One unique grocery store in West Bend is making sure produce of every shape and size ends up on a table instead of a landfill through its pay-what-you-can model.
According to City statistics, Toronto households produce over 99,000 tonnes of food waste every year and over 50 per cent of that is avoidable.
But, where does food waste come from? For individuals, it’s usually due to over-purchasing and misunderstanding expiry dates, while for producers, it’s because of odd-shaped produce and below-standard packaging.
While all this food is being wasted, some city residents can’t afford to adequately feed themselves.
In December 2024, City Council declared food insecurity an emergency in Toronto. Nearly 25 per cent of Torontonians are food insecure and the risks are higher for low-income, racialized and 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals.
So residents in West Bend are tackling two problems with one store — Feed It Forward’s pay-what-you-can grocery store uses excess and rejected produce to reduce food waste and address food insecurity.
“It’s unfortunate that the way our current grocery system and the way modern production [works], it’s just a scalability thing. They create food en masse, without knowing whether it’ll actually be utilized, and then when it can’t [be used] because of best before dates, meanwhile it’s still good, they just can’t sell it in traditional ways,” CEO Carson Foster shared.
Feed It Forward is a non-profit organization that runs both a grocery store and a free food-sharing app. The store collects high-quality, excess produce from restaurants, farms and retailers to sell at affordable prices or give away for free to those in need.
Meanwhile, the app empowers locals to share their extras by uploading details on the type of food and pick-up location.
Zack B., the store manager at Feed It Forward, tells The Green Line he has seen different people shop at the store, from those who want to be socially responsible and divert food waste away from landfills to those with no means of affording regular groceries.
“You would be surprised how many hugs I get alone, just from people being like, ‘Oh man I never knew a place like this existed,’ and you got people that are down to their last dollar.”
“There’s a social perception as well about buying food that is almost like secondhand, even though it’s not really secondhand food and we live in a world where we like our groceries to look perfect when we buy them. But if you’ve ever been in nature or worked on a farm or anything like that, you know that things don’t grow perfectly,” added Shane Rankin, a resident in West Bend.
Feed It Forward aims to build a socially responsible neighbourhood that diverts food from landfills and helps out a neighbour in need. The non-profit will be relaunching its app in December, making it more user-friendly and easy-to-access.
