Feeding Canada Together
Why foodservice belongs at the heart of Canada’s food security conversation
Every day, restaurants turn agricultural products into accessible meals, sustain demand for farmers and processors, nourish communities, and employ people in nearly every part of the country.
Restaurants Canada’s recent submission to the federal National Food Security Strategy makes the case for recognizing foodservice as an integral part of Canada’s food system. Restaurants are major buyers of Canadian food, essential employers and an important link between those who produce food and the millions of Canadians who rely on restaurants for meals every day.
Canada’s food security conversation has traditionally focused heavily on agricultural production and grocery retail. Restaurants Canada’s June 2026 submission, Feeding Canada Together, broadens that lens by demonstrating the scale of the foodservice sector’s role across the food system.
Restaurants purchase $43 billion in food and beverages each year, including approximately $30 billion supplied by Canadian producers. An estimated 68 per cent of restaurant food and beverage purchases are sourced domestically, with Canadian content exceeding 80 per cent in dairy, chicken and beef. The sector employs 1.2 million people and is projected to generate $130 billion in annual sales in 2026.
The case is simple and clear: foodservice does not sit at the margins of Canada’s food system. It is a critical link between those who grow, process and distribute food and the millions of Canadians who rely on restaurants for accessible meals every day.
“The restaurant industry is an important stakeholder because restaurants feed a lot of people and buy a lot of food,” says Anthony Polci, Restaurants Canada’s Executive Vice President of Government Relations and Public Affairs. “That puts us right at the table for any discussion about a food security strategy for Canada.”
The challenge: Costs are rising faster than menu price tolerance.
Food is the restaurant industry’s largest single expense, accounting for 34.4 per cent of operating revenue. Over the two years covered by the submission, total food costs rose 12.5 per cent—more than twice the 4.5 per cent increase in overall inflation. Labour, insurance, utilities and other operating costs all increased by more than 11 per cent.
At the ingredient level, the increases are even sharper. Roasted and ground coffee rose 41 per cent, beef 29 per cent, and nuts and seeds 16 per cent. Produce prices accelerated too, with cucumbers up 28 per cent, tomatoes 14 per cent and lettuce 12 per cent year over year as of March 2026.
Operators cannot simply rewrite their menus every time an input cost changes. Customers are already making hard choices: seven in 10 operators say their guests are dining out less because of affordability pressures. Four in 10 restaurants are operating at a loss or just breaking even, compared with 12 per cent in 2019. When the market will not bear another price increase, the operator absorbs the cost.
And the pressure does not stop at the restaurant door. Lower purchasing volumes affect farmers, processors and distributors. Closures weaken local employment and food access. In communities where prepared meals are limited, losing a restaurant can mean losing a piece of community infrastructure. Supply-chain weaknesses further magnify those pressures. Canada does not yet produce enough greenhouse-grown lettuce, tomatoes and other fresh ingredients to meet year-round foodservice demand at competitive prices. Restaurants therefore remain exposed to weather, seasonality, U.S. supply conditions and trade disruption.
Geography too adds another layer of vulnerability. In Newfoundland and Labrador, ferry-dependent logistics can delay deliveries, reduce product quality and turn a disruption into a food-access problem. Rural operators may receive only two deliveries a week and, during tourism peaks, they can be left scrambling for substitutes. Fresh food that spoils in transit is not only a business loss. It is wasted nourishment that never reaches the plate.
The opportunity: strengthen Canada’s Food system
The same scale that makes the sector vulnerable also makes it a powerful partner in strengthening Canada’s food system.
Restaurants are the country’s largest commercial purchasers of Canadian agricultural products. Their buying decisions create dependable demand, connect producers to millions of consumers and help sustain regional economies. As Kelly Higginson, Restaurants Canada’s President and CEO, notes, “The foodservice industry’s purchasing impact is a reminder to government that we significantly support the functioning of farms and the Canadian food system throughout the country.”
