Mississauga has highest food bank usage in all of Ontario: report

Food insecurity in Mississauga has reached an unprecedented and unwanted milestone.

Food insecurity in Mississauga has reached an unprecedented and unwanted milestone.

According to Food Banks Mississauga’s latest annual Impact report, the city just west of Toronto is seeing the fastest-growing food bank usage in all of Ontario.

In Mississauga, 1 in 13 residents or eight per cent of the city’s population used a food bank between June 2023 and May 2024.

Almost a third of those clients, roughly 16,000, are children -- a 42 per cent increase from the previous fiscal year.

In total, Food Banks Mississauga, the city’s leading food security organization, and its 60-plus member agencies saw 421,251 visits in that time frame – an 80 per cent year-over-year jump.

Those visits translate to 56,267 food bank users, which is more than double the number of people who accessed a food bank or related service the year before. Provincially, the number of food bank users went up by 25 per cent during that time frame.

Across its network, Food Banks Mississauga, which is formerly known as the Mississauga Food Bank, distributed more than nine million pounds of food from June 2023 to May 2024, more than double what it handed out the previous year.