SAVING THE HARVEST: Waste not, glean more, for B.C. food banks

Charitable groups and farmers are working toward decreasing food waste on all fronts

By CINDA CHAVICH

With food costs rising and supply chain challenges, no one wants fresh, locally grown food going to waste.

Yet even with the spotlight on the issue of food waste in recent years, Canadians still waste food. And it’s far more than that mouldy cucumber or limp head of lettuce in your fridge. Fresh food is also left in fields or composted right on the farms where it’s grown, due to a lack of markets, labour shortages and other distribution issues.

According to Food Banks BC’s latest Impact Report, more than $6 billion dollars of food is wasted in the province every year, “healthy food that is sent to landfill sites when it could be redirected to feed hungry families.”

“There is no shortage of food — there is a distribution problem,” David Long, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society (GVFBS), noted in a powerful piece he penned last year for Maclean’s magazine. Long said Vancouver has the highest poverty rate in the country, describing the many people now in need of food, whether retired teachers and nurses with pensions that don’t cover their living expenses or university students who haven’t eaten in days.

“When I became CEO of the organization in 2019, we were supporting 6,500 clients per month. That number has nearly tripled in just five years.”

A former chef, Long’s mission has been to improve the quality of food bank offerings, with a goal of at least 65 per cent of food distributed being fresh — the fruits and vegetables, dairy and meats that people who are struggling cannot afford to buy.

“I knew from my career how much food is out there, high-quality food that’s being wasted,” Long says.

The GVFB now relies on those in the supply chain — food wholesalers, distributors or retailers — to get fresh food to the food bank, and thanks to a new government tax credit, a lot more food is arriving direct from farms and orchards.

With the provincial government’s new B.C. farmers’ food donation corporate income tax credit, local farms that donate their excess production to food banks can now be compensated with reductions in their taxes, a 25 per cent credit of the retail value of their donation against their operating expenses. Combined with the 29 per cent federal “gift in kind” tax credit for donations to charities, this can be a significant incentive for farmers to donate.

One farmer, who asked to remain anonymous, donated 1.8 million pounds of produce to the GVFB last season alone, receiving a whopping $4.3 million tax credit.

It’s been a welcome windfall, with an 836 per cent increase in fresh food rescued by the GVFB in 2024, compared with the previous year. But fresh produce spoils quickly and as the largest receiving hub, the GVFB faced new challenges to save, preserve and distribute the B.C. bounty arriving at its doors.

That’s meant getting creative and innovative, extending the shelf life of fresh produce with new food preservation technologies.

Good food wasting away

Much of the B.C.-grown produce arriving at the GVFB is perfectly good to eat but, for a variety of reasons, farmers can’t sell it. After fulfilling their contracts with buyers, many farmers leave excess food in the field because harvesting, without guaranteed sales, is not financially viable. From weather issues and shortages of farm labour to fluctuating markets, a lot of good food that’s grown here is wasted.

But the GVFB has come to the rescue to save and redistribute this unwanted harvest, working with 19 farms from the Lower Mainland to the Okanagan last year.

Jeanne Lefebvre, agencies operations and partnership manager, and her colleague, Rhandi Neal, agriculture and food preservation assistant manager, are on the front line of the GVFB’s food preservation team, and they point to a “broken” food system to explain why so much fresh local produce is wasted.

Big grocery chains won’t buy a cob of corn that’s an inch too short or a pear that’s a tad too small — any imperfections mean edible food becomes garbage. Whether mushrooms or hydroponic butter lettuce, small or extra-large greenhouse peppers, slender carrots or gnarly potatoes, sweet Okanagan cherries or peaches, squash and pumpkins, an ever-changing variety of rescued food lands at the GVFB warehouse every week.

When one major grocery chain rejected a farmer’s corn crop on the basis of size, “that was 100 acres worth of corn that went to cattle feed.”

Last year, due to the collapse of the BC Tree Fruits Cooperative, the food bank received massive donations of apples, and even purchased the fruit “from a whole orchard” to help support the growers, Neal says.

While the GVFB has a new facility with more cold storage and freezing capacity, the growing influx of rescued fruits and vegetables — including food from orchards, farms, greenhouse and hydroponic growers, fish farms, vertical farms — has led the creative folks at the GVFB to focus on innovative food preservation projects.

Freeze, dry or freeze dry

When a trailer load of fresh fruits or vegetables arrives at their door, food bank staff and volunteers have a limited time window to make sure the food is properly stored and distributed. Freeze drying and dehydrating fresh products, or preserving it as pasteurized juices, is one way to extend that window, creating food products that can be stored and transported without refrigeration.

Neal says it was a surplus of 80,000 pounds of “ugly” Okanagan apples that started the scramble to find partners to help preserve them last year.

Chasers Fresh Juice Ltd., a local cold pressed juice company, helped by producing a HPP Cold Pressure (cold pasteurized) apple juice, preserving nutrition and flavour while extending the shelf life of the windfall. Supreme Freeze Dry Ltd., a freeze-drying plant in Coquitlam, created apple chips and worked with CanDry Technologies Inc. and EnWave, other companies that use similar low-temperature drying technologies, which quickly dehydrate and preserve foods while maintaining a high level of nutrients.

Since then, the GVFB has embarked on its own in-house drying and freeze-drying operations, purchasing commercial dehydrators and freeze-drying equipment, with additional staff devoted to exploring new food preservation possibilities.

In its commercial kitchen, the fresh foods it receives are prepped, cleaned and chopped for preservation by hand. Already, it’s one of the most popular jobs among its 1,000 volunteers, and the shifts in its food processing and preserving kitchen are fully booked.

