From landfill to plateful

Nearly half of all food produced in Canada goes to waste each year—an especially staggering figure considering one in five Canadians experiences food insecurity. Worse, much of that food winds up in the landfill while still edible, for superficial reasons like bruises on produce, typos on labels, or approaching “best before” dates.

That’s where Jessica Regan steps in. Jessica is the CEO and co-founder of FoodMesh, a Vancouver-based platform that rescues surplus food. Since 2016, FoodMesh has diverted over 45 million kilograms of food from landfills, the equivalent of about 70 million meals. Fostering networks across Canada, FoodMesh pairs retailers with governments and community organizations like food banks. When that’s not possible, the company connects food donors with farmers who feed what would otherwise be waste produce to their livestock. And for retailers whose margins are too tight to donate, FoodMesh even helps resell excess food at a discount.

Jessica’s road to becoming an award-winning CEO of a B Corporation (a corporation certified for responsible business standards, including social and environmental impact) is an unconventional one. Always passionate about social justice, she studied political science and embarked on a career in international human rights. That saw her working with organizations like the United Nations and the World Organisation Against Torture, and writing a handbook for victims of human rights violations. At the UN in Geneva, Jessica recalls “sitting in a big, beautiful building, talking with diplomats,” but feeling “disconnected from the actual causes.” She turned to graduate school at UBC seeking to solve social problems at a faster pace, on the ground. A “pivotal” course requiring students to tackle social problems in the community sparked her interest in sustainable entrepreneurship—a way to be “a bit more agile,” she says, while staying true to the principles of her humanities education.

By the time she co-founded FoodMesh, Jessica was an experienced entrepreneur: among other businesses, she’d founded EcoTrek Tours, which designed eco-themed field trips for Lower Mainland grade-schoolers. But when a friend showed her pictures of cases of ripe avocados destined for compost, Jessica felt compelled to take action against food waste. Given the complexity and scale of the problem, she knew it wouldn’t be easy. “The more I researched it, the more I talked to people, I was like, This is going to be the hardest thing I probably ever work on,” she says. “And it’s going to take at least 10 years of my life.”

She was right. Over the company’s first decade, Jessica has grown FoodMesh from a team of two into a team of two dozen, expanding their reach from one client to a network of over 2,500 organizations nationwide. But some things don’t change. “What thrilled me 10 years ago still thrills me today,” she says. “Those matches! We got an inquiry today for 10,000 cases of surplus food in Ontario… It just feels really great that we’re able to rescue that food.”