In 2025, Second Harvest's Food Rescue Program aims to rescue 87.4 million pounds of primarily perishable, nutrient-dense, surplus food across the Canadian supply chain. In collaboration with more than 8,800 food donors, the program seeks to redistribute this food to over 12,400 charitable food programs, reaching 6.5 million individuals experiencing food insecurity. At the same time, 288 million pounds of harmful greenhouse gas emissions will be prevented from polluting our shared environment.
46.5% of food produced in Canada is wasted. 41.7% of this food could be redirected to support the 8.7 million Canadians currently facing food insecurity. This equates to $58 billion worth of wasted food. In addition, this wasted food produces 25.69 million metric tonnes of CO2 emissions every year by decomposing in landfills rather than feeding those in need. We don't have a food shortage problem in Canada; we have a food loss, recovery and distribution problem.
Our mission is to grow an efficient food recovery network to fuel people and to reduce the environmental impacts of food waste. We work across the supply chain, from farm to retail, to capture surplus food before it ends up wasted in a landfill. We then redistribute this nutritious food at no cost to our vast network of social service agencies who use it to feed clients. This further allows our social service partners to apply funds into core programming rather than food procurement.
Second Harvest will reach and nourish more then 6.5 million Canadians through our food rescue programs. Our project aims to recover more then 87.4 million pounds of food and redistribute it to our network of 12,400+ food programs supported through 5,000+ non-profit organizations. By rescuing and redistributing this amount of food, we are both helping people experiencing hunger and also averting 288 million pounds of GHGs from the atmosphere.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
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