Food for Thought: How local procurement builds community wealth
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In our Food for Thought series, individuals within North York Harvest Food Bank will share their experience in matters pertaining to food insecurity and poverty. This series will share ideas, perspectives, and lessons learned as we work toward our vision of a community where all members are able to meet their food needs.
Written by Lianne Holland, Senior Manager of Social Enterprise and Community Wealth
When meeting with first-time FoodReach customers, I’m often asked, “How is it that you get the cheapest prices on food?”
The short answer is, we don’t.
Because FoodReach is a non-profit food supplier to the community food sector, there tends to be an expectation that we will sell food at bargain-basement pricing. But we take a different approach to procurement.
Consider for a moment the food in your fridge 
- Is it filled with food that nourishes you?
- Does it meet your cultural and dietary preferences?
- Is the food fresh?
- Did you buy it from a store you can rely on to stock what you need?
- Can you get similar foods cheaper elsewhere, but you’re more concerned with quality over price?
- Where did it come from?
These are all of the same questions we ask ourselves when we’re building FoodReach’s catalogue. We want to leverage economies of scale to lower food costs for our customers, and we want to create a long-term food solution.
Part of creating a long-term food solution is sourcing quality, nourishing, culturally relevant food from reliable suppliers we can count on, so our sector can count on us.
But how can we make our impact even greater? That’s where our Community Wealth Building mindset comes in. We’ve been focusing a lot on the question: “Where does the food come from?”
At any given time, FoodReach’s catalogue sells a minimum of 50% locally sourced products. This fluctuates to a higher number seasonally as a result of the supply and demand of produce. The more we’re procuring products from the local economy, the more we’re strengthening our community because it’s creating jobs.
Sourcing locally also makes our supply chain more reliable, and less susceptible to disruptions like we are seeing with this year’s tariffs, and back in 2020/2021 with the pandemic.
And as we make big plans for our future Community Food Hub, we’re looking at how we leverage our resources further to strengthen and support local, small businesses by supplying warehouse space and connections to a consistent demand from our customers.
When we look back in our fridges, not only are we nourishing ourselves, every purchasing choice we’re making is positively impacting other people’s lives so they can nourish themselves, too.
Resource Centre (CAR-C): An in-house emergency food program providing groceries to nearly 6,000 Lawrence Heights residents each year.
