our system, and how we manage them within our system,” Lemaire points out. “That’s the real challenge.

“Unfortunately, the government is trying to leapfrog that challenge because they don’t have a solution,” he says.

“However, jumping right to elimination is actually counterproductive to many existing sustainability strategies in our industry,” he states.

To prevent this from happening, CPMA is planning to engage the government in order to delay, if not repeal, the implementation of the ban in order to give industry more time to develop workable alternatives to single-use plastics.

That said, Lemaire says he is concerned that the current government is now too heavily invested in its policy for political reasons to contemplate a complete about face.

Despite that, CPMA is determined to pull all the stops to make the feds listen.

“We’re lobbying hard to ensure that the government really engages with us on this issue over the next year,” Lemaire relates.

“We are very happy to look at a strategy to reduce unnecessary problematic plastics,” he says, “but there are many flaws with the government’s current approach.

“Hence we want to engage with them to make sure they are not making any more unnecessary decisions that are problematic for the food industry.

“So our offer to the government is that while they pause, we’ll work with them to figure out a solution that is good for the industry, the government and, at the end of the day, the Canadian consumers,” Lemaire argues.

“Left unchecked, the current policy would be catastrophic for both the industry and the Canadian population,” Lemaire warns.

“Such a policy would not only dramatically change how our industry functions,” he says, “but it would have dramatically impacted how Canadians eat and the health of Canadians.

“We know that for every serving of fresh produce that Canadians cut out from their daily consumption ultimately adds up to an extra billion dollars in health-care costs each year,” he points out.

“Packaging plays a key role in driving higher consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables across Canada and beyond,” Lemaire concludes. “It’s not just a piece of the puzzle; it is in fact a catalyst for supporting healthy eating.”