Deadly Listeria Outbreak Tied to “Haven” for Bacteria, Newly Revealed Inspection Records Show

Peeling floors. Dripping ceilings. No testing for one of the deadliest foodborne pathogens in the world. These are among the conditions inspectors found inside a Pickering, Ontario plant that packaged plant-based milk linked to a listeria outbreak that killed three Canadians and sent fifteen others to hospital.

Inspection records obtained by The Canadian Press through a Freedom of Information request paint a troubling picture of the Joriki facility a third-party packager that bottled Silk and Great Value branded soy, almond, and coconut milk and raise pointed questions about whether Canada’s food safety system moved fast enough to protect the public.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency conducted its inspection of the Joriki facility between June 26 and August 22, 2024, weeks after public health officials in Ontario had already flagged the plant as a likely source of a listeria outbreak. What they documented, food safety experts say, amounts to a catalogue of systemic failures.

Inspectors noted condensation dripping from ceilings in pasteurization and batching areas exactly the kind of damp environment in which listeria thrives. Floors in the same zones showed peeling and flaking paint, a problem that Lori Burrows, a microbiologist at McMaster University, says makes thorough cleaning essentially impossible.

“It’s like the difference between wiping your counter and wiping your lawn,” Burrows said.

Garbage and empty cartons had piled up in the loading bay, a detail that alarmed Lawrence Goodridge, a food safety professor at the University of Guelph, who said the buildup could easily attract rodents carrying disease.

But perhaps the most striking finding in the inspection report was this: the plant did not list listeria as a hazard in its food safety plan, and finished products were never tested for the bacteria.

For Claudia Narvaez-Bravo, a food safety professor at the University of Manitoba, that combination was almost inevitable in its consequences.

“When you’re dealing with ready-to-eat products, listeria monocytogenes is always a concern always,” she said. “The fact that they didn’t list it and didn’t have a good sanitation program is telling you that was a combination for trouble.”

The timeline of events raises further uncomfortable questions. Public Health Ontario first alerted federal authorities on June 20, 2024, that an outbreak of listeriosis had been detected. Lab results confirming the link between illnesses and product from the Joriki facility came back on June 26 the same day the CFIA sent in its first inspector.

Yet the plant was not shut down until July 8, nearly three weeks later, when a formal recall was issued.

Jennifer Ronholm, an associate professor of food science at McGill University, said the delay is difficult to justify given what inspectors were seeing inside the plant.

“There were clear, big problems in this plant like two or three weeks before it was linked to the outbreak,” she said. “In theory, the outbreak could have been stopped a little sooner we could have probably avoided some illnesses.”

The CFIA has defended its timeline, saying it needed to confirm the scope of affected products and establish a definitive link to the facility before taking regulatory action. An open sample, the agency said, was not sufficient grounds on its own.

What is harder to defend, critics say, is that Joriki only received its written inspection report on August 22 nearly two months after inspectors first walked through the doors. The CFIA says inspectors verbally communicated their concerns to the company after each of six site visits. But Ronholm points out there is no way to verify what was said or how it was received.

“It seems like too much time between when the inspection was done and when they got the report,” she said.

The Joriki facility had drawn the CFIA’s attention before. The agency responded to consumer complaints about the plant in 2018, 2019, and again between 2023 and 2024. Those complaints involved potential allergen contamination, off-tastes, and the presence of mould. Each time, the CFIA investigated and concluded the incidents were isolated and did not represent a food safety risk, with corrective measures verified on follow-up visits.

In hindsight, Ronholm said the recurring mould and spoilage complaints should have been treated as a signal worth investigating more deeply, since they point to failures occurring after pasteurization the same part of the process where listeria contamination would also take hold.

Goodridge was more direct. “The CFIA should have been inspecting this plant at a much higher frequency,” he said. “These violations could have been identified earlier and the outbreak may never have happened.”

Part of the explanation lies in how the CFIA classified the Joriki facility. In 2021, the agency assessed the plant as low-risk a designation that reduced how often it was inspected. The CFIA has since acknowledged that its risk model needs updating to better account for consumer complaints and historical trends in emerging product categories like plant-based beverages.

An internal review conducted after the outbreak found that the CFIA had never visited roughly half of Canada’s 54 plant-based food manufacturing facilities. The agency has since released an action plan committing to inspecting more than 2,400 licensed but uninspected manufactured food facilities by fall 2026.

“The 2024 listeria outbreak underscored the importance of strong oversight in emerging product categories,” the CFIA said in a statement, adding that it is taking steps to modernize its inspection systems.

The Public Health Agency of Canada recorded 20 illnesses, 15 hospitalizations, and three deaths connected to the outbreak. The Pickering production line was shut down immediately after the July 8 recall and never restarted. Joriki ceased all operations at the end of 2024.

A class-action lawsuit against Danone Canada which markets Silk products along with Walmart Canada and Intact Insurance Company, was settled in November for $6.5 million. Danone declined to comment, citing the legal proceedings. Joriki, whose court-appointed representative was contacted repeatedly over more than a month, has never responded to media inquiries. The company previously disputed CFIA allegations to another outlet in December 2024, asserting it had a listeria monitoring program in place and that regulators had never raised concerns about it prior to the outbreak.

For Goodridge, the numbers tell a story that the regulatory language tends to obscure.

“What this shows me is systemic failures in the plant with respect to food safety a gross lack of food safety procedures,” he said. “The plant in which the beverage was being made may have been a haven for listeria.”

“This could have been prevented.”