The FoodMesh team is united in our love for food and passion for helping organizations waste less, feed more and save money.
2023 Benefit Corporation Report
Throughout 2023, FoodMesh has continued our work to help organizations minimize the volume of their unsalable food ending up in waste streams, and maximize the impact that food can have on their local communities.
During the year, the organizations we work with hit the incredible milestone of 30 million KG of rescued since FoodMesh opened our doors in 2017.
The impact of our work in 2023 – by the numbers
12,337,978
Meals provided
7,931,953
Food rescued (KG)
20,343,586
CO2 emissions saved (KG)
37,999,812
Donated value ($)
“I can’t thank Fresh St. Market enough for this food. It’s doing such good in our community”
– Gary Sugrim, Varad Ashram Inter-Cultural Service Humanitarian World Association
Impact on employees
- Maintained daily, weekly and monthly touchpoints with the team to check in with one another on their work and wellbeing
- Flexible work arrangement, for employees to choose the working hours that work best for them
- Provided employees with a training allowance and paid time to support their professional and personal development
- Ran our third annual engagement survey, to gain an understanding of how employees are doing and where the opportunities for improvement are
- Maintained a monthly ‘Coffee Culture Club’ to create space for the team to come together and share ideas on different practices FoodMesh can adopt to help build a positive, inclusive and supportive work culture
- Hosted our third annual all-staff retreat for quality in-person team building
- Completed a robust performance review process for the entire team
- Conducted a compensation review across the organization and made cost-of-living adjustments
- Maintained a social committee that included a summer picnic and a holiday party for the team to come together and enjoy informal social time and team building
- Continued the “Get to know the FoodMesh team” blog series, to help our customers and partners get to know the (amazing) people who make up our team
- Provided each employee with an end-of-year bonus and all employees received an adjustment in compensation to reflect evolving roles and inflation.
- Continued our volunteer program, providing the team with two paid days per year to volunteer with organizations in our network
Impact on customers
- Arranged for our clients to volunteer with their donation recipients, so they could see for themselves the impact their donations were having on the local community
- Helped to generate positive media coverage about our customers and their outstanding food recovery efforts
- Celebrated our customers’ key food recovery milestones on FoodMesh’s blog and social media channels
- Brought Choices Markets onto our Retail Food Recovery Program, which was met with positive feedback from store staff
“We are incredibly proud to be partnering with FoodMesh. At Choices, we firmly believe in cultivating win-win relationships, and this collaboration with FoodMesh is a shining example of that. Thanks to this partnership, all ten Choices locations are diverting 100 per cent of their unsalable edible food away from landfills, benefitting people in need in our community as well as the environment. We are excited about the positive impact we can make together.”
– Jon Janower, Chief Operating Officer, Choices Markets
Impact on the environment
- Helped organizations divert 7,931,953 KG in 2023 and 30,299,242 since FoodMesh began
- Helped save 20,343,586 KG of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere in 2023 and 77,687,666 KG since FoodMesh began
- When procuring equipment, such as office furniture or laptops, we maintain a ‘nothing new’ policy – opting for reused or refurbished items first and only buying items new when absolutely necessary
- We encourage remote working to reduce unnecessary emissions
- Our office is located near public transport hubs so that employees can commute to work by bus or train. A number of employees bike or walk to the office
- Our holiday party Secret Santa was using regifted, thrifted or homemade items only
“These donations have been incredible. We honestly can’t thank these stores enough – we’d be totally lost without them”
– Tania Allen, Salvation Army Harvest of Hope Food Bank
Impact on community
- We worked directly with 511 hunger-relief organizations and 272 farmers in 2023, and 1,797 indirectly
- We celebrate and promote the great work our charity partners are doing through blog posts and social media coverage on an ongoing basis
- We have shared $513,000 in revenue with hunger-relief organizations in 2023, and $1,696,000 in total since FoodMesh began
- We have helped organizations rescue the equivalent of 12,337,978 meals in 2023, and 45,117,648 meals in total since FoodMesh began
- We sponsored three food service businesses in Metro Vancouver to win a comprehensive Food Waste Audit by BetterTable.ca, to provide them with the tools to prevent waste in their daily operations, for long-lasting impact
- Our team volunteered 45.5 hours in 2023 to hunger-relief organizations we work with, helping them in their work to get food to people who need it
- We sponsored 5 BC-based upcyclers to showcase their products with 3000+ buyers and influencers from the grocery industry at the Upcycler showcase at the Grocery & Specialty Food West 2023 trade show, to help them grow their business and increase their impact. These businesses reported initial sales of $5,803 (which equates to 602 KG of food waste prevented) as a direct result of their participation in this event
- We hosted a webinar to help connect businesses in Metro Vancouver with solution providers to help them find alternative uses for their unsold food
- We collaborated with UBC’s Master of Food and Resource Economics program to conduct a study on the economics of food recovery, in a bid to better understand the social, environmental and economic value that hunger-relief organizations bring to the region by recovering unsold food, so we could better advocate for a just food system on their behalf
- We designed a new revenue stream for charities in our network, by involving them of the distribution of produce between farmers and schools, as part of the Ag in the Classroom initiative
- We did a spotlight series on organizations finding innovative ways to use surplus food on the FoodMesh blog
Public benefits and disclosures
- FoodMesh is both a B Corp and a benefit corporation under British Columbia law.
- We measure our public benefit through the B Lab Impact Assessment which measures a company’s positive social impact on its stakeholders. We were certified in May 2021, and the next assessment is in 2024.