With the end of the classes just a couple of weeks away for most public-school children in B.C., one food bank is worried it won’t be able to keep up with demand as kids lose access to specialized food programs.
Surrey Food Bank executive director Kim Savage tells 1130 NewsRadio that donations are keeping up with demand right now, but concerns linger.
“Our team has been working with farm partners and different commercial donors to make sure we have the food we need, but summer is always that tentative moment… so we know our demand will spike for those summer months. We’re just in the process of preparing for that and getting ready for that.”
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To help offset some of those worries, she says this year they’re doing something new.
“We’re actually banding together with two other food banks — Sources and StoreHouse — and we’re doing this thing called the ‘Surrey Summer Stock-up’ and encouraging the community to come together to support kids for the summer. Helping us get granola bars, yogurt tubes, cheese sticks, and fruit — all those things kids grab in the summer into our distribution line.”
Savage says the summer is a vulnerable time for families. She says that on average this year, they’re serving nearly 22,000 people a month — a number that’s up from 2025, which means 2026 is shaping up to be another record-breaker.
“We know with everything happening in the world, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s increased food prices, because of what’s going on in Iran, and the increased input cost for food and all that sort of thing, it all trickles down to the most vulnerable. So, we’re really working on shoring that up.”
She says families that had temporarily stopped coming to the food bank have returned due to ongoing financial pressures.
“The Food Banks Canada report came out, and one-in-four people in Canada are food insecure. That doesn’t mean one-in-four are using a food bank but it does mean one-in-four are making really tough choices at the grocery store in terms of what they’re putting in their baskets, the meal choices they’re choosing for themselves, so we’re just trying to work with everybody to make sure there’s enough.”
She adds the clientele is wide-ranging and includes children, immigrants, and seniors, and she says there’s a new trend emerging.
“The demographic that is starting to creep up is lower-middle income bracket. Both parents are working, they’re probably renting, but every inflationary piece, every upset to the system, everything that makes life more expensive, they’re very vulnerable too. Increasingly, those lower-to-middle income working families are people we’re seeing.”
The income range for those families, she says, is $60,000 to $70,000.
“If we broke down the budget and broke down rent, and how much it costs to run at least one vehicle, other transportation — whether it’s bus or that sort of thing — it all starts to add up.”
Savage held back tears as she described how heartbreaking it is to see people need a system that was never supposed to become the norm.
“The word I would use is chronic. Food banks were always supposed to be an emergency response to a temporary situation for a family, a group of people, that sort of thing. And now we are an integral part of a social safety net that is meeting a need that is no longer an emergency, it’s chronic. There are fundamental challenges that some families face month-in and month-out and they’re not emergencies, they’re shifts in economies, shifts in job markets, they’re all of these things that are making them vulnerable.”
She doesn’t have one perfect solution but feels the urgency about the situation should be enough to serve as a wake-up call for politicians and policymakers who can help make access to more affordable food a reality.
Savage says it starts with improved access to jobs and wages that keep up with cost of living.
“We’re sort of in this industrial revolution where there’s all of these jobs that are disappearing, and the new jobs haven’t yet been created. There’s this whole different way of thinking of work and approaching work, and so for the families we see, whether they are newcomers to Canada, whether they are working families or seniors — they’re caught in the fray — they’re caught in the now and not yet of that situation.”
She explains as jobs disappear to newer or improved technology, that’s also driving up usage.
The Food Banks Canada report card issued earlier this month gave B.C. numerous failing grades when it came to access to health care, housing affordability, and government support.
Overall, according to the report, B.C. received a D- for its poverty rate.
“The most recent available data [from 2024] show the poverty rate in B.C. is 13 per cent — the highest rate among the provinces,” said the report, which found social assistance and disability assistance both reached the poverty line.
B.C.’s unemployment rate stands at 6.7 per cent, and when it came to food insecurity, “The most recent available data [fom 2025] show that 23.2 per cent of people in B.C. live in households experiencing food insecurity. This is slightly below the national average of 24 per cent.”