This episode kicks off a miniseries about Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), a food safety certification designed for particpants in the fresh fruit & veggie supply chain. Increasingly, food distributors and grocery stores are requiring their suppliers to hold GAP certification.

This requirement has concerned many small-scale fruit & veggie growers, who believe that GAP certification was designed with a bias toward large-scale farming systems. They argue that GAP is too expensive and too inflexible to the alternate ways that diversified, small-scale farms operate. The result, they argue, is that the requirement of GAP certification by retailers and distributors represents an unfair barrier to their participation in those markets.

Access to wholesale markets is important to Emily Jubenvill, a diversfied small-scale farmer in the North Okanagan. In 2024, she applied for GAP certification in order to preserve her relationship with a few grocery stores in her region.

In this series, we'll track Emily's effort to obtain GAP certification, and talk to a couple of other small-scale farmers who obtained GAP, as we try to either confirm or disprove the concerns about GAP outlined above.

Optional background materials:

A previous episode of The Organic BC Podcast on this subject

Understanding the Safe Food for Canadians Regulation

Canada GAP website