Foodservice is also embedded in how Canadians obtain food. The submission reports an average restaurant transaction of just $12. Canadian households direct 28 per cent of their food spending to restaurant meals and snacks, and more than 100,000 restaurants, caterers and bars serve approximately 23.7 million visits each day.
Those visits are not all celebrations or nights out. They include breakfast on the way to work, lunch between shifts, takeout for a family with no time to cook, and a hot meal for a student, senior, traveller or person who cannot easily store and prepare ingredients. In some circumstances, purchasing and cooking all the components of a meal can cost more than buying the prepared meal itself.
That is why foodservice brings an important perspective to the national food security discussion,” Higginson says. “Food security is not only about how food is produced; it is also about how efficiently it moves through the supply chain, what it costs and whether Canadians can access it in the forms that meet their everyday needs.”
The opportunity is not simply to persuade Canadians to buy domestic products. It is to build the capacity that gives them a reliable and sustainable domestic option in the first place. As Polci puts it, “It isn’t about influencing consumer behaviour to buy Canadian. It’s about making sure Canadians have the option to buy Canadian.”
That means more year-round growing capacity, more resilient transportation and cold-chain infrastructure, and a policy environment that allows food to move efficiently from producers to processors, restaurants and consumers.
The work: Bringing the industry’s voice to a national priority
For Restaurants Canada, the development of the National Food Security Strategy presented an important opportunity to bring the scale, economic impact and operating experience of the restaurant industry into a national policy discussion of significant importance to government. The association developed a substantive foodservice perspective, working with outside research support and convening a cross section of member teams. The group included quick-service and full-service restaurants, regional operators, independents and national chains, with both owner-operators and procurement professionals contributing. Those members provided a practical view of how challenges within Canada’s food system are experienced at the restaurant level.
Their operating realities gave shape and first-person perspective to the submission. The discussion of Marine Atlantic came directly from a Newfoundland operator. The produce gap reflected the experience of brands that had searched for Canadian alternatives but found that capacity, crop cycles and scale can turn a seemingly simple substitution into a multi-year effort. The seafood section captured the frustration of Atlantic operators located beside working harbours who still cannot practically buy local catch in the quantities and specifications they need.
That member input was translated into a list of connected recommendations that, together, address four fundamentals: what Canada can produce, how food moves, what it costs, and whether businesses can operate efficiently enough to keep serving people.
The submission advances six key recommendations: investing in food supply chain infrastructure; modernizing supply management oversight; expanding greenhouse and controlled environment agriculture; permanently exempting all food, including restaurant meals, from GST/HST; conducting a pan-Canadian analysis of Extended Producer Responsibility costs; and harmonizing food safety standards and mutual recognition of certifications across Canada.
Taken together, the recommendations connect foodservice priorities directly to broader national objectives around food affordability, domestic production, supply chain resilience, internal trade and the competitiveness of Canada’s food system.
“You don’t just do the submission. You have to follow up,” Polci explains. “That means building understanding across Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Finance, the Prime Minister’s Office, ministers’ offices and the public servants who turn policy priorities into programs. It also means connecting foodservice recommendations to the government’s wider agenda—from trade resilience and domestic production to transportation and affordability.”
For Higginson, making these important connections and providing compelling, fact-based evidence is part of restoring a clear understanding of what Restaurants Canada exists to do. “We are an advocacy association first and foremost,” she says. “Creating change depends on the discipline of smart, strategic, credible advocacy on issues that matter, and on grounding recommendations in member experience and economic evidence.”
Positioning the sector at the heart of the food-security conversation is about contributing to more informed, and therefore better, policy. A strategy designed without the country’s largest commercial buyer of Canadian agricultural products will miss critical information about demand, distribution, cost and access.
“This is an important opportunity to show our members we’re not just pounding the pavement to address patio fees, we’re thinking bigger,” Higginson says. “Just as no sector belongs more centrally in the government’s youth employment conversation, the restaurant industry’s impact on Canadian agriculture is every bit as consequential.”
