Selling maple syrup in Ontario

No provincial licence or registration: O. Reg. 119/11 (under the Food Safety and Quality Act, 2001) regulates selling, packing, labelling, transporting and advertising maple products, but it contains no licensing provision for them. Unlike honey, there's no farm-gate exemption for maple — the grading and labelling rules apply to farm-gate and farmers' market sales too. A federal Safe Food for Canadians (SFC) licence from CFIA is required only if you manufacture, grade, package or label syrup that will be sent to another province, exported or imported; activities done under that licence follow CFIA's rules instead of O. Reg. 119/11.

O. Reg. 119/11 doesn't require a licensed or inspected sugarhouse and doesn't mention home kitchens. It does require that any premises where maple products are produced or packed — and the equipment and utensils — be kept clean and sanitary, and that everything touching sap or syrup be non-toxic, food-grade material (s. 6). Ontario's Food Premises Regulation (O. Reg. 493/17) exempts farmers' market food vendors, but it doesn't say whether a home or on-farm sales spot selling syrup is a food premise your local public health unit inspects — ask them.

To be called maple syrup it must have at least 66% soluble solids, measured by refractometer at 20 °C. Syrup sold in consumer containers (5 L or less), or in bulk containers going directly to consumers or retail stores, must first be graded "Ontario Grade A" or "Ontario Processing Grade" and classified into one of four colour classes — Golden, Amber, Dark or Very Dark — using a spectrophotometer or a visual glass comparator. Taste descriptors (Delicate, Rich, Robust, Strong) are optional but must match the colour class. The producer, packer or retailer can do the grading. Syrup in interprovincial trade uses the federal "Canada Grade A" (66–68.9% solids) instead.

Syrup grades explained · check your density

• ✓Name of the product (e.g. "Maple Syrup")
• ✓Name and full address (enough to find the premises, including postal code) of the packer, or of the person it was packed for
• ✓Volume of syrup in the container, in mL or L
• ✓Grade, immediately followed by the colour class
• ✓A production lot code
• ✓Containers of 125 mL or less need only the product name and the name and full address
• ✓"Product of …" only if the syrup was produced outside Ontario (not needed for Ontario syrup packed in Ontario)

Farm gate, roadside stands, farmers' markets and retail stores are all open to you without a provincial licence, as long as every container is graded, labelled and filled to at least 90%, and consumer containers (5 L or less) are new and securely closed. Bulk syrup sold to a packer or processor before it reaches consumers or stores doesn't have to be graded first, but its containers must still be clean, sound and labelled. Sending syrup to another province or country is interprovincial or export trade under the SFCR, which requires an SFC licence and federal grading and labelling. OMAFA inspectors sample syrup at retail stores, roadside stands, farmers' markets and farm gates.

Premises, equipment and utensils must be kept clean and sanitary, and every food-contact surface used to collect, store or transport sap or to make and pack syrup must be non-toxic, food-grade material (O. Reg. 119/11 s. 6). Contaminated syrup can't be sold, packed, transported or blended with clean syrup (s. 4). The province's Maple Syrup Monitoring Program tests samples for lead: above 0.15 ppm is treated as a sign that equipment doesn't meet the rules, and above 0.5 ppm (Health Canada's tolerance) triggers immediate compliance action and notice to CFIA.