That’s British Columbia, a province in Canada, not before Christ, although food purchases are almost entirely faith-based.

B.C.’s Public Health Act’s food premises regulation was amended in 2013 to require written food safety and sanitation plans from processors. The plans are a set of procedures to help prevent or reduce safety hazards, which can cause food poisoning.

The new rules will be enforced by March 2016, but out of the 5,500 food processors across B.C., about 4,900 of them are going to need to improve their food safety plans.

Steve Burthon, software architect with the Richmond-based tech startup ICICLE, has toured many facilities in B.C. and believes that implementation, which has faced a two-year delay, will most likely face more because of the number of processors still catching up.

“The thing most consumers do is when they walk into a supermarket they make the assumption the products on the shelves are safe,” he said. “When you walk into a store you can easily identify what’s GMO, vegan, gluten-free, but there’s no way of knowing that the product purchased is from a company that takes food safety seriously.”

Burthon said most processors who supply products to retailers have no food safety program in place, or it is limited.