Reducing the amount of food waste and ultimately your environmental impact doesn’t have to be a challenging thing. Taking a few steps today can help you save money and food tomorrow, and organizations like Second Harvest are here to provide support and resources along the way.
These small actions can help you keep food longer, caring for your time, budget and peace of mind.
Choose local staples with a long shelf-life, like cabbage, beets, squash, sweet potatoes and other root vegetables. Layer in nutrient-dense dried goods like whole grains, lentils and beans, which keep well long past their best before dates and provide versatile, nourishing options. When you fill your pantry with staples that last, you can plan meals around what’s on hand and find creative ways to use leftovers to make the most of every ingredient.
You can also learn more about food by visiting Second Harvest’s Resource Library, where you’ll find helpful guides like our Best Before Date timetable, a condensed reference showing when foods are still safe and good to eat.
Taking small steps at home is a good way to minimize personal waste, but we know that food waste is an issue affecting the entire supply chain. At the same time, more people in Canada than ever before — over 1 in 4 — are relying on food support to get by.
Families, seniors and individuals are facing tough choices every day. Food banks and community organizations are struggling to keep up with demand. And yet, every year, enough good food to feed 17 million people goes uneaten.
Second Harvest works to bridge the gap between hunger and avoidable food waste.
In 2025, Second Harvest rescued and redistributed 95.3 million pounds of surplus food, supporting 6.8 million people through our network of over 5,000 non-profit partners. Keeping food out of landfills also helps care for the resources used to produce it — safeguarding the land, water and energy that sustain our food system and are needed for a more food-secure future for everyone. Our work in 2025 also kept 309 million pounds of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere and saved 65 billion litres of water from going to waste.
You can learn more about the issues of food waste and insecurity by subscribing to the Second Harvest newsletter here or following Second Harvest on social media here .
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