Second Harvest is celebrating The Daniels Corporation and its 25 years as the Presenting Sponsor of Toronto Taste. Toronto Taste is Toronto’s premier culinary event, hosted for 30 years by Second Harvest with 50 participating renowned chefs, restaurants, and beverage purveyors. This year’s event is taking place on June 12, 2022, at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto. All proceeds go to supporting food rescue and hunger relief. Join us at Toronto Taste.
The partnership between Second Harvest and Daniels began in 1991. Together, the organizations’ combined efforts have helped to rescue and redistribute over 5.5 million pounds of surplus edible food. This helped avert over 20 million pounds of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.
As a special tribute to their monumental support, we had the pleasure of speaking with partner, Don Pugh. Don joined Daniels the same year that the organization began supporting Second Harvest and the first-ever year of Toronto Taste. Here’s our conversation.
A Conversation with Don Pugh, Partner at The Daniels Corporation
The Daniels Corporation is one of Canada’s largest preeminent builders and developers. It was founded in 1983 by John H. Daniels, Chairman Emeritus. Since the beginning, their passion for making a positive social impact translates into supporting many organizations in the GTA, including those that help the city’s most vulnerable communities.
Q: Why did Daniels extend their support to include Second Harvest—now Canada’s leading food rescue organization—all those years ago?
“As a company that builds homes and supports communities, we believe that everyone has the right to a roof over their head and food on their plates,” said Mr. Pugh. “We’re committed to providing affordable and accessible housing and helping those in need by providing food security, so it was a natural fit for our organization to partner with Second Harvest.”
“We’re very fortunate at Daniels to have a top-down understanding of our commitment to social impact. It’s never a question of should we do this, but how. How do we support these organizations and help to make an impact? It comes from our founder and Chairman Emeritus Mr. Daniels and Mitchell Cohen, our President and CEO, who built our relationship with Second Harvest in the early days.”
“There is a natural synergy between Daniels and Second Harvest that has always existed in a shared vision to make a positive social impact within our communities. We believe in giving back, and we believe in equality.”
Q: How do you make a positive impact on hunger relief?
“Support in any fashion is necessary—whether you’re a presenting sponsor of Taste Toronto or doing what you can by volunteering, donating, attending events or giving back in any way you are able to. A decade ago, when Second Harvest was first expanding its location, I commented on how sad it was that Second Harvest needed to grow. It’s not even as relevant as it was 25 to 30 years ago—it’s more relevant today. Not only is food insecurity not going away, but it’s growing.”
“We support Second Harvest for hunger relief, but also the notions of rescuing surplus food and diminishing waste that aligns with our sustainability goals. The immediacy of that and Second Harvest’s ability to react and move quickly are dynamic, which we appreciate as a dynamic company.”
How Daniels and Second Harvest’s 30-year Partnership Tackles Hunger
Daniels’ impact and support for Second Harvest have been tremendous, to say the least. Support spans from being the Presenting Sponsor of Toronto Taste for 25 years to helping build a major extension warehouse, helping to purchase delivery trucks, donating time and resources, and volunteering at countless events. All of it adds up to making a huge impact.
Q: What opportunities to get involved has the partnership presented?
“One of the opportunities is that, over the years, we have introduced colleagues in our industry to Second Harvest and we’ve seen a number of them step up and support Toronto Taste by attending the event as well as becoming sponsors themselves.”
“Partnering with Second Harvest has also allowed us to engage with the Daniels team and support other Turkey Drive Days, where our team members get dressed up as turkeys, Lunch Money Day, Hero Days, or getting out on the truck, which I’ve had the personal opportunity to do. There have been many different ways that we can engage with Second Harvest and it’s given us the opportunity to share that relationship with every tier of our organization. Like when we helped with the expansion of their space, our construction guys got to roll up their sleeves and help.”
Q: Can you recall a particularly memorable experience with Second Harvest over the years?
“Helping build a major extension of Second Harvest’s warehouse in 2009 is certainly a memorable experience for me. But the day that I participated in a ride along with a Second Harvest driver was by far the most memorable. You go out with the driver, starting early in the morning, and drop food off at Second Harvest’s agency partners. It’s an eye-opening and emotional experience. You see the real impact of your support on the ground. Once you’ve seen that, it stays with you forever.”
Here’s to the next 30 years of partnership and tackling hunger and food waste together!
“Yes—in whatever way, shape, or form it takes. Count us in.”
