Food Waste Is a Huge Problem—What Are Vancouver Restaurants Doing About It?

Stacked seafood towers, elaborate tasting menus and bottomless brunches: Vancouver’s hospitality scene loves to show off. But behind the indulgence, a growing number of kitchens are addressing one unsavoury issue: the food that doesn’t make it onto the plate.

“You will always have food waste in commercial kitchens,” says Ben Liegey, founder of BetterTable, a Vancouver-based company that launched in 2022 to help hotels and restaurants reduce their food waste and carbon emissions through consultation and AI auditing tools. “But you can cut that in half, no matter where you are.”

The BetterTable team likens food waste to leaving the lights on all night: wasteful, costly and bad for the planet. By tracking what kitchens toss and why, they’ve helped restaurants cut waste by nearly a third, saving up to $20,000 a year. Their next step is an app that automates the process to make food sustainability tracking as routine as checking inventory.

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Canada throws away more than 60 percent of the food it produces every year. A third of that waste—11 million tonnes, to be precise—is perfectly edible. Picture Highway 1 completely filled with perfectly usable surplus food—from here all the way to Montreal. In Metro Vancouver, households aren’t the only culprits. Restaurants and hotels are behind nearly 40 percent of the region’s food waste, according to a 2024 Metro Vancouver advisory report.

Vancouver’s kitchens are changing the way they think about food waste. Some chefs focus on sustainability, others on rescuing surplus. Chef TJ Conwi is doing both. His company, Ono Vancouver, turns excess ingredients into meals for people who might otherwise go without. With one in 10 British Columbians facing food insecurity, his work shows how waste can be reimagined and repurposed.

Since 2020, Conwi has turned surplus ingredients into thousands of meals for vulnerable Vancouverites. Much of the food comes from grocery stores, hotels and suppliers who over-order fresh produce and ingredients. Everyday items like arugula, mushrooms or eggplant become 1,200 to 1,500 chef-made meals each week. Seven local charities help deliver them to those most affected by food insecurity, with a focus on women and BIPOC communities, says Conwi.

Conwi is constantly hustling to keep the free meal program alive. During the pandemic, he launched ReRoot with co-owner Sean McDonald, which sells frozen meals made from surplus produce. Each purchase supports up to 10 community meals. When retail sales proved tough to scale, the team pivoted to catering events, with a focus on companies making a  social impact. Proceeds cover staples like protein and pantry goods: everything needed to turn rescued produce into restaurant-quality meals. “It’s not like any other catering company where people are just working for the paycheque,” Conwi says. “We have a collective purpose.”

Born and raised in poverty in Manila, Conwi knows what it means to go hungry. He and his siblings often turned to extended family or community sources to scrape together a meal, sometimes just a tin of sardines to share over rice. For him, the most meaningful part of his work is knowing someone felt love and dignity from a warm bowl of homemade pasta that he was able  to provide.

If Conwi’s mission is to feed the city’s most vulnerable, chef Rumy Muenala’s is to feed its soul. Through his catering company, Ayapacha (which also focuses on recipe development, storytelling and community events), he draws on Indigenous knowledge to rethink how we value food from seed to plate. Ayapacha means “energy and everything around us” in Kichwa—the name offers a reminder that food is more than just calories, it’s connection. His philosophy, “seed to soul,” honours not just the ingredients, but also the people, land and traditions behind them. “We want to showcase the journey and the people involved in bringing food to our tables,” he says.

For Muenala, less is more. “Our values are that we don’t want to overproduce,” he says. Careful planning with event organizers keeps portions exact and waste minimal. His “root-to-shoot” cooking—the plant-based answer to nose-to-tail—turns every part of a vegetable into something new. Radish greens become sauces. Trimmings simmer into broth.

That philosophy came alive at Cooking for Change, an event Muenala organized to showcase food-waste innovators. Representatives from ReRoot and the nonprofit Vancouver Food Runners explained their recovery work, and Yellow House Farms wowed guests with snickerdoodles made from kiwi peels—a sweet reminder that “waste” can be delicious.

Some of Vancouver’s top kitchens share this ethos. At The Acorn, the beloved Main Street veggie hot spot, sustainability is baked into the foundations. Founder Shira Blustein says the mission has always been simple: showcase vegetables with respect for the farmers and land they come from. That means using every part of an ingredient—onion skins become jelly, husks become stock and even leftover carrot tops can be reimagined as housemade pesto.

“We want to use everything we can,” adds head chef Matt Gostelow, pointing to a winter dish that turns an entire squash—skin, flesh and seeds—into cake, ice cream and sauce. Even the bartenders fold kitchen scraps into cocktails. But going zero-waste isn’t easy. “It saves somewhat on food costs,” Blustein says, “but you spend far more on labour.” That extra time with each ingredient deepens her team’s respect for the food, but may explain why not every restaurant makes it a priority.

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Metro Vancouver has tried to dispose of its waste problem. Since 2015, businesses have been banned from sending food scraps to landfills and must compost instead, but contamination and compliance remain a challenge. The region also partners with FoodMesh to help restaurants safely donate their surplus, and runs public campaigns like Love Food Hate Waste to change habits from the ground up. Groups like Vancouver Food Runners, along with public-facing apps such as Too Good To Go, help restaurants and cafés divert leftovers, either by selling them at a discount or donating them directly to people who can use them.

So, if a kitchen wants to make a difference, where should they begin? Start small, the chefs say. Track your waste. Think creatively about scraps. Work with farmers. Redefine what’s “usable.” And, above all, build teams that care.

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