At one point, producing 30,000 food hampers a month was unimaginable to Edmonton’s Food Bank. Now, the agency provides an average of 43,300 hampers each month to Edmontonians in need. That’s up 100 each month from last year. “It might not look like much, but (it is) when we go back five years,” food bank communications director Tamisan Bencz-Knight told CTV News Edmonton on Wednesday after the release of a national report which found food banks in Alberta counted a 9.3-per cent increase in usage between 2025 and 2026. Alberta’s food banks counted nearly 230,200 visits in that timeframe and provided some 457,600 meals. The report underscored Bencz-Knight’s point: While a handful of other provinces saw a comparable year-over-year increase, Alberta has seen food bank usage rise the most out of all the provinces and territories since 2019. Over seven years, food bank usage in Alberta has increased 156.3 per cent, according to Food Banks Canada’s annual HungerCount report. Meanwhile, between 2025 and 2026, food bank usage across Canada rose by 8.7 per cent. Between 2019 and 2026, food bank usage in Canada rose 116.8 per cent. CEO Kirstin Beardsley called the data “the story of what happens when millions of people are out of options.” Bencz-Knight added, “When you have one of those challenging moments in your life where your car breaks down, school’s in, you have maybe an extra medical bill for your meds – that all ripples into somebody’s household that is struggling financially.” She continued, “It is just disheartening and sad to see that what’s affecting us here in Edmonton is throughout the province and throughout Canada.” Both she and Food Banks Canada say the cost of living needs to be addressed in order to bring food bank usage down. “Look at affordability, affordable housing, affordable childcare, utility costs, renter support, and there’s a whole number of things that we need to do to make change in our community that will have that ripple back to supporting individuals and needs,” Bencz-Knight said. Food Banks Canada described the relationship between housing affordability and food insecurity “particularly striking,” citing the results of a survey it commissioned which found twice as many food-insecure households were spending more than one third of their income on rent or a mortgage as food-secure households. “The most dignified thing we can do is to allow people to buy their own food. But until that time, we’re here to support our community,” Bencz-Knight said. In Alberta in the last year, 34 per cent of food bank users were children. Roughly 40 per cent of all users were single people, while 20 per cent were from single-parent families and 20 per cent were from two-parent families. More than one third reported having no income. The vast majority, 74 per cent, were renters. With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Evan Klippenstein