Thank you to Don Pugh for speaking with us and for your support. Thank you to the Founder and Chairman Emeritus, Mr. Daniels and Mrs. Daniels, President and CEO Mitchell Cohen, and the entire team at Daniels for your outstanding support over the decades. As Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”
A farmer, a flight attendant and a cook make up our tech team at Second Harvest. You may think this is the beginning of a bad joke … but it’s not. A farmer, a flight attendant and a cook are actually running the technical team for the Second Harvest Food Rescue App.
And thanks to the incredible power of the Microsoft suite of tools, this unlikely trio has now become an all-star tech team.
Second Harvest was approached by its partners at RedBit in May 2021 with an opportunity of a lifetime. Through their Ascend project, Microsoft offered to spend three days teaching the team how to build something in its Power Platform. Power Platform is a low-code suit of tools that allow non-developers to essentially act as developers. Without knowing code, users can build powerful flows that automate work, create apps of all kinds, and connect and visualize data far beyond what is currently possible via Excel. The Power Platform (and low-code/no-code tools in general) put technology in the hands of the everyday users. Needless to say, the team immediately jumped at this opportunity.
Photos, from left: Pat Joslin – Community Success Manager (farmer), Emily Krause – Community Success Coordinator (flight attendant), Veronica Summerhill – Director or Product Development (cook)
Problem Solving, Building, Learning
The project kicked off with a one-hour session to connect the teams and plan out the goal for the build. We were so excited about the options that we had a list a mile long of things we wanted to investigate. Our food rescue app has so much existing functionality within the app itself, but the back end, hosted in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is infinitely capable. The team members who work on the food rescue app are busy in Dynamics every day. This is how they monitor donations, support businesses and non-profits, and track progress. The obvious option was to automate something that the team was manually doing in Dynamics on a regular basis.
Eventually we settled on an option to automate the manual work needed when a non-profit picks up a donation but does not verify their donation correctly in the system. This process currently takes the team an approximate 120 hours per month. By getting the system to automatically send emails and update the data, as opposed to the team doing this on their own, there was a huge opportunity for business improvements. In addition, we chose this option with the amazing guidance from the Microsoft team, who wanted to ensure through this project we were given the opportunity to build something that would provide a lot of learning. A key outcome of this experience is to help organizations like Second Harvest gain the tools needed to continue further development on their own.
The “hackathon” was set for two full business days. When we kicked off our first build day, we learned that Microsoft had never done a session like this fully online before. We were happy to be providing them with some learnings as well. Together we found an amazing groove of teaching, problem solving and most importantly building. Our steward and MC extraordinaire Anthony Bartolo guided the project, ensuring we were keeping on track and sticking to our targets. Power Platform guru April Dunham guided us through the decision making process. And Greg Hurlman, senior software engineer, helped us problem solve when we hit a blocker. With such a strong team of teachers, we went became Power Automate pros in two days.
The result was the automation of six key tasks that the team currently does manually:
Identify when a non-profit has said they didn’t receive their food due to an alternate pickup schedule
Create a support ticket for the issue
Email the non-profit to provide information on how to correct the scenario
Email the business to provide information on how to correct the scenario
Open the donation again so the non-profit can accurately record the data
Close the support ticket when this is complete
While the time spent with Microsoft has come to a close, we are just at the beginning of our Power Apps journey. We’ve started building additional flows to automate a number of other manual tasks. These flows are following up on other scenarios where donations aren’t tracked properly, but also do things like create a support ticket if someone inputs a bad address, automatically mark data differently if it was picked up by our trucks, or automatically put responses from a survey into a template document.
We’re looking forward to the future of our work with Power Platform. Who knows, maybe our farmer, flight attendant and cook will be creating custom apps soon!
When McCain approached Second Harvest in 2021 to share its new goal of ensuring environmental compliance across McCain’s supply chain and sustainable practices with its customers, consumers, and employees, our team was thrilled. We knew right away that we would do big things together—and we truly have. McCain’s focus on meal donation, improving lives in the community, and volunteering aligns with our own vision of No Waste, No Hunger.
McCain Moves Mountains of Food Rescue in Canada
McCain is a long-time supporter of Second Harvest, having donated millions of pounds of food since 2005 that we’ve redistributed to our partner agencies. In June 2022, McCain has an upcoming volunteer week with Second Harvest to help with food sorting and our major annual culinary event, Toronto Taste.
They have also been big supporters of our Hero Campaign since 2007 and deepened their support this year when they rolled out their own Hero Campaign nationally. In recent years, McCain was prepared to donate large quantities of food and to do so more regularly. So in 2021, Second Harvest formally launched our Food Rescue Program with McCain Foods, which connected McCain locations to our network of partners with Second Harvest’s Food Rescue App.
