Food Stash Foundation rescues grocery store waste to feed Vancouver families

When Food Stash Foundation got its start a decade ago, it was about as bare-bones as it gets.

After watching the documentary Just Eat It, David Schein was moved to start what would become Food Stash. The documentary follows a Vancouver couple that swore off grocery shopping for six months to live off food they find in grocery store dumpsters.

And Schein saw in that documentary a potential model for addressing food insecurity in Vancouver.

“He took it on himself to reach out to grocery stores, … and said, ‘What are you doing with the food you’re not selling? Can I take it and instead redistribute it to other charities in the city?’” said Food Stash communications specialist Anna Gray.

Since its early days, Food Stash has grown considerably.

At first, it was just an operation to rescue good food from the trash and donate it to charities. Today, the charity still donates 80% of its food to other charities.

But it has also developed some of its own programs.

That includes a food delivery program, which Food Stash has worked with meal prep and delivery service Fresh Prep to run for the last couple of years.

And the group’s Mount Pleasant-area warehouse has a public-facing space that is set up like a grocery store, with dairy, meat, produce and pantry sections, where people can engage in a more traditional market shopping experience.

It’s since grown well beyond Schein’s one-person operation — besides running a warehouse, the organization has three trucks running every day to retrieve food from grocery stores they partner with.

In that time, the region has also seen increased demand for services like Food Stash.

The last decade has seen skyrocketing housing costs, and recent years have also seen grocery costs rise, particularly after pandemic-era restrictions were lifted.

Independent grocery stores, which are often more affordable than the big chains, have struggled in recent years, leaving communities grappling with how to address food insecurity on top of other social crises.

Food banks and other similar charities have warned year after year that the current situation isn’t tenable. It’s no surprise that Food Stash is seeing that strain as well.

“It’s people who are working two jobs and just can’t make ends meet, or it’s families that are new to Canada and can’t find work. So it’s really varied in who’s showing up to these programs,” Gray said.

Food Stash has to regularly turn people away, with programs at capacity, she added.

The food box delivery program is specifically geared towards people who self-identify as being low-income with a disability that makes it hard to leave home to get groceries.

“So people that are on our food box delivery program are often on the program for a long time, which means that spots don’t really open up that often,” Gray said.

The market program in the warehouse, on the other hand, doesn’t have restrictions on who can join, so admissions are based on a lottery system for three-month memberships.

The program has a capacity for 160 members, less than half the roughly 375 applications the program gets.

But Gray said programs like food banks and Food Stash shouldn’t need to exist.

“The food that we’re providing is a band-aid solution. We need long-term solutions to help people not be food insecure. And in order to do that, we need government support,” Gray said.

“People need money, people need higher wages, people need lower rent. So we’re always advocating for those long-term changes as well.”

Where food banks rely more on donations to buy food, Food Stash’s reliance on grocery store waste insulates it a bit more against economic downturns. But the charity still depends on donations to fund its infrastructure, including staff and capital costs.

“We have 35 food donors that we currently work with, and we’re at a bit of a point where we can’t really take much more food because we just don’t have the infrastructure for that,” Gray said.

“We don’t have the fridge space, we don’t have the freezer space, which means we can’t expand our in-house programs.”

And that leaves them vulnerable to the increasing cost of land and rents.

Their current lease on their warehouse at 290 East 1st Avenue is a time-limited lease. And while there are options to extend the lease, that would come with renegotiating rent, and it’s far from guaranteed that the new rents would be tenable for the organization.

As is, the organization shares the office space above the warehouse with other organizations to save costs, but that isn’t the only risk to the charity — the property could also be redeveloped.

That’s what happened to their previous location on West 2nd Avenue, near the Cambie Bridge.

That location was demolished and turned into a four-storey-deep hole in the ground, intended for a seven-storey creative manufacturing and office space, before the proposal was abandoned in 2024, according to Daily Hive.

The developer is now proposing a 25-storey mixed-use development, including purpose-built rentals, with council voting unanimously in favour of a tentative rezoning.

Though the location was a hole in the ground for several years, Gray said the organization was pushed out of the warehouse quicker than they expected, as the development was, at the time, advancing.

“Not wanting to have that same situation again is something that’s always on our mind,” Gray said.

“It’s not something we’re talking about day-to-day, but just larger picture, it would be nice to have a more permanent place that met all our needs and was affordable as well.