That's correct.
Evidence of meeting #34 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was waste.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #34 for Agriculture and Agri-Food in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was waste.
A recording is available from Parliament.
6:35 p.m.
Liberal
6:35 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
I would, as well.
How much revenue do you generate, and where do you generate your revenue from to keep your operations going?
6:35 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Second Harvest
Our revenue is generated, like most charities, through a diversity of funds, so foundations, corporate and individuals. We receive a fair amount of money from the emergency food security fund to allocate across the country. We do a little bit of social enterprise, in terms of charging people for some training and that kind of thing.
6:35 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Great.
Are there opportunities for you to generate more designated revenue through earned revenue streams?
6:35 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Second Harvest
Yes, I think there absolutely is. I think there is an opportunity within the charitable sector.
There's a great deal of surplus food that we know about. The value of our food this year alone was $180 million, and our revenue was about $35 million to move all of that food, because it's all free food.
There's a network of 61,000 charities that people don't consider. We hear about food banks, and they're very important and we support them, but there are only 4,500 of them. There's a whole invisible network that needs this food, spaces like mental health places or senior centres or schools. We really think it's critical to get that food to them. It's healthy. If we don't get them the healthy food, we have terrible educational outcomes—the research is done—and terrible health outcomes.
We believe that we can get some of the surplus food at a deeply discounted cost, which is what we did with the surplus food rescue program. There are charities that will purchase it. We're spending millions of dollars on food, in addition to distributing free food.
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Right. You could essentially supply them with healthy, affordable food at a lower cost than they would have gotten on the market.
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Okay. That's great.
Could Second Harvest scale up its operations significantly to serve more communities? What would you need to do that?
6:40 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Second Harvest
Absolutely. It's always funding. That's the reality of life. You just need more funding.
Our biggest challenge is transportation. The food is out there. The latest research we did showed that only 4% of businesses that have surplus food were donating it. It's a great opportunity—it's not a negative—but moving that food across the country, and as far north as you can go, comes at considerable cost when we have supply chain issues already.
So it would be for transportation, for the most part.
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Isn't it the case that there's about a 30% waste in our food system today? Is that correct?
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
There's a significant amount of food that is going to waste that could be going to feed people.
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
Okay.
Is access to capital to scale up your operations one of the key aspects of what you need? Is it really access to capital?
6:40 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Second Harvest
It's access to capital. We built out logistics. We worked with, again, all the 61,000 charities. We have a hub-and-spoke model, because we don't want to build in huge capital across the country. If it exists, let's all work together. But we also have an app that's connecting that. There's a cost to technology, which increases the more people use it.
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
In terms of the steps in the value chain, are there any other areas that you could target in terms of where we could achieve additional efficiencies and prevent further food waste?
6:40 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Second Harvest
Absolutely. It's in manufacturing. Again, we believe in prevention first, but if you can't prevent it, then please divert it to feed people. There are great organizations that are doing audits in processors, manufacturers and ag farms to give them the economic benefit of finding those areas where they are wasting food. Really, some of them are the simplest things that they can do. The aggregate that they're saving in the end is about $250,000 a year on these small factories.
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
Ryan Turnbull Liberal Whitby, ON
In terms of the overall food insecurity problem in Canada, what percentage of that five million or more people could Second Harvest actually support?
6:40 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Second Harvest
We could support all of them. Last year we supported 4.3 million people. If we have the food, we can get it to everybody who needs it.
What's critical is that people are going everywhere to get food, and we understand that. That's another bit of research that we did, on Canada's invisible food network. We know where they are. We know where the food is. It's really just a matter of connecting these dots. It's a really common-sense solution.
6:40 p.m.
Conservative
6:40 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
