OTTAWA — Federal food safety and public health officials have added more baked goods sold and distributed in Ontario to an ongoing investigation into Salmonella contamination.
According to notices from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Public Health Agency of Canada, the following products have been recalled:
- D. Effe T. brand Lemon Delight
- D. Effe T. brand Tartlet with Forest Fruits
At this point, these products were only found to be distributed in Ontario, the notices said.
According to federal officials, the affected Lemon Delight and Tartlet with Forest Fruits products were distributed in locations such as grocery stores, bakeries, hotels, restaurants, cafeterias, hospitals, retirement homes and have been served at catered events.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency added that the recall affects products with best-before dates up to and including December 11, 2025. The agency added that the products “may have been sold clerk-served or in smaller packages, with or without a label that may not bear the same brand, product name, or best before date.”
They were added to an ongoing investigation by the Public Health Agency of Canada that began with a probe into the Salmonella contamination of Sweet Cream brand mini pastries.
The investigation was launched after the agency started detecting the outbreak in mid-December 2024 when it received signals from laboratories across the country, said April Hexemer, the director of the outbreak management division at the Public Health Agency of Canada. By then, she added, it had been detected in a couple of provinces.
"Part of that investigation was re-contacting the people who had gotten ill to ask them about the sorts of things they were doing and the things that they were eating before they became sick,” Hexemer said. “And then we analyze all that information that we collect from those ill people to find something that's common across all of them.”
Most of the individuals had attended catered events, she said, adding they had eaten "fancy desserts."
“We received records from those catered events and that was how we identified that the Sweet Cream brand pastries were served at those events,” she continued."
“So we're quite confident that that was one of the sources of these illnesses."
The D. Effe T. brand desserts connection came about, Hexemer said, after subsequent report to federal officials from someone who had consumed another frozen dessert purchased from a grocery store and gave a detailed description. She said after the Canadian Food Inspection Agency probed that case, they found that the D. Effe T. and Sweet Cream desserts came from the same company in Italy. Lab testing found Salmonella in the store-bought D. Effe T. desserts.
Hexemer said she couldn't name the Italian company.
As of Jan. 29, the Public Health Agency of Canada said that 69 people had fallen ill due to the contaminated sweets with 24 of those in Ontario. The total number of hospitalizations across the country stood at 22, according to public health data; no province-by-province breakdown of that number was provided.
No deaths had been reported.
The public health agency advised people to check to see if they have the affected products, and not to consume, serve, use, sell, or distribute them. Instead, people should throw them out, or return them to where they were purchased.
Hexemer said they expect to receive more reports.
“There is a what we call a reporting delay between the time when someone becomes ill and their illness is reported to national public health officials — this time frame can be anywhere from two to seven weeks,” she said, adding that can be because of a number of factors, including how long the person was sick before reporting it or how long the labs take to process samples.
“Right now, we're seeing illnesses reported to us that started around the Christmas period and maybe into early January.”
