Our work
The cost of wasted food
What Canada throws away has a price.
Wasted food is expensive before anyone counts the hunger it could have answered. Second Harvest and Value Chain Management International estimate that the edible food Canada throws away carries a large economic cost every year.
Their study also measured the food itself. 8.8 million tonnes of edible food is wasted in Canada every year. Second Harvest and Value Chain Management International, 2024. That figure counts only food that could have been eaten. The total amount of food waste is larger again.
The cost lands on households too. The National Zero Waste Council reports that the average Canadian household throws out a substantial amount of food every year, and that much of it could have been eaten.
Grown, paid for, buried.
Our work
Money is one way of measuring the loss. The work section sets out another: the produce itself, and how chapters ask farms about it and hand every yes to a food bank that collects it.
See our work
What we do
Ask, introduce, record. What we do explains how produce that was written off as a loss on a farm can reach a food bank instead, when the farm says yes and the receiving organization collects it.
Read what we do
Surplus produce
Some of that food never reaches a buyer at all. Surplus produce explains where it comes from: contracts that fall through, specifications that change, and fruit the wrong size for a supermarket shelf.
About surplus produce
