Nearly half of the food produced in Canada is wasted annually: report

A customer holds a head of lettuce at the grocery store. (Michael Burrows/Pexels)

Nearly 50 per cent of food produced in Canada is wasted every year, according to a new report.

The report, produced by Second Harvest, a food rescue organization, shows that 46.5 per cent or 21.1 million tonnes of food produced in Canada is actually never used.

"We find ourselves in a paradox," said Lori Nikkel, Second Harvest CEO.

"Food prices are skyrocketing, making it harder than ever for millions of Canadians to put healthy food on their tables. Yet at the same time, we're still wasting vast quantities of perfectly good edible food."

Avoidable food waste, food that can be eaten by people, makes up nearly 42 percent of that produced food.

"Every pound of avoidable food waste is a missed meal for a family," said Nikkel.

Best-before dates are seeing consumers throw food out 23 per cent of the time, with the avoidable food waste equating to $58 billion.

"I think that regulators probably need to take a closer look at that and look at some other jurisdictions where they've either completely done away with best before dates, and if something's expiring, it's expiring, but otherwise it's fine for consumption," said Calgary Food Bank CEO Melissa From.

In Calgary, the food bank says it's not surprised by the numbers.

"We don't actually have a food quantity problem, we have a food distribution problem," said From.

"In the last fiscal year, we actually reclaimed 13 million pounds of food and so that is retailers and businesses and corporations in our city saying, ‘We're not going to waste this, we're going to make sure it goes to good use.’"

Lourdes Juan founded Leftovers Foundation and Knead Tech, where she helps organizations come up with customizable software that helps get food safely and to scale across North America.

"The curse of food waste is that it happens at every step of the supply chain," she said.

"I would say from a household perspective, like your freezer is your friend, and take that approach. Freeze meals in portions instead of letting them go to waste."

Although Second Harvest found that total food waste only equates to 3.1 per cent in households nationwide, there are ways to make that number smaller.

"We talked about trying not to buy bulk if you don't have to," said Juan.

"Studies have shown that in our household, we throw away about 25 per cent of what we purchase at the grocery store. So, actually, it's better for the environment and our wallets if we're only buying what we need and using up what we need."

Second Harvest says avoidable food waste contributes to more than 25 million metric tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.