In November 2021, the Second Harvest team conducted a training session with over 60 McCain staff across the country. This included a live demonstration of the Second Harvest Food Rescue app, up to 18 McCain’s locations donated over 68,574 pounds of frozen foods to four agency partners in three provinces. Outstanding teamwork!
As of May 2022, McCain has donated 247,921 pounds of nourishing baked goods, snacks, and prepared foods to 11 non-profit agency partners across six provinces. They also contributed 290,000 pounds of raw potatoes to our Surplus Potato Project.
McCain’s Turn the Tables on Hunger Impactful Campaign
In early 2022, McCain launched an impactful cause campaign called Turn the Tables on Hunger. During the campaign period (January – March 2022), McCain donated one dollar to Second Harvest for every case of fries purchased by its customers. McCain continued to “turn the tables on hunger” during National Volunteer week in April, where its employees engaged in virtual volunteering for Second Harvest at McCain locations across Canada.
The campaign was a super success. Not only did they raise their goal of $125,000 to deliver 300,000 meals to families in need, they also effectively engaged with McCain employees and customers. Some volunteers were artists who shared heartfelt messages on decorative lunch bags for Second Harvest’s Feeding our Future program. (This Second Harvest program prepares healthy lunch bags and takeaway kits for families and kids during summer camp.)
We are incredibly grateful to McCain’s employees and volunteers who contributed their time, talent, and gifts in support of Second Harvest’s food rescue programs. Thank you!
The Second Harvest Family
Second Harvest is endlessly grateful for the generosity of all of its incredible supporters, such as McCain, who provide food, funds, and services to help ensure that no one goes hungry when there is more than enough food to go around.
Wasted OpportunityisSecond HarvestandValue Chain Management International (VCMI)’s third and most recent report. In it, we dive deep into how much, where, and why surplus edible food is wasted in the food industry. We identified 127,177 businesses that are potential donors of surplus edible food within Canada’s food industry—including farmers, food processors, wholesalers, retailers, hotels, restaurants, and catering services.
Our research discovered that 3.2 million tonnes of surplus edible food is produced by Canada’s food industry each year. Of that, 96% is not rescued and redistributed for human consumption.
Why? While viewpoints differ within the food industry, we found that barriers to donate edible surplus food were based on false and limiting beliefs that we can and must overcome.
Why Rescuing and Redistributing Surplus Edible Food is Essential
Rescuing surplus edible food can help address Canada’s social and environmental issues (on top of others). Socially, food insecurity is on the rise and food charities are stretched to feed the millions of Canadians who experience hunger. Our second report, Canada’s Invisible Food Network (2021), found that there are 4X more food charities—at 61,000 non-profits—in our country than grocery stores.
Environmentally, wasting edible food is an unsustainable (and wasteful) use of our resources and it’s harmful to our planet. On average, the rescue and redistribution of surplus edible food equates to a reduction of 3.82 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions for each tonne of food. Rescuing edible surplus, compared to sending it to a landfill, improves food-related greenhouse gas emissions seven-fold.
What’s blocking the way forward? What can businesses in Canada’s food industry do?
5 Blockers and Food Waste Solutions for Canada’s Food Industry
We found five factors that have the greatest impact on the willingness of businesses in Canada’s food industry to donate surplus edible food. Here they are with opportunities to skirt around them and overhaul our broken food system.
1. Add Financial Benefits to Donating Surplus Food
Canada’s food industry makes profits and pays wages from the production, distribution, and sale of food. It is natural for industry stakeholders to view the donation of surplus food as less important to their commercial interests.
––Quoted from Wasted Opportunity report
The opportunity? Make it financially beneficial for businesses in the food industry to donate surplus edible food. For instance, when the Canadian government created the Surplus Food Rescue Program, food organizations were provided with $50 million in funding to purchase and redistribute surplus food. That helped incentivize businesses to donate. When funding ended, so did the donations.
2. Educate to Alleviate Legal Liability Concerns
In Canada, many businesses are concerned about legal liabilities surrounding the donationof food, particularly perishable food. Yet there is no documented case in Canada of a business that donated surplus food being sued for negligence. So there is no precedent for legal liability—even if the food is perishable.
The opportunity? Create awareness and educate businesses in the food industry to help remove concerns around the legal liabilities of donating food. When a business follows its usual food safety protocols and donates food in good faith, they are protected against legal liability by the “Good Samaritan” and “Food Donation” acts of legislation.
