Toronto's food bank use keeps hitting new records, faster than ever before: report
CBC
Food bank use in Toronto keeps hitting new records, with a new report finding 4.1 million visits made from March 2024 and April 2025 — an increase of hundreds of thousands from the year before.
The annual Who's Hungry report, released Monday, is a joint effort between Daily Bread Food Bank and North York Harvest Food Bank and provides a yearly profile of food insecurity and poverty in the city.
Neil Hetherington, Daily Bread’s CEO, told CBC Toronto the number of visits has been climbing at an exacerbating and alarming rate in recent years.
“It took 38 years to get to one million visits, two years to get to two million, a year to get to three,” he said. “And now we're another year and here we are at 4.1 million visits.”
That figure comes straight from this year’s Who’s Hungry report, and represents an increase of 636,962 more visits than 2024. It’s also a 340 per cent increase since 2019.
Other key findings: More than 112,000 first-time food bank clients and one in four food bank clients are children, with 18 per cent of households with children reporting their kids went hungry at least once a week.
The figures in the report come from a survey of 1,890 food bank clients representing 73 member food banks between March 2024 and April 2025. Respondents completed a detailed questionnaire about their income, housing, employment, and experiences of food insecurity.
Nearly all respondents (96 per cent) said the rising cost of living is one of the top three reasons they use food banks.
Hetherington pointed to a number of social issues contributing to the problem.
“The first is the lack of affordable housing. We get that solved, then we start to see a reduction in the number of people that need the food bank,” he said.
“The second is income supports … we want to make sure that the Ontario Disability Support Program is appropriate and that the Canada Disability Program is wholly adequate so that if you're living with a disability, you're not legislated to live in poverty.”
Craig Pickthorne, director of the communications at the Ontario Living Wage Network (OLWN)
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