Food company pleads guilty after worker died in smokehouse

A food processing company in Edmonton, Canada has pleaded guilty to a charge over workplace safety following the on-site death of an employee in 2023, according to media reports.

Sofina Foods Inc could reportedly pay a $330,000 penalty (£179,000) after it admitted failing to ensure employee safety that could have prevented the death of Samir Subedi.

Subedi died aged 32 on March 2nd 2023 after becoming trapped in a smokehouse. He was a superintendent at the South Edmonton facility and had entered the smokehouse to monitor the meat drying process, news reports said.

Temperatures in the smokehouse could rise as high as 90 degrees centigrade (Jon Hicks/Getty Images)

A statement of facts read out in court detailed how Subedi had died from complications arising from thermal burns, with temperatures in the smokehouse reaching as high as 92 degrees centigrade. He was unconscious by the time a colleague found him, with the broken interior emergency door handle preventing his escape.

In place of the broken handle, an unapproved door stopper was being used. It had to be activated in advance of someone entering the smokehouse, with no means to activate it from the inside.

The court was told that there was no evidence that Subedi had been given training on either the emergency handle or the door stopper, Canada's CBC reported.

"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," said prosecutor Hendrik Kruger.

Sofina’s defence lawyer, Loretta Bouwmeester, said the company accepted that workplace hazards hadn’t been appropriately mitigated.

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

She said that Sofina had cooperated fully with the investigation and had increased its engineering and health and safety departments’ staff numbers since Subedi’s death.

As part of the proposed sentencing detailed on June 18th 2025, the penalty fee would be invested in food safety training at the Alberta Food Processors Association.

Money from the penalty will go towards food safety programmes in Alberta

Along with the proposed penalty, Sofina had paid $500,000 (£271,382.50) to his family to cover the cost of the mortgage on his wife and two children’s home.

Subedi's wife, Bhumika Bhattaria, reportedly said in a victim impact statement read to the court by the Crown: "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.

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