Food processing company pleads guilty to charge in death of Edmonton man

A commercial food processing company has pleaded guilty to a workplace safety charge after an Edmonton worker became trapped in a smokehouse and died.

The Crown and defence are jointly recommending that Ontario-based Sofina Foods Inc. be ordered to pay a $330,000 penalty after admitting to failing to ensure the safety of employee Samir Subedi.

The 32-year-old died on March 2, 2023, after a coworker found him unconscious in a smokehouse at a Sofina Foods facility in south Edmonton. Subedi was a superintendent at the plant, and he'd gone inside the smokehouse to monitor the drying process of the meat products inside.

As part of a proposed creative sentencing order detailed in court Wednesday, the money will go toward funding a food safety training project at the Alberta Food Processors Association.

The Crown intends to withdraw the 25 other charges the company was facing in the case. A judge will rule on a sentence Thursday.

Sofina has also already paid Subedi's family $500,000, not accounting for tax reductions, so that his wife and two young children can cover the cost of the mortgage on their home.

Subedi, who had a master's degree and had been working at Sofina for nearly a year at the time of his death, was the primary breadwinner for the family.

Several Sofina executives were in the Edmonton Court of Justice on Wednesday to hear the details of the plea.

The court also heard from Subedi's wife, Bhumika Bhattarai.

"The oddest thing in life is living without someone you are planning to spend your whole life with. My children keep asking me, 'Where is daddy?' And I can't explain," she said in a victim impact statement read by the Crown.

"Daddy went to work ... in a developed country and didn't come back."

Broken emergency handle

According to an agreed statement of facts read in court, Subedi died from complications of thermal burns he sustained inside the smokehouse, where the temperature rose as high as 92 C.

The smokehouse's emergency handle to open the door from the inside was broken, and in its place was a door stopper that hadn't been approved by Sofina's engineering team.

The door stopper couldn't be activated once someone was inside the smokehouse — workers had to engage it in advance. The court heard that there isn't any evidence Subedi had been trained on either the emergency handle or the new "makeshift" door stopper.

"The Crown submits that the level of negligence here was at the high end. The Crown would not hesitate in describing that as a gross level of negligence," prosecutor Hendrik Kruger said.

Defence lawyer Loretta Bouwmeester said Sofina accepts that workplace hazards around the smokehouse weren't adequately controlled.

"These types of offences are — certainly, it goes without saying — tragically impactful to the family and their communities, all the workers in an organization. They do deeply affect everyone who has any involvement in the incident."

She said the company fully co-operated with the Occupational Health and Safety investigation, and since Subedi's death, Sofina has increased staffing in their engineering and health and safety departments.