🤝 Meet Lori Nikkel. She’s the CEO of Second Harvest, a Canadian non-profit focused on reducing food waste across the country. Last year, the organization and its partners redistributed over 95 million pounds of food that would have been thrown out. We sat down with Lori to talk about Canada’s food waste problem, the myths behind best-before dates, and the logistics of rescuing 22 million pounds of potatoes.
How did you land in this line of work at Second Harvest?
I came to my career very organically. I was a low-income single parent of three sons, and I had to figure out how to feed them. I was terrified, so I started a child nutrition program at my son's school. Eventually, they asked me to train people in different parts of the city to run child nutrition programs. It was mostly low-income moms — women who were being abused, women who were new to Canada — and they had all lost their confidence.
We built these little businesses in each of the schools. We had to build like a small restaurant that would serve 350 kids every day on a budget of around $100,000 a year with no money and volunteer staffing. I'd heard of Second Harvest, thought I could do it, and went to check it out. Once I got there, I realized this was a great idea.
Can you explain the differences between a best before date and an expiration date and how that confusion can lead to food waste?
It is so much waste. One shocking finding was that 23% of avoidable food waste is based on arbitrary best before dates. That’s over $12 billion a year. And they're about food quality, not safety. Only five foods actually expire. Baby formula, meal replacements like Ensure, and protein bars. The other two are prescription only, so don't worry about those unless your doctor tells you to. Everything else has a best before date.
In Canada, we're only regulated to put a best before date on products with a 90-day shelf life or less — so think of anything perishable: meat, dairy, fresh items around the perimeter of the grocery store. Those dates are conservative and based on quality, not safety. Then you have all the shelf-stable products — pasta, dried beans, canned goods. They don't even require a best before date. That stuff will outlast all of us.
What shocked you when you started looking deeper into the problem of food waste?
There's $58 billion worth of edible food being wasted in Canada that we should be capturing. Second Harvest's first mission is prevention — stop the waste from happening in the first place. One thing I did in 2017 was question why we were sending trucks to hotels or Starbucks. We're an environmental organization — that doesn't make sense. So we built a technology marketplace to connect donors and recipients directly. That allowed us to scale nationally much faster and stop food from being wasted.
What are some of the biggest culprits behind so much food being thrown out?
It's really simple: what gets measured gets managed, and most of this isn't getting measured. If we don't require any kind of measurement, we can't know what's happening. Second Harvest did research in 2019 and updated it in 2025. In 2019, 58% of all food produced in Canada was being wasted. By 2025, it had come down to about 46.5% — but we need continuity and standardization. Are businesses measuring the same things? Are they using the same language? If not, you can't really know what's happening across the entire supply chain.
Food is a global system — a Canadian standard that doesn't work within a global food supply chain isn't useful. The system is broken, but it is a system. Food waste has long been treated as just the cost of doing business. Now that we recognize the economic, social, and environmental impacts, people are finally paying attention.
What causes food to get thrown out on an individual level?
Most of this is actually happening across the supply chain, not in individual homes. About 17% happens at the household level — that's not nothing, but the majority is at the beginning of the chain: manufacturing, processing, and production.
We overproduce food in Canada, partly because of climate unpredictability. You might grow more potatoes than you need because you could get pests that year, or any number of setbacks. So farmers overproduce to meet demand, and sometimes the market doesn't absorb all of it. There are also cosmetic specs — certain products have to look a certain way, and nature doesn't always cooperate. Right now we have 22 million pounds of potatoes in surplus, partly because buying patterns have shifted.
A great example of how quickly food systems can change: GLP-1 medications are already shifting what people are buying, but the food has already been produced. You planned for one reality and the market moved. Floods, fires, climate events — there are endless reasons for surplus. But nobody grows or produces food because they want to throw it away. We can do way better than we're doing.
You redistributed $400 million worth of food in Canada last year. What are some of the biggest logistical challenges of working at that scale?
We do it a couple of ways. We have an app — a marketplace developed in 2017 and 2018 — that connects food donors and recipients directly. It works really well at the retail and store level, like a grocery store or Starbucks, where a recipient with the right cold storage infrastructure can pick up directly. For larger volumes, we use third-party logistics. We have trucks traveling across the city, the GTA, and Ontario, plus third-party logistics for larger pickups.
The challenge becomes when you get a call about, say, 22 million pounds of potatoes — that's 340 truckloads. They're field potatoes, so they need to be cleaned, bagged, and prepared in a way the charitable sector can actually accept. And even then, the system can only absorb so much before it's at capacity. So yes, a lot of what we do is connecting large producers to the network of 61,000 charities and nonprofits providing food to people across the country. Food banks are one part of that, but a relatively small part.
What are you most focused on in the next year?
A few things. We're in the middle of an advocacy campaign right now. Canada is currently building a national food security strategy, and food waste must be included. It's a food security strategy, not just a food insecurity strategy. It's about building a stronger Canadian domestic supply chain, and food waste is a core part of that.
We're also doing a gap analysis on food manufacturing in Canada, mapping out where all the processors and manufacturers are across the country, and understanding what capacity exists for surplus food processing. And of course — please donate. Fuel costs are rising, and the charitable sector needs support to keep this food moving.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
