People ask what "verified" means here, usually in one of two tones: a shopper wondering whether to believe it, and a brand wondering whether they would pass. The answer is the same for both, so here it is in full.
The three gates
Incorporated in Canada and majority Canadian-owned. We check the corporate registry, not the About page. Plenty of brands that feel Canadian turn out to be a Canadian storefront on a foreign company, and that is a different thing worth knowing.
Orders leave a Canadian address. No drop-shipping from overseas warehouses. If the parcel starts its journey outside the country, the brand does not belong on a shelf that promises otherwise.
The brand makes or designs what it sells. We do not list resellers. If someone else made it and you are simply moving boxes, there is nothing here for you — and a shopper looking for the maker would be misled by finding you.
And then we buy something
The fourth check is the least sophisticated and the most useful: we place a test order, like a customer, and see what turns up. How long it took, how it was packed, whether the thing is what the photographs promised. A brand can pass every paper check and still fall down here, and we would rather find that out ourselves than have a customer find it for us.
Then the label
Clearing the gates gets a brand listed. It does not decide what its products say. Each one gets one of the three Competition Bureau labels according to where it is actually made — Product of Canada is the rarest and the hardest to earn, Made in Canada means the last substantial transformation happened here, and Canadian Company means Canadian-owned with manufacturing that may happen elsewhere. We apply the one that is true, not the one that sells best.
What happens when something changes
Brands move production. Ownership changes. When that happens the label changes with it, or the brand comes down. If you spot something on this site that looks wrong, tell us — that is a real offer, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.
If you make something
We reply to every application within two weeks, including the no's, and if it is a no we will tell you what would change it. The full standard is public, and so is this process, deliberately: a shelf that will not explain its own bar is not really applying one.
