Ugly Potato Day won’t keep the rain away, but can it help our food system?
On October 19, the first atmospheric river of the season dumped record-breaking levels of rain across Metro Vancouver. Winds in Surrey caused power outages while waist-high lakes gathered above leaf-clogged drains, shutting down portions of the road network, flooding basements and claiming vehicles. The polling stations coaxed some folks from their homes and into the storm, but the crowds standing in torrential rain at Cloverdale Fairgrounds weren’t there to cast their vote on election day.
They were there for fruits and vegetables — for the 17th Ugly Potato Day event, which has grown into one of the largest produce-giveaway events in Metro Vancouver.
When Tyler Heppell, event organizer and fifth-generation farmer at Heppell’s Potato, saw the weather warning for the day, he seriously considered cancelling. “I’m an optimist through and through. I didn’t think [the weather] would change, I knew it would change. But… it progressively got worse.”
But 250,000 pounds of produce and other perishables donated by 12 local farms and businesses had already been collected and brought to the site. Concerned that the rain would keep people away, Heppell made a plea to his social media followers to come out and support the event.
They answered in hordes. Within six minutes of opening, 1,000 people were through the doors of Shannon Hall at the fairgrounds. From there, the line quickly grew, extending through the parking lot and past the Cloverdale Agriplex.
As the wind hurled rain sideways, families, students and others flocked slowly across the fairgrounds under multicoloured umbrellas and sodden raincoats, carrying shopping bags or towing dollies, trolleys and wagons. One group moved in procession holding a tarp above their heads. Anyone checking road conditions that morning would have been baffled by the traffic jam ballooning from the fairgrounds, causing half-hour or more delays.
Meanwhile, another storm was building inside Shannon Hall. Bins big enough to bathe in, filled to the brim with potatoes, carrots, squash, beets, apples and other produce, were rapidly depleted. Apples from There & Back Again Farms in Kelowna were gone in 24 minutes.
“We had 30 volunteers, which we thought was enough,” explains Heppell. “We realized it wasn’t enough with how wet it was and how many people there were. And that we probably needed security, proper security too…” At one point he had to call the police.
Heppell doesn’t blame anyone though. “A lot of people are fighting for their family’s lives. When there is free food up for grabs, you see some of the best and worst sides of people.” Two hours into the event, he had to start asking people to leave, attempting to shut down early.
“The day for sure was a success. But definitely bittersweet,” Heppell says. “Having that many people stand out in the rain — not even rain, a downpour — it broke my heart a little bit. It shows you, for one, how hurting our province is.
Between 2018 to 2023, food prices increased across Canada by 26.8 per cent. And high grocery prices have made it harder for many people to put food on the table. In 2023, 21.8 per cent of British Columbians were living in food-insecure households according to Statistics Canada.
“A lot of people were there for their families, or their neighbours, or for the elderly. It made me feel that a lot of heroes were there.” Heppell had the opportunity to speak with a father of six who waited an hour and a half so he could provide for his family. Another attendee, when asked to return to their car, said they didn’t have one — they had taken transit from Vancouver.
As Heppell points out, while this might have been a novel experience for some, too many others have become used to waiting in line for their meals. “A lot of people are struggling right now to make ends meet. Food banks are over-run and people have to wait a few hours to get their food.”
In their annual HungerCount, Food Banks Canada reports that the number of visits to food banks in B.C. has increased by 81 per cent since 2019. Last year, nearly one-third of visits to food banks involved children.
Tyler Heppell, also known as Potato Ty, top middle, started Ugly Potato Day with “a mission is to feed food-insecure communities while showing the world that just because produce is ugly looking doesn’t mean it’s not nutritious and delicious, he writes on Ten Servings website. Photos by Riley Janzen.
Becoming Potato Ty
After four years of working in sales, the 30-year-old Heppell returned to his family’s 104-year-old farm. “I was looking for something new and out of all my options, [returning to the farm] was the hardest,” he says. “But I had a really great mentor who said that in life, sometimes the best choice is the hardest one to make.” He and his father agreed that he would stay on the farm for at least a year. If it didn’t work out, Heppell would know he’d at least given it a shot.
