In March 2025, Canadian food banks logged close to 2.2 million visits in a single month — roughly double the level of 2019 — and on the harmonized international measure of food insecurity, an estimated 19% of Canadians lived in a food-insecure household in 2024, the third consecutive record year. That places Canada well above every European G7 peer and second in the G7 only to the United States.
This page sets the Canadian figures alongside the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan — and shows why the cleaner comparison is food insecurity, not food-bank counts.
Read this first. The G7 nations do not count food-bank use the same way. Canada reports monthly visits; the UK's Trussell network reports annual parcels (a volume figure its own analysts say cannot be converted to unique users); Germany reports people using the Tafel network; the US and France report food volume (pounds, tonnes) with no national headcount. Converting visits or parcels into "people" requires a frequency assumption that drifts with each charity's operating capacity. So the food-bank column below is directional. The food-insecurity column — drawn from national surveys (StatCan, USDA) and the FAO "moderate + severe" scale — is the only series where all seven nations sit on one axis, and it is the one to rank on.
The harmonized FAO "moderate + severe" scale applies the same eight-question experience framework across countries, so the percentages are genuinely rankable. The dashed line is the unweighted mean of the four European G7 members (France, Italy, UK, Germany) — kept clean of the two North American outliers so the benchmark is not inflated by what it is measuring against.
Canada (~19%) sits at roughly 2.5× the European G7 peer average, and is the highest in the G7 after the United States. The four European members cluster within about a point of the 7.6% line; Japan is the clear low outlier. Removing Canada and the US from the benchmark barely moves it (8.1% → 7.6%), which tells you the European cluster is genuinely tight and the two North American nations are the outliers.
Where the insecurity chart is rankable, the food-bank chart is mostly gaps — four of seven nations cannot be placed on it at all because they publish food volume rather than a people count. Where data exists it runs the same direction as the insecurity measure, but the units (visits, parcels, people) are not strictly comparable.
The food-bank chart is mostly gaps: four of seven nations cannot be placed on it at all, because they publish food volume rather than a people count. Where data exists, it runs in the same direction as the insecurity measure — Canada highest, Germany lowest, the UK in between — but the units differ (visits vs. parcels vs. people), so the bar lengths are not strictly comparable to one another.
Cross-country snapshots show where Canada sits; the trend shows where it is heading. The chart below plots HungerCount's March food-bank visits — the one metric Food Banks Canada reports on a consistent basis year to year — against the same figure normalized per 1,000 population, to separate genuine deterioration from the effect of a fast-growing population.
Total visits rose 70% from 2021 to 2025, while visits per 1,000 people rose 56%. The gap between the two lines is the contribution of population growth: real, but modest. Even after stripping it out, per-capita food bank use is up well over half in four years, so the surge is overwhelmingly a deterioration in need, not just more people. The steepest single-year jump in both lines is 2022→2023, coinciding with peak inflation. This visits trend is corroborating evidence for rising hardship; the headline claim of rising food insecurity rests on the StatCan survey (the moderate+severe figure in the table below), which moves the same direction.
| Country | Food-bank reliance (people, % of pop) | FB data yr | Mod + severe food insecurity | FI data yr | FI confidence | vs. Euro G7 avg (7.6%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇨🇦 Canada | ~5% (visits→people bridge) | 2025 | 19.0% | 2024 | High | +11.4 (2.5×) |
| 🇺🇸 United States | n/a — volume-based | — | 13.7% | 2024 (final) | High | +6.1 (1.8×) |
| 🇫🇷 France | n/a — tonnage-based | — | ~8.5% | 2024 | Med | +0.9 |
| 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 3.6% of households (survey) | 2023/24 | ~8.0% | 2024 | Med–High | +0.4 |
| 🇮🇹 Italy | n/a | — | ~7.5% | 2024 | Med | −0.1 |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | ~2.4% (Tafel people) | 2022 | ~6.5% | 2024 | Med | −1.1 |
| 🇯🇵 Japan | n/a — small sector | — | ~3.0% | 2024 | Med | −4.6 |
| European G7 average | — | — | ~7.6% | 2024 | — | — |
| N. America + Europe (FAO) | — | — | 8.1% | 2024 | — | — |
On the harmonized FAO scale, Canada's ~19% is about 2.5× the European G7 average of 7.6%. The distance between Canada and the European cluster is larger than the entire spread among the European members. Only the United States (13.7%) is higher, and the US figure is now its highest in a decade.
Food Banks Canada's HungerCount recorded close to 2.2 million visits in March 2025 — a 5.2% rise on 2024 and about double the 2019 level — of which roughly 712,000 were children. This is the only national food-bank study (running since 1989, ~5,500 organizations), but it counts visits, not unique people, which is why it cannot be ranked directly against other countries.
The widely-quoted 25.5% of Canadians in food-insecure households (Canadian Income Survey, 2024) includes the "marginal" category and is not comparable to other countries' FAO figures. The internationally comparable number is moderate + severe at ~19%. Using the 25.5% figure in a cross-country chart would overstate Canada's position by roughly double — the single most common error in this comparison.
Food-bank counts can't rank the G7: four of seven nations don't publish a bridgeable people-count, and the units (visits, parcels, people, tonnes) aren't interchangeable. The US series, ironically the best national survey, has no food-bank headcount at all — and USDA announced in September 2025 it is discontinuing its food-security report after the 2024 edition, removing one of the few high-quality national series. National food-security surveys plus the FAO scale are the durable basis for benchmarking; treat food-bank figures as supporting colour.
The ~5% annual reliance figure converts HungerCount visit counts to unique people using the ratio implied by provincial dual-reporting (British Columbia reports both visits and ~113,606 unique individuals served in March 2025). This ratio is unstable: when a food bank cuts a client's visit frequency to manage capacity, visits fall while unique people do not — so the bridge drifts for operational reasons unrelated to need. Treat ~5% as an order-of-magnitude estimate, not a precise value.
March-visit totals are the figures Food Banks Canada reports on a consistent basis: 1,272,580 (2021); 1,465,721 (2022); 1,935,911 (2023); 2,059,636 (2024); 2,165,766 (2025). Per-capita uses Statistics Canada July 1 population estimates (38.25M in 2021 to 41.65M in 2025), giving +70% total growth and +56% per-capita over the period — confirming population growth accounts for only about a fifth of the rise. The series starts in 2021 because no HungerCount was conducted in 2020 (COVID), and although the report plots a 2010–2025 visits curve (Figure 6), it does not publish the underlying pre-2019 values, which are not estimated from a chart here. Note also that "visits" is the consistent recent metric; earlier HungerCount reporting emphasized unique people, a different unit, so splicing a longer series would mix definitions.
The FAO "moderate + severe" framework applies the same eight-question experience scale across countries, so the percentages are genuinely comparable. The food-bank metrics are not: a Canadian "visit," a UK "parcel," a German "person," and a US/French "tonne" are four different units measuring four different things, gathered by charities with different service models and coverage. The European G7 average (7.6%) is an unweighted mean of France, Italy, the UK, and Germany, excluding Canada and the US so the benchmark is not inflated by the outliers being measured against it.
Depth and persistence of food insecurity, the relationship between food-bank use and actual food insecurity (most food-insecure people never visit a food bank), provincial and demographic breakdowns (Canadian and US data both show large disparities by Indigenous status, race, and household type), the role of inflation and social-transfer design, and 2025 readings — which do not yet exist for the survey series (Canada's next CIS publishes spring 2026; FAO's next edition mid-2026; the US series is discontinued).
The editable series and underlying calculations live in Elevating_Food-Bank-Use_Data.xlsx. Only series the workbook actually contains are described here.