How Storage Sentry supports your SFCR compliance.
If you run a licensed food business in Canada, your monitoring records are the evidence that your preventive controls actually worked. When the Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspects your operation, or a customer audits you, or a recall investigation reaches back to a specific lot, those records show that temperature and humidity stayed where they were supposed to. This page is for owners, operations managers, and food-safety leads who need that evidence to be complete, and who are tired of assembling it from binders, spreadsheets, and a laptop in the back cooler.
Storage Sentry is a wireless environmental-monitoring platform built for Canadian agricultural operations. It does not make your business compliant. Compliance is an outcome you own, built on a documented Preventive Control Plan and the controls behind it. What Storage Sentry does is generate the continuous, timestamped, exportable evidence a working plan is supposed to produce, so the records portion of an audit stops being the hard part.
This page is a practical overview, not legal advice. SFCR obligations vary by licence type, commodity, and activity. Consult the CFIA or a qualified food safety professional for guidance specific to your operation.
The SFCR requirements Storage Sentry is built around.
The Safe Food for Canadians Regulations are outcome-based. They describe the safety result you need to achieve and generally leave the method to you. For most food operations, temperature and humidity control is one of the critical measures the plan relies on, and the regulations expect four things around it: monitoring, records, corrective action, and verification. Here is each requirement in plain language, and how the platform maps to it.
Monitor conditions at every critical control point
- What the SFCR expects
- Your Preventive Control Plan identifies where temperature and humidity matter most, defines the acceptable range for each, and describes how conditions are measured, how often, and by whom. The monitoring frequency has to be sufficient to give real confidence that conditions stay within your critical limits. A four-hour check interval is not adequate if the product could become unsafe within two hours of a failure.
- How Storage Sentry supports it
- Wireless sensors take readings continuously and log them digitally with a timestamp and a sensor identifier, across every shift, weekend, and holiday. There are no overnight gaps to explain, because the readings do not depend on someone being on site to write them down. You set the acceptable range per location to match your plan, and the record reflects the actual interval without an inspector having to ask. For the full picture of what the regulations require here, see SFCR temperature monitoring requirements.
Keep complete, legible records for the retention period
- What the SFCR expects
- Monitoring, corrective action, and verification records must be legible, accurate, and reflect what actually happened. PCP-related records generally have to be retained for a minimum of two years from the date the record was made, or three years for shelf-stable low-acid foods in hermetically sealed containers. A reading filled in after the fact, or a log with blanks where the weekend entries should be, does not meet that standard.
- How Storage Sentry supports it
- Every reading is written as it happens, so the record is created at the moment of measurement rather than reconstructed later. The history is stored digitally, searchable by date and location, and exportable, which removes the two failure modes that sink manual retention: the gap that was never written down, and the paper log that got lost between audits. Because the data lives in a system rather than a single binder or hard drive, you can back up your own archive on a schedule. For how the two-year rule really works and where retention breaks down, see SFCR record retention: what two years of records actually means.
Respond to deviations with documented corrective action
- What the SFCR expects
- A temperature deviation is not, by itself, a compliance failure. Failing to respond to it and document the response is. Your plan describes who gets notified when a reading goes out of range, what happens to the affected product, how the issue is resolved, and how it is prevented from recurring. Your records need to show those steps were followed.
- How Storage Sentry supports it
- When a reading crosses a threshold, the platform sends an alert by text or email immediately, to the person responsible, whether it is the middle of a shift or the middle of the night. The alert is the trigger for the corrective-action procedure already in your plan, and the system logs the breach with a start time, duration, and the alert it sent. That record ties a specific excursion to the moment your team was notified, which is the difference between catching a failure and discovering it Monday morning. The corrective action itself, what was done with the product and how recurrence was prevented, is still an activity your team performs and documents.
Verify that the whole system is working
- What the SFCR expects
- Monitoring and verification are separate activities, and the plan needs both. Verification is the periodic check that your controls are actually working: sensor and thermometer calibration, reviewing monitoring records for completeness, and confirming that corrective actions were carried out. Both monitoring and verification records fall under the retention requirement, and both may be assessed during an inspection.
- How Storage Sentry supports it
- A continuous record makes verification reviewable. You can pull a full month of readings for a location and confirm coverage was unbroken, because a gap in the data is as visible as an out-of-range reading rather than hidden by it. The platform supports the record-review side of verification and surfaces device status so you can confirm the instruments were reporting during the period. Calibration and the sign-off itself remain activities your team owns and documents as part of the plan.
Hand over a clean record, not a two-day scramble.
The point of continuous monitoring is being able to hand an inspector or a customer a clean record without a two-day scramble. Instead of assembling logs from multiple sources, you filter by date range and location and export the readings, threshold breaches, and alert history the system has been collecting since installation. Consistent, professionally formatted records tend to shorten the records portion of an inspection and move the conversation to the controls behind the readings, which is where it should be. For what good compliance reporting includes and what it does and does not replace, see how automated compliance reporting reduces your biggest audit headache.
An auditor-facing PDF report or CSV data export, scoped to the whole facility, a building, a room, or specific devices, for any period you choose. Each report packages the full timestamped readings, every alert excursion with the alert rule as it existed at the moment it triggered, a data-gap disclosure that flags any stretch where expected readings did not arrive, and a per-device summary of minimum, maximum, and mean, plus the percentage of expected readings actually received. Every report carries a unique identifier and a public verification page, so it is a single dated, attributable record you can retain and share without handing anyone a live login. PDF reports are available on the Medium plan and up.
Export does not make a weak program strong. The hazard analysis, the written plan, the corrective-action procedure, and staff training still have to be real. Storage Sentry removes the records-management overhead, which is the part that consumes time without improving food safety.
What the same evidence protects.
The monitoring that supports your compliance records is the same monitoring that catches an expensive failure in time. A walk-in cooler that fails on a Friday night and is not discovered until Monday is one of the most common and costly failure scenarios in food storage. An immediate alert turns that lost weekend into a same-night fix, protecting product that would otherwise be a total loss. The evidence you keep for the CFIA and the alert that saves a cold room are two outputs of one system.
Underneath both is operational reliability. Alerts route to the right person with context, so a threshold breach reaches someone who can act on it rather than sitting in a shared inbox. The result is fewer surprises, a shorter records review at audit time, and a facility that is easier to inspect.
Book your free facility evaluation.
If you are not sure whether your current monitoring could produce two years of complete, unbroken records, that is exactly what a facility evaluation is for. We walk your critical control points with you, map them to what your Preventive Control Plan requires, and show you where the gaps are before an inspector finds them.
Book Your Free Facility Evaluation →