We’ve all heard of food banks. Like insurance, we know what they are and understand their purpose but hope to never need them. Unfortunately, with inflation driving up food prices, more and more people are turning to food banks to feed their families.

In a recent BCBC piece on the impacts of inflation, David Williams noted that in 2023, there were nearly 200,000 visits to B.C. food banks. This is a 57% increase in the number of people who visited between 2019 and 2023, and around one-third of these visits included children.

In an ideal world, having a full-time job would leave you impervious to food insecurity. However, the data shows that 22% of visitors to food banks last year had employment income as their main source of income, which shows that having a job doesn’t necessarily mean you can always put food on the table.

With such a surge in reliance on food banks, access to nourishing, healthy food is crucial, and this is a role the Greater Vancouver Food Bank takes seriously. We were recently invited to visit their HQ in Burnaby by CEO David Long to learn more about their operations and their mission.

The GVFB was set up as a temporary relief to the hunger crisis in Vancouver in 1983, like many food banks, in a church basement. In Long’s own words, they’re far from a church basement today, and their 40,000-square-foot space in Burnaby couldn’t reflect this more. When we walked into the bright, busy warehouse, we were immediately struck not only by the sheer amount of food but also by its quality.

Under the assumption that food banks are wholly stocked with non-perishable goods, tins, and boxes of Kraft meals, the sight of their shelves, fridges, and freezers lined with fresh vegetables, fruit, and meat of supermarket quality quickly changes this.

Providing fresh food is central to the mission of the GVFB. Food banks are often associated with a sense of shame around being unable to provide nourishing food for your family and a stigma around asking for help. David Long told us when he took over the reins in 2018, he heard this all the time and built his strategy around a simple rule: if you wouldn’t feed it to your children and family, he wouldn’t feed it to their clients.

This ties into one of the first things we learned on our tour: in 2022, the GVFB ended food drives. A concept central to the idea of a food bank, Long found that the food being donated did not meet the standard of food they wanted to provide. People donate the food they no longer want to eat themselves, but don’t want to dump—and it ends up at food drives. In place of this, they run virtual food drives, where people can browse the fresh produce online and donate towards it, allowing the food bank to then buy food they actually want to provide.

This sort of innovation threads throughout the GVFB’s entire operation. Operation being the key word here— the organisation is run not like a charity, but like a business. They have a $30 million budget, a full-time paid staff of 65 people, and consistently look for creative and innovative ways to allow them to distribute healthy meals to the over 17,000 people they feed per month. One way they do this is by partnering with corporations, which help them tackle the issue of food distribution.

This was a message that was driven home to us on our visit. We do not have a food scarcity issue, but a distribution one. Often, companies can’t sell perfectly good food if it does not meet certain standards. These standards mean that food can be discarded or deemed unsellable for being slightly off size, off colour, or because there is simply too much of it. A tomato which is perfectly edible, ends up going to waste for being too small. Partnerships with companies like Loblaws now mean that this food no longer ends up in landfills, but in the fridges of the GVFB, and the homes of the families who need it.

We also learned about the little-known B.C. Farmers’ Food Donation Tax Credit. In B.C., when farmers reach their quotas, a lot of the excess harvest is often left in the fields because it cannot be sold. The GVFB has worked to inform farmers about this credit and encourage them to donate unsellable food to the food bank, allowing them to receive a tax credit in return.

Since 2023, this initiative has resulted in the collection of over 1,000,000 pounds of donated food for the GVFB that would have otherwise gone to waste. We saw this firsthand in one of their 200 industrial freezers, where the team proudly showed us the meat they’ve been able to provide from farmers- a butcher would envy the stock.

Although we love economics, when we talk about how companies build prosperity in B.C., we view prosperity as something more than just economic value. Prosperity is often defined as having the ability to thrive, and by providing more than $2 million of healthy, fresh food to families across Vancouver each month, few companies support prosperity more than the GVFB.

Walking into their warehouse, we admired the flowers they had tied along their staircase. The team told us that CEO David Long and his wife had married there the week prior. Many leaders can talk the talk and even walk the walk- but few walk down the aisle. Thank you to David and all the team at the Greater Vancouver Food Bank for an incredible visit.

See how you can support the amazing work of the GVFB this holiday season.