Food bank use in Ontario has surged to a record high with 8.7 million visits recorded in the past year as more than one million residents turned to emergency food services available in their communities, according to a newly released report.
Meanwhile, visits are up 13 percent over the previous year with a total of 8,712,897 food bank visits recorded in 2024-2025. This marks a 165 percent increase since 2019-2020.
“For nearly a decade, Ontario’s Food Bank network has faced record high demand, and this year is no exception,” Feed Ontario CEO Carolyn Stewart said in the 2025 Hunger Report, noting that food bank usage has been on the rise for nine years.
“With more than 1 million people turning to food banks for help we have seen firsthand how the affordability crisis continues to push more and more families from ‘just getting by’ to ‘barely holding on’.”
Twenty-nine percent of Ontario food bank visitors in fiscal 2024-2025 were children, while 61 percent were on assistance, statistics from the report show. Both demographics represented a 2.9 percent increase from the previous year.
The stats also indicate that one in four food bank visitors were employed, a 3.4 percent increase from last year and an 84 percent increase from 2019-2020.
Thirty-four percent of the more than one million people using food banks were first-time visitors, up 20 percent from the last fiscal year, the report says. Seventy-six percent were renters and 51 percent were from single-person households, up 4 percent and 0.2 percent respectively.
“Food banks are working tirelessly to meet demand and, in some cases, are preventing many of the province’s biggest challenges from getting worse,” Stewart said in the report. “But the need for help is outpacing the resources available, and food banks may soon have no choice but to turn people away.”
Research cited in the report says that food bank access is an indicator of housing instability and a precursor for homelessness.
As the gap between rent and income widens, low-income families will initially reduce other expenditures and deplete all alternative resources—frequently depending on food banks or various charitable organizations for assistance—before defaulting on their rent and losing their housing, the report says.
Ontario data from 2016 to 2024 shows a pattern of spikes in food bank demand typically precede spikes in homelessness, it says.
“The average number of food bank visits per person has increased by 13 percent, a warning sign that another surge in homelessness is on the horizon,” the report says.
The report calls for policy change and urges all levels of government to make poverty reduction a priority. It also advocates for the improvement of social assistance programs, job creation efforts, and the availability of affordable housing.
