How Loaves & Fishes Community Food Bank Is Expanding Food Recovery Across Coastal BC

“We really believe in food recovery. There is enough food out there, it’s just a distribution problem of getting it sorted and getting it out to people who need it,” Peter Sinclair, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, shared.

Since 1998, the Nanaimo, B.C.-based organization has grown from a small local operation into one of the largest food recovery and redistribution networks along the West Coast. Today, Loaves & Fishes supports more than 2,000 people every week, distributing food across Vancouver Island and beyond.

“Across the BC coast, from Victoria up to Haida Gwaii, we’re putting food out in the community,” Peter said.

Every morning, three truck routes head out to collect surplus food from local donors. Alongside those daily rescue routes from grocery stores, Loaves & Fishes also receives large volumes of rescued food through Second Harvest, including surplus produce from the Okanagan Valley.

Since joining the Second Harvest network in 2019, Loaves & Fishes has rescued more than 3.5 million lbs of surplus food, helping expand access to fresh, nutritious food across the communities it serves.

Back at the warehouse, volunteers and staff unload donations by store and department, sorting and weighing meat, dairy, produce, baked goods and non-perishable products.

From there, Loaves & Fishes distributes food through two main streams.

“The first one is direct-to-client, that’s through our free food market network,” Alex Counsell, director of operations, said.

Food moves from the warehouse to trucks and then directly to community food markets. Today, Loaves & Fishes operates 11 market locations at 13 different times throughout the week, including morning, afternoon, evening and weekend options.

“What we try and do is bring food to different areas of town so people don’t have to travel far to access the food bank,” Alex continued. “We bring the food to the people. We try to spread out by time, by location to make it easy for people to access.”

The second stream supports community organizations. Groups like community kitchens, schools, Indigenous communities and other non-profits can visit the warehouse and access food at no cost, allowing them to redirect funding toward other essential services.

“The idea is they can use their money in other ways. Hopefully they don’t need to buy as much food by accessing food through our warehouse,” Alex explained.

Loaves & Fishes is working with a software developer to create an online ordering platform that will allow organizations to browse real-time inventory, place orders and have food packed and ready for pickup.

Serving communities across such a vast region can involve long and complex journeys, including hours of driving and ferry travel to reach remote coastal communities. But rather than scaling back, Loaves & Fishes is growing its capacity to say yes to even more food recovery opportunities.

The organization is currently building a new 24,000-square-foot warehouse, four times the size of its previous facility. With increased storage capacity, the additional space will allow the team to move more food throughout its network.

“It will allow us to say yes to more big volume donations from Second Harvest,” Alex explained, noting a recent donation of 18 pallets of cherries.

For Peter, the impact of food recovery is measured not only in pounds of food rescued but in the experiences of the people who receive it.

“We all need food to eat, by providing that base standard of service to people, it gives them dignity … people can feel respected and know it’s the best for them,” Peter said.

He recently checked in with an individual visiting the food bank who shared that thanks to Loaves & Fishes, they were able to have cheese for the first time in five years and it brought them to tears.

As a food recovery organization, Loaves & Fishes works hard to close the gap between surplus and the increasing need from communities. Across the supply chain, millions of tonnes of perfectly good food is wasted before even reaching consumers, while 9.8 million struggle to afford essentials like dairy products or protein.  

As Loaves & Fishes continues to grow, the organization hopes its success can demonstrate what's possible when communities invest in food recovery at scale.

“Our hope is that we can prove a model of large-scale food collection and distribution across the BC coast and have the results of that model be so persuasive that that model can be replicated across the province and country,” Peter said.

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