Sofina Foods Inc. to pay $330K penalty toward safety program after Edmonton worker's death

An Ontario-based multinational food company was "significantly negligent" in safety failures that led to the death of an Edmonton worker, a judge says.

Justice Michèle Collinson sentenced Sofina Foods Inc. on Thursday in Edmonton Court of Justice after the company pleaded guilty to one Occupational Health and Safety Act charge in the March 2023 death of Samir Subedi.

Subedi, 32, died after a coworker found him unresponsive during his shift as a superintendent at Sofina's south Edmonton food processing plant. 

Collinson said Subedi's death was easily preventable, with workplace risks created by the company's "incompetence, inattention, or a combination of both." 

After going into a smokehouse to monitor some meat products drying inside, Subedi got trapped as temperatures rose to 92 C.

An emergency handle to open the smokehouse doors from the inside had broken off, and despite maintenance requests that went back to May 2022, it hadn't been replaced — in violation of both provincial worker safety standards and Sofina's own policies.

Instead, a makeshift door stopper was installed that could only be activated from the outside. There's no evidence that Subedi, who'd been at Sofina for about 11 months, had been trained on how to use either the emergency handle or the doorstopper.

"It was not difficult to see that there was a risk of an accident in the smokehouse … given the lack of safeguards and training," Collinson said.

"The fact there had been no incident prior is more an operation of luck than anything else."

The judge accepted a proposal for a creative sentencing order that sees the company pay a $330,000 penalty, which will go toward funding a food worker safety training program run by the Alberta Food Processors Association.

The training will be tailored to address the increased dangers of confined spaces such as smokehouses to help prevent similar deaths in the future.

Collinson noted that before the company was charged last year, they had already made voluntary "direct reparations" to ensure Subedi's wife and children could cover the cost of their mortgage. She said Sofina has expressed genuine remorse.

Since Subedi's death, the company has added new warning labels to smokehouses telling employees not to enter while they're running, and to check for the presence of the inner emergency handle — if it's missing or broken, they're instructed not to go inside at all.

Collinson called the level of workplace deaths in Alberta "unacceptably high."

She addressed part of her decision directly to Subedi's family.

"Your loss and the grief causes pain and suffering, and the reality is that the process in court does very little to alleviate that. Some things just cannot be fixed; they can only be carried," she said.

"We don't send our loved ones off to work thinking that this is the last time that we're going to see them."

The remaining 25 OHS charges laid against Sofina Foods Inc. were withdrawn.