Now GVFB produces shelf stable foil bags filled with tasty dried treats — whether crunchy carrot coins, chewy freeze-dried pineapple chunks or “freeze-dried apple fries”— products branded with its stylized orange heart and fresh food logo.

“The ultimate goal is to have an expanded facility to create various types of products,” says Lefebvre, pointing to ongoing experiments with flash freezing, dried soups and snacks, mixed fruit and vegetable “power juices” and even 100 per cent-fruit popsicles. Her team is also considering some kind of social enterprise, selling the GVFB-label dried and preserved foods to raise additional funds like seasoned vegetable chips and salmon jerky.

“The life span of freeze-dried products is up to 25 years, with 97 per cent of nutritional value preserved,” Lefebvre adds.

Those preserved fruits and vegetables can be more easily distributed to communities where there is no food bank and access to fresh foods is limited, Lefebvre says, noting the GVFB sends some of the perishable foods it receives to other food banks across the province.

Each month the GVFB provides food for 15,000 individuals and families and 150 community agency partners in Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster and the North Shore, including after school programs, women’s shelters or soup kitchens.

One in three food bank clients is a child, so two school meal programs — through Flourish School Food Society and BC Agriculture in the Classroom — benefit from the food that’s being rescued and dehydrated at GVFB. Freeze-dried fruit snacks went to The Long Table Society’s programs for low-income elementary school kids in Burnaby.

By preserving fresh food, more of it is getting from local farms to other B.C. organizations and the communities they serve.

More gleaners

Gleaning — rescuing a farm’s excess produce that would other- wise go to waste — has been popular in the fruit and vegetable growing regions of B.C. for decades.

It all started with Christian groups, such as the Okanagan Gleaners Society in Oliver and the Fraser Valley Gleaners Society (FVG) in Abbotsford, non-profits that gather surplus vegetables to dehydrate, and turn into dried soup mixes and dried apple snacks that are then distributed to affiliated Christian groups providing food aid around the world.

Running with armies of volunteers — this year FVG is celebrating one million volunteer hours — both have big commercial drying and packaging facilities. Locals arrive every day to chop the fresh vegetables that are then spread on drying trays and wheeled into big industrial drying units. Dried vegetables are combined with donated beans and lentils to make “just add water” soup mixes for world distribution. Since opening its doors in 1999, FVG has produced 250 million soup servings for its missionary programs.

At the household and community level, there are other groups gleaning fresh fruits and vegetables to reduce waste.

In Victoria, the LifeCycles Project Society focuses on redistribution of surplus food in the community. Whether it’s a backyard tree brimming with ripe apples or plums, or a farm or garden with excess produce, LifeCycles organizes volunteers to harvest fresh fruits and vegetables, with a portion going to the pickers and homeowners and the bulk to local food bank programs and non-profit partners.

It ensures fruit from the city’s “urban orchard” isn’t wasted and provides participants with fresh food and education, while raising awareness about local food systems.

The non-profit harvests more than 30,000 pounds of fruit and 10,000 pounds of vegetables every season, working with partners such as Flourish School Food Society and the Food Share Network to get fresh, nutritious, local food to other community organizations. In 2024, LifeCycles volunteers picked 18,000 pounds of unsellable produce from 14 partner farms, donating most to the Food Share Network, the local food rescue and distribution centre.

LifeCycles also processes some of the fruit it gleans at Kitchen Connect, the Food Share Network’s non-profit commissary kitchen. LifeCycles shares its gleaned fruit, and is making juices and preserves, including apple cider and fig jam, that’s sold through the online South Island FarmHub, to support its ongoing work — a truly circular non-profit business model.

Urban Bounty in Richmond, a similar non-profit devoted to food security, has a fruit tree gleaning program, collecting surplus fruit from home gardens and public lands to distribute among volunteer harvesters and community partners including the local food bank.

Waste not, want not

With a new building and more cold storage capacity, the GVFB is the province’s major receiving hub for rescued fresh food and is focused on increasing the amount of fresh food it can distribute to those in need. Beyond B.C. farms, FoodMesh, a Vancouver-based non-profit dedicated to reducing food waste, connects businesses with surplus food organizations across Canada, with its Marketplace platform to divert surplus food in the food supply chain. It co-ordinates pick-up and transportation from grocery retailers and farms, with some food going to charitable organizations, food banks and other feeding programs, with any that’s no longer safe for human consumption, offered to local farmers to feed their animals at no cost.

FoodMesh also recently merged with Love Food Hate Waste Canada, an education campaign aimed at offering consumers ideas and tips about reducing food waste by shopping smarter, storing food properly and making use of every ingredient. They say 63 per cent of food that’s wasted at home could have been eaten, meaning the average household throws away $1,300 worth of groceries every year.

As Canadians face the ongoing political turmoil of tariffs and learn more about food grown and produced in Canada versus imports, there may be less food wasted in our local supply chain and at home.

Food recovery experts such as Neal and Lefebvre say consumers need to learn more and pressure big grocers to end their wasteful practices, a shift that could make more and cheaper food available to all. Produce that’s imperfect or “ugly” is the same as any other food once you prepare it and should never be wasted. Reducing waste at home makes social and environmental sense and promotes food security for all.

But meanwhile, the GVFB continues to find to ways to meet the challenges in our food system and preserve this precious local commodity for those with the greatest need.

This feature story appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Edible Vancouver Magazine

©CindaChavich2025