3. Set Policies for Donating Surplus Food with Incentives and Accountability
Our research shows that corporate policies preventing donation exist which are based on incorrect perceptions. Such policies are not regulations––they are seen across the supply chain as “the cost of doing business” and adopted because there is no accountability for reducing food waste within the industry.
The opportunity? Put regulations in place that stipulate and encourage food industry businesses to rescue and donate a greater amount of their surplus edible food. Offer tax breaks or financial incentives to reward those businesses and hold others accountable that do not meet regulatory requirements.
4. Coordinate Food Rescue and Donation Efforts
The charitable food sector has limited financial resources and is often reliant on volunteers.This can present challenges around communication and workflow for businesses that wantto donate to food rescue groups.
The opportunity? Second Harvest’s second report, Canada’s Invisible Food Network (2021), shed light on Canada’s unconnected patchwork of 61,000 non-profits trying to help feed 6.7 million Canadians in need of food. In response, we launched our Food Rescue App across the country to help facilitate and connect businesses looking to donate surplus edible food with those organizations in need of it. Technology and organizations like ours can help coordinate food rescue at scale.
5. Make it Easier to Donate Surplus Food
Operational constraints across the food system make change difficult. Production lines are continuous, high volume, and one-way. Lines cannot be reversed, interrupted for small runs, or have different products introduced part-way along… Meanwhile, the charitable food sector has limited financial and logistical resources to quickly and efficiently support the rescue and redistribution of surplus edible food.
There is a perceived complexity when it comes to changing systems in order to donate surplus food rather than dispose of it, business as usual.
The opportunity? Encourage businesses to take a deep look at and review whether a proportion of what is incorrectly deemed organic waste is, in fact, surplus edible food that could be donated. This would require funding to support a reliable, effective, and efficient transportation solution to rescue and redistribute food surplus.
Positive Food Waste Solutions for Canada
False and limiting beliefs are often all that prevent us from moving forward with sustainable action. We can overcome these constraints and limitations. By starting with small pilot programs where we can test and validate our hypotheses and work toward positive change at scale.
Second Harvest would like to thank the Walmart Foundation for their continued support of Second Harvest through providing the necessary funding for this study, as we all work towards sustainable solutions that will drastically reduce the amount of food that is lost and wasted across the Canadian supply chain.
Potatoes, Potatoes, Potatoes! What a versatile ingredient. Our favourite way to prepare potatoes is making crispy, saucy Patatas Bravas Madrina! This crowd-pleasing recipe will also be available to taste atToronto Taste on June 12th! Grab your ticket today to enjoy tastes of recipes like the one below from 50 of the city’s top chefs. We can’t think of a more appetizing spring foodie event!
Patatas Bravas Madrina
(serves 8 pieces of patatas bravas)
Ingredients:
300 g peeled yukon potatoes
Dash Kosher salt
Directions:
Slice the potatoes very thinly with the help of a mandolin, place them in a mixing bowl and season them with salt, once seasoned place them in layers in a baking tray previously covered with baking paper, we need to create 1.5 inches of potato layers.
Preheat the oven at 350 Fahrenheit and then bake the potatoes for 30 minutes, let them cool for an hour at room temperature, and make sure the potatoes are well cooked with a knife.
After, place the potatoes in the fridge with another tray on top of the baking tray and some weight for the potatoes to keep flat.
After 5 hours the potatoes should be cold, now we proceed to take them out of the tray and cut them into strips approximately ¾ inch thick and 4 inches long, and keep them refrigerated.
For the Brava sriracha sauce
50 g Confit onion
5 gr Tomato paste
5 g Sriracha sauce
10 ml Olive oil
4 g White sugar
5 ml Sherry vinegar
Directions:
Put all ingredients together in a small saucepan and cook slowly for an hour
Blend it until very smooth, let it cool down and store in the fridge inside a piping bag.
For the Wasabi mayonnaise
50 g Mayonnaise
4 g Wasabi powder
Directions:
Mix the mayonnaise with the wasabi powder in a mixing bowl with a whisk until smooth, keep the mayonnaise in the fridge in a piping bag.
Finish:
Fry the potato strips at 350 Fahrenheit until gold and crispy, place them in a drying paper to absorb the oil. Season with Maldon salt.
Place the potatoes in a small plate to share, make dots of the brava sauce and wasabi mayonnaise on top of the potatoes just like in the picture. Sprinkle chopped chives on top of the potatoes.
Food Waste Tip
Store potatoes in a cool, dry place that is far away from onions! Storing potatoes and onions together causes them to ripen and spoil faster.
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