The Heppell Farm has been a family business for over 100 years.
Rooted firmly in the fertile soils of British Columbia's Lower Mainland, Heppell's Potato Corp grows and packages premium potatoes and squash for local distribution across Western Canada.
Each year, Heppell's produces millions of servings of healthy food. They specialize in early production, which has made them the first farm to harvest potatoes for retail in Canada every year for forty years! As a result, they proudly play a role in food security for Western Canada by displacing foreign imports with fresh, locally grown produce.
Where does Ten Servings come in?
Canada produces enough food every year to feed 52 million people - more than enough to feed all Canadians. Yet, 5 million people in Canada go to bed hungry. So why is that?
Supermarkets have strict cosmetic standards for fruits and vegetables — they need to be relatively uniform in size and shape, without blemishes such as scarring. Resulting in more than a third of all the food produced never reaching a table. This isn't specific to Canada either. Worldwide this works out to roughly 1.3 billion tons of food - worth nearly $1 trillion USD at retail prices - wasted each year.
Growing up a 5th-generation farmer Tyler Heppell personally saw how much food was wasted or sold for cow feed just because of its looks. When he returned to the farm at age 28 he made it his mission to figure out a solution that would allow local farmers to get their extra ugly produce to the food banks and feed the millions of food-insecure homes in our extended community. From that desire, Ten Servings was founded.
Our Mission
Access to food is a basic human right, not a privilege. No one should go hungry, and accepting that produce can be top quality and delicious, even if it has a slight imperfection in appearance is the first step.
At Ten Servings, our mission is to make a positive impact on our community through our commitment to reducing food waste. For every item of clothing we sell, we will rescue and donate ten servings of misshaped produce to the food bank. We believe that every person has a right to access healthy, nutritious food, and we are dedicated to doing our part to make that a reality. Our business is not just about selling clothing, but about making a difference in the world.
We tend to take our food for granted in the developed world.
Since food is so plentiful, we aren't aware of the tremendous amount that's wasted and the impact that it has on world hunger, political stability, the environment, and climate change. In a world where an estimated 805 million people go to bed hungry each night - the environmental cost of producing all that food, for nothing, is staggering.
Reducing food waste is the #1 solution to the climate crisis, according to Project Dawn - coming above electric cars, solar power and plant-based diets.
