Label obsession grips Canada as shoppers shun American products

She scans the barcodes on food packages and studies the origin stories that pop up on her phone. When something seems potentially misleading or incomplete, she moves to phase 2, poring over the fine print.

“Sometimes it will say, ‘Prepared in Canada,’" the retired college administrator said during a recent weekend shopping trip with her husband. “But if you read the package, it’s shipped through Florida or California," and doesn’t specify what kind of preparation took place north of the border.

“I don’t care that someone in Canada touched it. It has to be legitimate," said Fromowitz, who added it now takes her twice as long to shop.

Canada has a label fixation.

As tensions with their neighbor rise, Canadians are turning away from U.S.-made products. To appeal to increasingly anti-American shoppers, brands and retailers are touting–and in some cases embellishing–their Canadian credentials in a practice that’s become known as “maplewashing" or “mapleglazing."

Some shoppers say they are spending a lot more time in the store studying labels to ensure they are buying Canadian.

Labels like “Designed in Canada," “Prepared for Canada," “Distilled in Canada" and “Proudly Serving Canadians" are proliferating, puzzling shoppers looking for country-of-origin information as part of the national backlash against tariff and annexation threats from the U.S.

Campbell’s got into hot water with the Buy Canadian movement with its line of Habitant soups, which includes a pea soup based on a traditional Quebecois recipe and features a small “Designed in Canada" label on the can.

“Did they conceive of the recipe while visiting Banff?" one poster queried on a Reddit thread devoted to helping consumers discern Canadian content.

A spokesman for Campbell’s said in a statement it has heard from some consumers seeking clarification on what “Designed in Canada" means. The label has been on Campbell’s products since 2018 and “describes a product that is created based on Canadian taste preferences, insights or recipes," said the spokesman, James Regan. He added that the peas used to make Habitant Pea Soup are “grown by Canadian farmers."

Some U.S. companies selling to Canadian consumers have become increasingly sensitive about their products being labeled American. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created a stir in January by suggesting Canada could respond to U.S. tariffs by targeting American imports that have Canadian alternatives. He cited Kraft Heinz ketchup, saying Canadians could instead buy French’s, which wouldn’t face tariffs since it was still using Canadian tomatoes.

Kraft Heinz responded swiftly with a statement that it makes Canadian ketchup at a 1,000-worker facility in Quebec and is the biggest buyer of Ontario tomatoes.

Kraft Heinz said it makes Canadian ketchup at a facility in Quebec and is the biggest buyer of Ontario tomatoes.

All four party leaders running in Monday’s federal election took pains during one of the debates last week to spell out their aversion to buying American products. “No more wine. No more American alcohol," Prime Minister Mark Carney said, when asked which U.S. product he had dropped.

Montreal-based tech entrepreneur Christopher Dip and his friend Alexandre Hamila spotted an opportunity amid the label confusion. In February they launched their Buy Beaver app, which rates products based on where a product is made, where its ingredients are sourced, and who owns the brand. It’s been downloaded 150,000 times.

“We saw a list of products getting shared online [as Canadian] that were not always truthful," said Dip. Competing apps include BeaverMade and O SCANada.

Canadian-content labeling has long been regulated according to federally-designated criteria, so that labels such as “Made in Canada" and “Product of Canada" are reserved for products that meet various thresholds for Canadian-sourced ingredients, materials and manufacturing.

A frozen pizza, for example, can only be labeled Made in Canada if its “last significant transformation" happens in Canada, and the maker also includes information about whether the ingredients are Canadian, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s guidelines.

Nikiforos Iatrou, a competition lawyer at McCarthy Tetrault in Toronto, started to notice a surge in Canadian content claims as the tariff rhetoric heated up early this year. In an article for the firm’s website, he warned companies about “inappropriately draping wares with the Canadian flag."

A “Shop Canadian" sign on a grocery store shelf in Victoria, British Columbia.

He has since fielded calls from clients looking for advice on how to better promote themselves as Canadian without getting in regulators’ crosshairs.

Complaints to the food inspection agency related to Canadian branding claims have jumped this year – to 58 in February and March, up from a total of six in the last quarter of 2024. Canada’s Competition Bureau, which enforces false-advertising laws on non-food products and can levy fines for deceptive claims, has recently fielded more queries about Made in Canada claims, a spokesperson said.

In response, the agency is prodding companies on LinkedIn to “learn how to make accurate claims about where your products are made." For consumers, it has added an online warning: “Don’t assume a product is Canadian just because it displays red colours or a maple leaf design."

Complicating the task of identifying a product’s roots: Products from cars to beef have flowed seamlessly between the two countries for decades.

Southern Ontario, home to Canada’s most densely-populated corridor along the U.S. border, doesn’t have enough pig processing facilities to satisfy pork demand, so the industry sprawls across what’s become effectively an invisible border, said Mike von Massow, an expert on food supply chains at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

“You can have a pig that is born here, raised here, fed in a Canadian farm with Canadian grain and then goes to the U.S. and is processed in the U.S.," von Massow said. “Is that Canadian pork or is that U.S. pork?"

Heather Buchanan, an artist who lives in Calgary, Alberta, considers a product to be Canadian-made if the company making it is Canadian-owned. When she shops, she googles company names and has tried to support small businesses.

TicTacs in downtown Toronto are labeled as being prepared in Canada.

“I do my detective work," said Buchanan.

For even the most pro-Canada shoppers, sometimes necessity trumps patriotism.

Maria Fielding tries to Buy Canadian as much as she can. But she also makes a white bean soup recipe that calls for a sundried tomato pesto.

“It doesn’t have a Canadian-made label," she said, holding a jar of her preferred brand. “But I really need it."

Write to Elena Cherney at Elena.Cherney@wsj.com and Vipal Monga at vipal.monga@wsj.com