New food processing funding could see more produce for rural food banks

More farm veggies will soon be on the menu more often at Manitoba food banks.

Harvest Manitoba will be upgrading its distribution and food processing centre, after receiving a $500,000 donation from Crown corporation Farm Credit Canada.

“This support is going to allow Harvest to work with our agriculture sector to make sure that we waste less food as a province, and that we get more food onto the kitchen tables of Manitobans who need it now more than ever,” president and CEO of the Winnipeg non-profit Vince Barletta told The Carillon.

The upgrades include expanding cold storage space at its processing centre in Winnipeg and creating dedicated spaces for sorting, bagging and storing larger quantities of root crops and vegetables, such as potatoes and zucchinis, he said. The charity’s industrial facility is also slated to broaden its capacity to include repackaging some donated foods safely and turning donated items, like squashes, into soups and stews for distribution, Barletta added.

Harvest Manitoba already sends out 12 million pounds of food every year to food banks throughout the province, he said. With the new upgrades, Barletta said the charity could handle at least 8 million additional pounds and use it to “improve lives.” Harvest Manitoba supports more than 400 food banks across Manitoba, helping more than 100,000 people every month, according to its 2024-2025 impact report.

Having the new facilities will help capture the wasted food because the current processing systems can’t handle them or don’t have enough space, Barletta said.

“We turn food away today, especially on the produce side, because we simply don’t have the infrastructure to be able to handle millions more pounds of potatoes,” he said. “But we know that food could very much be used.”

Barletta said growing Harvest Manitoba’s capabilities means more food will get to food banks across the province in rural areas. He said demand for food banks across Manitoba is steadily rising. In the charity’s 2024-2025 impact report, it found food bank usage rose by 150 percent since 2020, a rate faster than the national average.

South East Helping Hands executive director Ken Dyck welcomes the announcement.

“Everything helps,” he said.

The Steinbach-based food bank has seen a steady increase in demand, and Dyck expects see the number of families served rise to 400 by Christmas.

He said their charity has turned into its own unofficial distribution centre, as it ships off food from Harvest Manitoba to other Southeastern Manitoba communities, like Piney and Ste Anne. The food bank is low on many food items, and it has limited freezer space for storing goods, Dyck said.

The amount of good quality produce they receive still doesn’t fill the need, he said, noting that staff usually have to limit it to one item per person. Dyck said they often receive produce but they have to give it to local organizations, like Steinbach Family Resource Centre, otherwise it would go bad before people could take it.

While it’s too early to know what the impact will be locally, Dyck said it would be great to get more and better quality produce during the winter seasons from Harvest Manitoba.

He said there’s always been strong support from locals to help the food bank when its needed.

“We’re always very grateful for Steinbach and surrounding area, because they do a tremendous job filling our needs when we have them,” Dyck said.