Toward Performance Metrics for Canada’s Food System

The Centre for Food in Canada (CFIC) seeks to create a Canadian Food Strategy to ensure a healthy, secure, sustainable, safe, and prosperous food system. This report provides examples of practical performance metrics that could be included in the Strategy. CFIC believes such metrics should spur stakeholders to act, make management decisions, finance investments, build programs, and improve dietary choices. However, to track and assess performance, we first need to set strategic, achievable, actionable, and measurable goals, and that task requires solid data. To that end, the report also examines the numerous knowledge gaps in Canada’s food system. The author reviews various data sources according to the Strategy’s five elements: industry prosperity, healthy food, food safety, household food security, and environmental sustainability. The report provides examples of performance baselines and ends with steps for implementing performance metrics.