Food bank use in Canada more than doubles since 2019, report shows

Food bank use in Canada has more than doubled since 2019, with employed Canadians making up nearly one-fifth of those turning to emergency food assistance, new data shows.

Monthly food bank visits throughout the country reached 2.35 million in March, 2026, up nearly 9 per cent compared with the same month a year ago and up 117 per cent since 2019, according to a report from Food Banks Canada released on Wednesday.

It’s a symptom of an affordability crisis that spans food, shelter and transportation, according to Richard Matern, research director at Food Banks Canada. He said many households have little room in their budgets to absorb sudden price shocks before they are forced to turn to food banks for help.

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“What’s most concerning is the sustained depth of need that’s been occurring over the last few years,” Mr. Matern said. “People are progressively losing their financial cushion.”

For around 18 per cent of food bank users, employment was their primary source of income, up from just 12 per cent in 2019 but down slightly from 19.4 per cent in 2025, the report found. Meanwhile, the share of visitors who had social assistance as their primary source of income has consistently shrunk over the same period.

“This portion of clients who were employed [was] holding at 10 or 11 per cent for like a decade,” said Mr. Matern. “And that’s when the affordability crisis started to hit.”

Food Bank Canada’s HungerCount survey is sent out to a network of nearly 3,000 food banks and affiliates across the country each February, and the data is collected for the month of March.

Grocery inflation in Canada eased at the end of the summer after two years of sustained increases, with prices up 1.7 per cent year over year in September compared with annual growth of 2.8 per cent in August.

But that simply means already-high grocery prices are rising at a slower pace. The price of a typical grocery basket is up 30 per cent since 2019, according to data from Royal Bank of Canada.

And even the modest reprieve from high food inflation looks to be short-lived, as soaring diesel prices linked to the continuing conflict in Iran are poised to make food imports in the winter months more expensive.

Those fuel costs are turning into a “double-whammy” for food banks across Canada, Mr. Matern said.

“On one hand, transportation and fuel costs affect the operational budgets of the food bank network, and on the client side, increased gas prices are another layer on the affordability challenge.”

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Diesel prices are up more than 70 per cent from a year ago, and may soon have a bigger impact on grocery prices as well, warned Mike von Massow, a professor in the Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Guelph.

Currently, Canada’s harvest season is helping to keep fruit and vegetable prices in check, Prof. von Massow said. But prices typically go up in the colder months as the country begins to import more of its produce, he added.

”Those prices may be even higher with the rising price of diesel,” he said.

Then there are shelter costs, which have increased by 37 per cent since January, 2019, for renters, as measured by Statistics Canada. Roughly 72 per cent of food bank users live in market rent housing, according to Food Banks Canada.

For the most financially vulnerable Canadians, including many who earn a paycheque, incomes have not kept up with the threefold blow from years of steep food, transport and shelter cost increases, Mr. Matern said.

People in the lowest-income bracket are spending upward of 60 per cent of their disposable income on their housing alone, he said. “Resilience has been eroded at this point for a lot more people.”