David Harada, a former Driscoll’s manager of food safety and regulatory compliance, alleged in a lawsuit filed in June 2026 in Ventura County Superior Court that the California berry company knowingly shipped fruit to Canada with illegal pesticide levels between 2022 and 2024.
According to the lawsuit, Driscoll’s own data showed that more than 50% of its shipments to Canada in that period contained berries exceeding Canadian maximum residue limits, equal to nearly $100 million worth of produce, CBC News reported. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) told CBC it had inspected Driscoll’s berries sold in Canadian stores between 2022 and 2024 and found pesticide levels above the country’s legal limit, though none of the cases led to a recall.
The cases you have identified involve different products, pesticide residues, importers and locations over a period of several years. The presence of the Driscoll’s brand on the products does not, on its own, establish that the non-compliances originated from a single producer or source.
That statement, from a CFIA email to CBC News, said the agency takes action based on the level of health risk involved and issues recalls only when Health Canada determines a product poses an unacceptable risk. Driscoll’s has said it “never knowingly shipped product that we believed to be unsafe” and that it has since amended its compliance controls to meet Canadian standards. The company declined to comment further on Harada’s lawsuit but denied his allegations.
Harada joined Driscoll’s in September 2022 as a pest control adviser and was promoted to manager of food safety and regulatory compliance for the United States and Canada by March 2024, according to the lawsuit. He says he told supervisors that fall that at least two growers were violating pesticide label limits, prompting Driscoll’s senior agronomist, Felix Zorita, to reply in an email that “if the over limits are confirmed this is something that needs to be addressed. Please help,” the suit states.
The number of growers found to be exceeding pesticide limits grew from two to eight to 27 over the following years, according to the lawsuit, which alleges executives told Harada to focus on profitability and on establishing “plausible deniability” rather than fixing the violations. Harada says he told the company’s chief operating officer in May 2025 that he would not help conceal the issues unless Driscoll’s disclosed them publicly and issued a recall; the suit says he was reprimanded, sidelined and placed on a performance improvement plan before Driscoll’s “constructively terminated” him on October 1, 2025.
Driscoll’s is separately facing a proposed federal class action, Berlinger v. Driscoll’s, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of six consumers in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Illinois. That suit accuses the company of “greenwashing” its conventional strawberries by marketing them as safe and sustainable while failing to disclose pesticide residues linked to PFAS, or “forever chemicals.” Driscoll’s has said it has “worked to earn the trust of our customers by communicating responsibly about our products and our growing practices.”
The chemicals identified in the CFIA’s inspections were bifenthrin, an insecticide that attacks insects’ nervous systems; and captan and iprodione, fungicides used to prevent mould and rot on fruit and vegetable crops, according to CBC News. Maria Corradini, an associate professor in the University of Guelph’s food sciences department, told CBC that chemical residues degrade over time but that the risk lies in over-application and insufficient time before harvest. Environmental toxicologist Daniel Green told CBC’s Gloria Henriquez that a person would likely need to eat about 19 kilograms of the affected berries in a short period to feel any adverse effects.
This issue isn’t one serving of berries. It’s one speck of the chemicals to which people are exposed in their daily lives.
Driscoll’s chief executive, Soren Bjorn, stepped down on September 2, 2026, and was replaced by Brie Reiter Smith, the great-granddaughter of one of the company’s co-founders, according to Food Safety News. The outlet reported the leadership change coincided with, but was not officially linked to, the pesticide and PFAS litigation. Harada’s wrongful-termination lawsuit and the federal PFAS class action are both continuing, with no trial date set in either case.