Millions of pounds of Driscoll’s berries shipped into Canada between 2022 and 2024 exceeded the country’s legal pesticide limits, according to a whistleblower lawsuit that is now raising a tougher question than the one already making headlines: why nothing was recalled.
David Harada, Driscoll’s former manager of food safety and regulatory compliance for the U.S. and Canada, alleges in a lawsuit that roughly half of the company’s shipments to Canada during that period exceeded Health Canada’s maximum residue limits for pesticides including bifenthrin, iprodione and captan, according to CBC News. Harada says he was pushed out of the company in October 2025 after refusing to help cover up the violations, which he claims totalled close to $100 million in potentially non-compliant product. Driscoll’s has denied wrongdoing, telling CBC that food safety is “fundamental to who we are” and disputing Harada’s account of how the company handled the concerns he raised internally.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has confirmed it issued at least five warnings to Driscoll’s between October 2022 and June 2025 after its own testing turned up pesticide residues above the legal threshold. Yet in every case, the agency says, it closed its file once the company took unspecified corrective action, and no recall was ever ordered. That gap is the part of this story worth understanding on its own. According to the CFIA’s own published guidance, exceeding a maximum residue limit does not automatically trigger a recall: results above the limit are instead referred to Health Canada for a separate risk assessment, and only based on that outcome does the CFIA decide whether a seizure or recall is warranted, since limits are deliberately set “far below the amount that could pose a health concern.” That distinction is rarely explained to the public when a file is quietly closed. For a company the size of Driscoll’s, which supplies conventional and organic berries to most major Canadian grocery chains including Loblaw, Sobeys, Costco and Walmart, it means repeated violations over three years produced warning letters rather than a single public recall notice Canadians would have seen in stores.
South of the border, the allegations are drawing more visible regulatory attention. The lawsuit says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent Driscoll’s notices in April 2025 after reports that some consumers experienced dizziness and headaches linked to its berries, and a separate California suit accuses the company of failing to disclose PFAS, or so-called forever chemicals, in its strawberries. Driscoll’s has pushed back on that claim as well, pointing to its published food safety program.
For Canadian shoppers, there is no active recall to act on, so the practical advice from CFIA remains the same as always: rinse fresh berries under cold running water before eating them, since washing removes surface residue even though it does not eliminate everything absorbed into the fruit. Consumers with safety concerns about a specific product can file a complaint directly with the CFIA online.
The bigger unresolved question, and one neither Driscoll’s nor the CFIA has answered publicly, is how many other produce suppliers have had similar warning letters closed quietly over the past three years without ever becoming public. Harada’s lawsuit is under review in a California labour court, not a Canadian one, meaning any accountability for what reached Canadian shelves will likely be decided in a legal system that has no obligation to inform Canadian consumers of the outcome.
Via CBC News. Original report: cbc.ca
