Over 60,000 Manitobans relying on food banks

WINNIPEG — Linda Smith first turned to Harvest Manitoba in the early 1990s when her husband became permanently disabled. Now, on a fixed income, she continues to access the food bank to make ends meet.

Smith is one of more than 60,000 Manitobans now relying on food banks each month as demand continues to grow, a new report by Harvest Manitoba reveals.

The organization said in its 2025-26 impact report, released Thursday, that 61,188 people accessed a food bank in the province in March. Nearly half of them were children. The number of people accessing food banks in the province since 2020 has ballooned by more than 150 per cent, including more seniors, like Smith, than ever before.

Smith, a mother of five now in her 70s, first went to Harvest Manitoba in 1991 when he husband was disabled, and then again in the mid 2000s following a major car accident that led to a brain stem injury that forced her out of the workforce.

“It has been a life-saver,” she said, adding that her injury makes it painful to do many physical things in her day-to-day life.

An average of 24,880 households visited a food bank each month over the past year, an increase of more than 3,000 compared to previous year figures. That figure has more than doubled since 2020, when the charity showed that it was distributing about 11,000 hampers each month.

While the pace of growth has slowed from the double-digit increases seen during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, Harvest Manitoba president and CEO Vince Barletta said that shouldn’t be mistaken for demand easing.

Food-bank use has more than doubled over the past five years, meaning even smaller percentage increases now represent thousands more Manitobans seeking help.

“Even if the growth this year is six or seven per cent, that’s like growth of 15 or 16 per cent a few years ago just because the base is so much larger than it was before,” he said Thursday.

Harvest said it distributed more than six million kilograms of food across the province.

Harvest collected nearly four million kilos of donated and rescued food, valued at $31.85 million, while volunteers contributed more than 66,000 hours.

“There’s no way that we could move the amount of food that we do without the volunteers who come in here every day to help us do the work,” Barletta said.

The organization also delivered more than 315,000 kilos of food to northern Manitoba through 214 trips and provided weekly Meals2Go kits to 6,752 students at 20 schools.

Harvest Manitoba’s Community Food Network now includes 400 food banks and community partner organizations across the province.

“We’re really proud of that,” Barletta said, adding the report is also used to celebrate successes of the work the organization has been able to achieve.

Barletta said the organization became the first food bank in Canada accredited under the federal Nutrition North program in 2022, allowing it to access freight subsidies and work with remote First Nations to establish food banks in communities where they previously did not exist.

“The cost of groceries is bad enough here in the south,” Barletta said. “It’s even worse in a remote setting, and you add to that isolation, economic health challenges.”

The organization is also planning the Manitoba Food Transformation Centre, a facility intended to expand its ability to recover, process, preserve and distribute surplus food.

» Winnipeg Free Press