Bimbo Canada is the country…

Bimbo Canada is the country’s leading manufacturer and distributor of packaged fresh bread, bakery and salty snacks, including popular brands like Dempster’s, Vilaggio, Stonemill and Takis.

Our mission is to serve delicious and nutritious baked goods and snacks to all Canadians, and our purpose as a company is Building a sustainable, highly productive and deeply humane company, and one of our sustainability goals is for all of our packaging to be recyclable, biodegradable or compostable by 2025.

Despite the fact that our bread bags – which represent the vast majority of our packaging across our banners – are technically recyclable, the patchwork of rules across municipalities for determining which packaging is accepted makes it difficult for us to fulfill that goal in practice.

We therefore welcome Ontario’s move to full producer responsibility (FPR) with a goal of reducing the amount of valuable materials that end up in landfill and encouraging responsible innovation in packaging. We are also glad to see that this plan will ensure consistency of what will be collected across the province. Furthermore, the timelines provided should allow for members of the industry to prepare for the anticipated increase in fees to manage the packaging produced by our banners and sold to consumers in Ontario.

That said, we are concerned that the province does not appear to be playing a significant role in coordinating the development of Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) as they will be critical in the successful rollout of this monumental shift in how the Blue Box program and consumer/household recycling is operated in Ontario. We understand that the province does not want to intervene in a process that will be driven and managed by the private sector. The number of manufacturers and brands operating and selling packaged foods in the province, however, suggests that there is still a role for the province to play in ensuring that PROs are set up to serve their eventual customers: producers and their residential consumers.

As the process unfolds towards Ontario’s transition to FPR of the Blue Box program starting in 2023, we encourage the government to: play a role in sharing progress in the development of PROs and the anticipated fees that producers will be paying to PROs to manage the program; provide case studies of other jurisdictions (e.g. British Columbia) who have successfully transitioned to FPR and how they got there; and, continue to inform producers and the public about progress made on this file on a regular basis.