Pilot project that saved more than 2.5m kg of food last year poised to expand across province, with food bank usage surging across Canada

Supermarkets in Quebec will now be able to donate their unsold produce, meat and baked goods to local food banks in a program – described as the first of its kind in Canada – that also aims to keep millions of kilograms of fresh food out of landfills.

The Supermarket Recovery Program launched in 2013 as a two-year pilot project. Developed by the Montreal-based food bank Moisson Montréal, the goal was to tackle the twin issues of rising food bank usage in the province and the staggering amount of edible food being regularly sent to landfills.

Provincial officials said the pilot – which last year saw 177 supermarkets donate more than 2.5m kg of food that would have otherwise been discarded – would now begin expanding across the province.

“The idea behind it is: ‘Hey, we’ve got enough food in Quebec to feed everybody, let’s not be throwing things out,’” Sam Watts, of Montreal’s Welcome Hall Mission, which offers several programs for people in need, told Global News on Friday. “Let’s be recuperating what we can recuperate and let’s make sure we get it to people who need it.”

Recent years have seen food bank usage surge across Canada, with children making up just over a third of the 900,000 people who rely on the country’s food banks each month. In Quebec, the number of users has soared by nearly 35% since 2008, to about 172,000 people per month.

The program’s main challenge was in developing a system that would allow products such as meat and frozen foods to be easily collected from grocers and quickly redistributed, said Watts. “There is enough food in the province of Quebec to feed everybody who needs food. Our challenge has always been around management and distribution,” he added. “Supermarkets couldn’t accommodate individual food banks coming to them one by one by one.”

More than 600 grocery stores across the province are expected to take part in the program, diverting as many as 8m kg of food per year.

Provincial officials announced on Friday that the government would contribute nearly C$400,000 (about US$300,000) to help cover the cost of transportation and gasoline for the program. “Hats off to this brilliant initiative which – besides being good for the environment – offers a unique and lasting solution to the problems of waste and food precariousness,” said Lucie Charlebois, the province’s minister of public health.

Organisers also point to the environmental benefits of keeping the food out of the landfill, estimating that the program could yield an annual reduction of more than 7,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions – described as the equivalent of taking some 1,500 cars off the road each year.