How one farm started Loop: A food revolution
What began as a farmer's attempt to cheaply feed his pigs has quietly diverted the weight of half an aircraft carrier's worth of food from Canadian landfills.
It started, as most great ideas do, with a problem and a reluctant trip to the grocery store. Jaime didn't set out to build a province-spanning food-rescue network. He just wanted to stay home on the farm, take responsibility for what his family ate, and find a cheaper way to feed his pigs.
"Chickens are a gateway drug," he explains, recounting how the family went from a few backyard hens to goats for milk, goats to cheese, and cheese to the inescapable conclusion that pigs were the most economical path to affordable meat. They were — until the feed bills arrived.
Based on the Martin Gooch study funded by the Walmart Foundation (2015–16). Researchers later revised the figure upward — the real number is higher.
"Holy smokes do pigs eat a lot of feed," Jaime says. "And this cheap meat is not cheap." So he went to his local grocery store with a proposal: let us take the food you can't sell and turn it into something great on the farm.
"They said no. And that was the start of Loop — going back and talking through all the reasons they had to say no."
Months of conversation later — sorting out insurance, waivers, contingency farms for when a truck breaks down — the store agreed to try again. That "one more time" was nearly nine years ago, and the system has run in essentially the same format ever since. Loop sits in the middle: the stores need the food gone, the farms want it to arrive, and Loop makes sure both sides are covered.
The First Pickup
Jaime drove to that first collection in a suburban, towing a trailer he'd planned to load with fence posts. He expected a few boxes of surplus produce. The store had forty-eight.
48 Boxes on the very first pickup
Jaime had driven to town expecting three or four. He filled the flat deck trailer front to back, a layer and a half high.
He filled the flat-deck trailer front to back, layer and a half high — and then the store called after him: "Thanks so much. See you tomorrow." That night he phoned his neighbour, who had 35 Red Wattle pigs, and a cattle farmer a mile south with 150 head. By the next morning, the core of what would become Loop was in place.
"One pickup was enough to convince me — it takes an army. We've got to have a group of us."
More farms joined. The grocery store next door asked to be included. That store had sister stores — two in Grande Prairie, one in Fort St. John. Jaime didn't want to drive two hours for a load, but he knew farmers who would. That's how the first overflowing suburban grew into the actual Loop.
The numbers that followed
Jaime is the kind of person who, upon realizing his first load was bigger than expected, immediately counted every box and texted his brother a photo. That instinct to document has meant Loop has data stretching back to pickup number one, in 2017.
2017 Loop began tracking data from the very first pickup
Year one alone ended with the equivalent of two full tractor trailers' worth of food rescued — food that had been destined for the landfill, in some cases the very day it was collected. By the time the program had expanded across Canada, the totals had grown into units that required new metaphors.
rescued in British Columbia alone since 2017.
from landfill in OntarioOntario launched in 2021 — less than BC, but gaining fast with more stores and farms.
in New Brunswick since 2023.
Why the waste number is even higher than reported
The backdrop to all of this is a statistic that doesn't get enough attention: roughly 58%of food grown in Canada is wasted before it reaches a plate — and that figure likely undercounts the real picture.
Much of what gets recorded as "field loss" was never truly wasted. Jaime's uncle grew pumpkins; his brother next door had dairy cows. Unsold pumpkins were reported as field loss. The cows ate every one. "Loss in the world of not suitable for humans already has a bunch of good news stories embedded in it," Jaime explains.
The more meaningful measure is speed of return. A slow compost pile takes a year to ready soil for tomatoes. Feed those same peppers to a cow, and the next morning you have concentrated, nitrogen-rich soil amendment. "We used to just call it soil," he says.
What you can do right now
Jaime's prescription is disarmingly simple: get some chickens. Not as a grand political act, but as a practical one. "Learn to take some accountability for what you eat. You'll gain a whole new appreciation for quality — and for the work that went into feeding us all."
He points out that less than a hundred years ago, 9 in 10people were farmers. Today almost none of us are — and almost all of us wish we were. Buying local is the next best thing.
"Small producers can't get a toehold in the international market. Japan is not knocking down my neighbour's door to get his potatoes. But he is feeding our community. And if you choose to buy food in the community you live in, you're supporting the future of food that I think you want to have."
As for Jaime's own household? Any broccoli that survives the week goes to the chickens. "Next morning they lay some eggs. I do eat the broccoli — just secondhand. My breakfast is made of the food I wished I would have eaten that week." He pauses. "It completes a beautiful loop."
