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Chef Jagger Gordon hates food waste. His food rescue app and pay-what-you.-can grocery store are part of the plan. After serving nearly nine million meals through his not-for-profit, he has his sights set on a new venture.
Chef Jagger Gordon is familiar with an empty stomach. As a child, his parents weren’t around much. He went to bed hungry, woke up to no breakfast. He often relied on neighbours and friends for meals. But it wasn’t his childhood experiences that put him on the path to food philanthropy. It was his daughter.
“My daughter had a sleepover,” he says. “She slept over at a friend's house, and the following day, the little girls came back to our house for breakfast in the morning. I asked, ‘Why are you all here?’ And she said it was because there was no food in the friend’s apartment.”
Gordon was a single dad working in the private security industry at the time. He lived in a good neighbourhood, yet there were still pockets of the population struggling with food insecurity. To help, Gordon started visiting schools. He launched after-school programs meant to ensure no kid went hungry.
The experience sparked a love for food. Acting on the feeling, Gordon quit his private security job and went to culinary school at George Brown College. He travelled the world to train with top chefs. He specialized in Indian, Thai, and Mediterranean flavours. When he returned to Toronto, he opened a catering business. “That was a success,” he says. “But I ran into a situation where I had so much food for an event that was canceled on me last minute, and I had to figure out what I was going to do with the food, so I did a pop-up at Trinity Bellwoods Park around Thanksgiving 2014.” The number of people in need of a Thanksgiving meal was shocking.
The experience convinced Gordon to launch Feed It Forward, his non-profit devoted to helping the food insecure and to combatting food waste. According to a 2024 report from food charity Second Harvest, 46.5% of all food produced in Canada is wasted, and 41% of that waste (valued at $58 billion per year) is avoidable. A large percentage is disposed of because the food doesn’t meet consumer standards, Gordon explains. Restaurants and grocery stores will throw out a bruised apple, a wrinkled pepper, or a banana with a brown spot rather than display or serve it.
The report also points out that 23% of the food waste is due to best-before dates. “That’s just a marketing concept so you throw it away and purchase something new,” Gordon says. “After that date, the manufacturer can’t guarantee the flavour profiles, the colouring of the packages, and such.”
To try and mitigate Canada’s overwhelming food waste, Gordon reached out to local restaurants and began collecting their excess food, then placed it in public freezers around the city, accessible to anyone. The food disappeared quickly.
From there, he used the money from his catering business to launch The Soup Bar, a pay-what-you-can restaurant in downtown Toronto. This steamrolled into a sustainable meals program at local colleges and universities where students pay what they can for soup.
With the success of the restaurant, Gordon wanted to hold larger companies accountable. He began approaching corporations such as Starbucks and Whole Foods. “Everyone was still on the back burner saying, ‘Well, what happens if we give you the food and somebody gets sick?’” But Gordon discovered that under Ontario’s Donation of Food Act, the company donating food is not liable for damages. Once he’d convinced the corporations, the partnerships opened a much larger supply of leftover food.
To try and mitigate Canada’s overwhelming food waste, Gordon reached out to local restaurants and began collecting their excess food, then placed it in public freezers around the city, accessible to anyone. The food disappeared quickly.
Between all its programs, Gordon says Feed It Forward has served nearly nine million meals. And the organization continues to expand. In 2016, he opened a pay-what-you-can grocery store using leftover food collected from other businesses. The store, called Feed It Forward, is located in the Junction neighbourhood, near Keele and Dundas streets. The store is currently undergoing a rebrand with fixed prices. “When someone shops there, they’re contributing towards the reduction of food waste, they get to feed their families for 50 per cent of the cost of grocery stores in the area, and the proceeds allow families that can’t afford the food to shop for free,” he says.
That same year, he launched the Feed It Forward app. People with excess food can upload a picture and description along with a pick-up location on the app. Those in need of food can then reply when they’ll pick it up.
All of these enterprises have been self-funded by Gordon’s catering business. “I haven’t asked for a penny from anyone yet,” he says. But his latest venture may require some financial support.
“We’ve expanded up north into the Muskoka region where we've been supplying food for many years,” he says. “We've taken over a whole plaza, 31,000 square feet, and we are developing Feed It Forward programs and offering a food bank, a 30-bed shelter with a warming and cooling centre, a soup kitchen, and more.”
Due to the area’s high-priced cottages, Muskoka is often seen as a well-to-do location, but it’s populated with large swathes of poverty. Gordon has partnered with The Table Soup Kitchen Foundation, a Muskoka-based non-profit, to open the plaza. It will be located in a former Fresco on Cann Street in Huntsville, and will be known as Table Plaza. Gordon anticipates that it will be his biggest project yet.
To tackle it, he’s decided to delegate. Gordon plans to step down as Feed It Forward CEO, transitioning to executive chef for Table Plaza, focusing his efforts on the kitchen by getting creative with meals and figuring out how to best roll out the organization’s programs in Muskoka. His goal, however, remains the same: To ensure no one wakes up hungry the way his daughter and her friends did. But on such a large scale, he’s realizing he may not be able to accomplish it alone.
“I think I’m going to have to step on a little pedestal,” he says, “and start asking people for help.”
Get tips on how to reduce your own food waste at home and read about best-before dates in a piece by Dot, Bluedot’s advice columnist.
