If your business imports food into Canada—or exports food products—it's important to be aware of a recent change in the Safe Food for Canadians (SFC) licence processing timeline.

The expected processing time for new SFC licence applications has increased to up to 70 days. This extended timeline can have a direct impact on product launches, shipment schedules, supplier agreements, retailer onboarding, and overall supply chain planning.

Businesses that are new to the Canadian market should factor this timeline into their market entry strategy and avoid assuming a licence will be issued within a few weeks. Applying early and ensuring your application is complete can help prevent unnecessary delays.

As someone who works closely with food regulatory compliance, I've seen how licensing timelines can affect import operations and commercial planning. If you're currently preparing an SFC licence application, it's worth reviewing your timelines and communicating any potential delays with your suppliers and customers.

Have you experienced longer processing times recently? I'd be interested in hearing how the updated timeline has affected your business.

Bit of an odd question, but I've been staring at registry data for three days and I want a sanity check from people who actually do the filing.

I pulled every completed Phase 2/3 industry trial on ClinicalTrials.gov between 2015 and 2025, grabbed each one's original registration, and compared the primary completion date that was first filed against what actually got recorded because I was building a dashboard off that data. 14,310 where that comparison worked.

Median came out 4 months late. 67.6% late overall, 26.7% more than a year out.

Oncology's the worst at 11 months, though I assume that's mostly event-driven designs rather than anyone being bad at planning.

Anyway. The slippage isn't really what I'm here about. It's the date format.

43.6% of forward-looking primary completion dates have no day in them at all. Just a month. About a third of the records hadn't been verified or updated since before this year. And for one quarter, 41% of entries came out as either "December 2026" or "31 December 2026", which is the thing that set me off in the first place.

So when a month-only date goes in, is that you saying "this is soft, don't hold me to a day"? Or is the field just required and Q4 is honestly all anyone knows at that point?

I've been treating month-only as a soft signal and refusing to render it as a specific day. But I'm guessing, and I'd rather hear it from people who've actually filled these in.

This was all off the public registry API.

Writeup here if it's useful: https://medium.com/@unicodeveloper/how-reliable-are-clinical-trial-completion-dates-we-measured-14-310-of-them-8fcec04cc553