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The Daily Bread Food Bank is dealing with “dramatically” higher costs due to rising numbers of people who need help and ballooning food prices.
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Neil Hetherington, CEO for the Daily Bread Food Bank, said that pre-pandemic there were an average of 55,000 client visits per month, but they now receive over 130,000 visits a month.
“Unemployment is going down but our numbers continue to rise,” Hetherington said. “A lot of it has to do with repayment of debt — there’s been two years of borrowing from friends and families and that type of thing — but a lot of it is food pricing.”
The Daily Bread’s annual food expense used to be about $1.5 million to $2 million a year before COVID-19 hit, but now it has grown by about eight-and-a-half times so that the budget now has to be adjusted mid-year , he said.
The mission of the Daily Bread Food Bank is to provide three days’ worth of food to anyone who shows up in need, he said.
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Staples come at an increased cost.
“We have had a 118% increase year over year in (lettuce), we have had a 23% increase in yogurt and a 21% increase in milk,” Hetherington said. “We’re now spending about $10,000 more on gasoline — that would be over the last three months… than we would otherwise have spent.”
Given how client visits have increased, a Torontonian is either using the food bank or likely knows someone who is.
Those hardest hit are people living on fixed incomes, like seniors or recipients of the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) or Ontario Works (OW) whose incomes have not kept pace with inflation, especially in housing, he said.
“The new faces are people who are working 35-40 hours a week, they’re generally cobbling together two-three part-time jobs, they don’t have benefits,” Hetherington said.
Almost half of food bank users in Toronto have some university education, he said.
“Still, making ends meet is incredibly challenging,” he said.