Canada's National Food Microbiological Monitoring Program

Introduction: The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is Canada's federal food safety, animal health and plant protection enforcement agency. One of the roles of the Agency is to monitor and regulate Canada’s food supply to ensure safety and the enforcement of standards. This is achieved through a series of activities that range from the inspection of federally-registered establishments to border inspections, laboratory testing and surveys, the performance of food safety investigations, risk assessments, and regulatory action on unsatisfactory results.

Purpose: The National Microbiological Monitoring Program (NMMP) is one of many tools utilized by the CFIA to verify that both domestically produced and imported food products meet Canadian standards. It is designed to sample and test for the presence of pathogens in foods deemed to pose the greatest risk to consumers, and covers a broad range of domestic and imported foods of both plant and animal origin.

Methods: The NMMP consists of a variety of microbiological sampling activities such as (i) monitoring by random sampling of the food supply to verify compliance, and (ii) risk-based sampling through enhanced sampling of specific food/hazard combinations that are of greater concern to human health.

Results: Results from this testing enable the CFIA to make decisions concerning the acceptability of food based on its microbial quality.

Significance: A summary of the sampling and testing activities performed under the NMMP over the 2011/12 to 2013/14 time period will be presented.