When a severe ice storm hit parts of southern Ontario late in March 2025, Kawartha Food Share general manager Ashlee Aitken knew she was in for a challenge. Comprised of 37 member agencies in Peterborough and the surrounding region, Kawartha Food Share typically serves more than 14,000 people experiencing hunger monthly. Because of the extreme weather, all except one of these agencies lost their electricity — and with it, their perishable food reserves. 

Therefore, the first urgent task for Aitken and her colleagues was to contact each agency to see how much food they had lost and to discuss how Kawartha Food Share could go about replenishing it — keeping in mind that these food banks and meal programs didn’t know exactly when they would get their power back. In the end, some of them waited for over a week. 

Contacting the food agencies was easier said than done, since the storms had damaged the telecommunications networks. “My staff and I were driving to certain areas of the city where there was still reception just to send an e-mail or make a phone call,” Aitken recalls. “And there was also a lot of driving to places to talk to people face-to-face to make sure they were okay.” 

Naturally, it wasn’t only food banks that saw the food in their fridges and freezers spoil. Plenty of families had the same problem at home. “After the power was restored, we still had a huge surge in clients,” says Aitken. “There are many households that live on the brink of food insecurity and that didn’t have the means to replace everything they lost.” 

Despite generous help from corporate partners, local businesses and the food bank network, Kawartha Food Share and its agencies have still not completely recovered from the ice storm. “We’re all in this together, and fortunately, there are places we can turn when things like this happen,” Aitken says. “Even so, six months later, we’re still working to get our food stock back up.” 

Food bankers have a demanding job at the best of times: food insecurity in Canada is an ongoing emergency in its own right. And when natural disaster strikes, hunger spikes. “So, thank goodness we had emergency food hampers available from Feed Ontario and Food Banks Canada,” Aitken says. 

Lightening the Load 

With support from donors and partners, Food Banks Canada assembled 50,000 emergency response food hampers in 2025, to help alleviate the burden on people facing emergency situations and the food bankers serving them. 

Intended to supplement other food sources, these hampers each provide approximately three days’ worth of food. They contain a balanced variety of shelf-stable items that are either no-cook or low-cook (for example, apple-cinnamon oatmeal that requires boiling water). This makes them practical for people who have been displaced from their homes, who are staying in a hotel or who do not have electricity. The pallets are shipped with can openers, bowls and cutlery available for those who need them. 

Thanks to Food Banks Canada’s logistics and storage partners, the hampers are staged in strategic locations throughout the country. The aim is to be able to deliver them within 48 hours of an event and/or through recovery. 

Aitken requested a shipment of these hampers and was pleased to receive them at Kawartha Food Share’s warehouse the next day. “If I had purchased that product from somewhere, it wouldn’t have come as quickly!” she says. 

Municipal officials helped distribute the food. “The city set up warming shelters, and the people who came in to warm up and take a shower could have a snack or leave with something to eat,” says Aitken. 

“Our agencies were thrilled to get them too,” Aitken adds. “They operate with volunteers, a lot of whom couldn’t come in that week because they had their own issues to worry about at home. But the hampers were already pre-packed and very easy to distribute [despite staffing shortages].” 

Aitken doesn’t usually serve clients face-to-face: that job normally belongs to the agencies for which she helps to source food. But during the ice storm and its aftermath, she was on the frontlines.

“So, I saw firsthand that people were very appreciative of the hampers,” she says. “There was a lot going on. You were without power. You couldn’t cook. It was a very cold week, so you were freezing. You were throwing away all this perishable food and thinking about the cost of it. Getting an emergency hamper to relieve even just some of that burden was extremely helpful.” 

The Ongoing Need 

According to Environment Canada, climate change is intensifying both the frequency and the severity of certain kinds of extreme weather events, including storms and wildfires. Currently, Food Banks Canada is working with Harvest Manitoba and Food Banks of Saskatchewan to distribute its emergency hampers to various organizations serving communities affected by wildfires in Western Canada. Its staff is also planning to replenish the existing supply of hampers once it runs out, which could happen as early as this year. 

“Honestly, I don’t think we would have made it through that week without the emergency hampers,” Aitken says. “I think there should always be food stored somewhere, readily available to go out in an instant, because it really makes such a huge difference.” 

Food banks and community organizations that need emergency food hampers can request them through their provincial or territorial food banking association. 

Companies interested in donating products to Food Banks Canada’s emergency response hampers or supplying them at a discount are welcome to contact us.

To support Food Banks Canada’s work, including the Emergency Response Program, donate here.