About a week after announcing they were giving up on Canadian beef in favour of Certified Humane meat from the U.S., Earls Restaurants has had a change of heart.

Wednesday morning in a news release, the Vancouver-based restaurant chain said it made a mistake in deciding to move away from Canadian meat, but it wants to make the situation right by bringing Canadian beef back to the menu.

"We have deep roots in Alberta. We started in Edmonton and we have many operations and employees here," said company president Mo Jessa in the news release.

In a follow up phone interview, Jessa says they stand by their decision to offer customers beef that meets specific audited standards for animal care and has never been treated with antibiotics or growth hormones.

He says unfortunately people misunderstood the term Certified Humane -- which is a label under the Humane Farm Animal Care organization -- getting the impression that beef not a part of this program was somehow not being raised humanely.

"I want to clear that up," Jessa says, "I want to apologize to everyone that was impacted by it. Certified Humane means that we were looking for certification that validates cattle (have been) raised humanely. The standards in Alberta are very high, nothing is more important to me than to let beef producers all over Canada to know that we understand their standards are high."

Alberta Beef Producers president Rich Smith says it was music to his ears to hear that Earls would be moving back to sourcing Canadian beef.

"We were certainly pleased to see the announcement," he says. "It's a positive message to producers here and a good first step toward putting Canadian and Alberta beef back on their menus."

Jess has already met with the Alberta Beef Producers and the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef to discuss Earls' needs. He says it will take some time, but they hope to work with a coalition of ranchers in Alberta and Canada to put Canadian beef back on the menu.