Getting back to his roots felt right. “I’ve found my purpose in agriculture. I know I’ll also always be in this industry.”
While helping run the farm, Heppell started posting videos about the loss of farmland. They went viral, and Potato Ty’s following grew. That’s when he stumbled on the issue of food waste. “It was ridiculous that we couldn’t sell some potatoes because they had a small crack in them or looked weird.”
One day he put out some ugly potatoes for free. He did it again and called it Ugly Potato Day. “It had this ring to it… people were asking about it.” Heppell leveraged his social media following to promote Ugly Potato Day as a recurring event. “It slowly grew as [my] social media grew and I think also the demand.”
But he wanted to go bigger. Heppell started Ten Servings Co. to support Ugly Potato Day and offer people a way to support their local food bank between events. For every item of clothing sold, 10 servings of imperfect produce is donated. The clothing is also an education tool: If you’re wearing a shirt that calls on you to “Eat Ugly Potatoes,” people will ask what that means. Heppell responds with, “Whatever it means to you. But we’re trying to reduce food waste and feed the food insecure.”
Since the first Ugly Potato Day, new farms have joined to expand the offerings from potatoes to other fruits, vegetables and perishables. This past summer, the event outgrew its original location at the family farm and moved to Cloverdale Fairgrounds. In just two years, 2.7 million servings of food have been donated through Ten Servings Co. and Ugly Potato Day events.
A broken food system, by the numbers
The first Ugly Potato Day drew 12 people. Last year, more than 15,000 people waited in line in the rain. “It just shows you the need that’s out there… and also the volume of food that’s out there,” reflects David Long, Chief Executive Officer of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB). “I mean, think about it: The worst weather, an atmospheric river, and we still had 15 to 16,000 people show up.”
Long has been with the GVFB for six years. “I love it when people ask, ‘What do you do for a living?’ They think I work in a church basement handing out boxes of Kraft Dinner. But one of my warehouses is 40,000 square feet. It looks like a Costco.”
“Canada produces enough food to feed 52 million people,” Long continues. “There’s just over 40 million people in this country, and seven million go to bed hungry. That’s your broken food system.”
One key strategy for the GVFB has been to partner with farms, rescuing fresh produce that would have otherwise been wasted and diverting it to those in need. They’ve even created a new farming liaison position in the organization. It’s a huge opportunity. One farm donated 1.1 million pounds of vegetables in the month of August alone.
The GVFB partnered with Heppell’s Potato for the last three Ugly Potato Day events. Among other things, the GVFB lends its trucks, infrastructure and personnel to get donations to the fairgrounds.
Removing barriers to food donations
Heppell knows he needs to make it as easy as possible for farms to donate to Ugly Potato Day. “Farmers are good-hearted people. But where we are lean, outside of money, is time, and it does take time and logistics to donate produce. It doesn’t just happen.”
At the end of the day, farms are a business. “My goal is to set up [Heppell’s Potato] with innovative systems to last 200 years. Giving away all our potatoes just isn’t a sustainable business model.”
But Heppell and Long agree there’s a win-win solution for farmers and food banks. “The main thing you can do is keep the farmer tax credit going,” Long says. The B.C. farmers’ food donation tax credit is a non-refundable tax credit to encourage farmers to donate food they produce to registered charities. The credit is 25 per cent of the market value of the agricultural products donated, but it is set to end on December 31, 2027. “It makes no sense for me to go to my board and say I want to spend millions of dollars on infrastructure, like a processing facility, if in 2027 the tax credit ends,” he says. “Then there’s no incentive for farmers to give me produce.”
Donations prompt innovation
With more donations, Long can get creative. He was contacted recently about a holding facility in the Okanagan with around 500,000 pounds of apples destined for the landfill because they wouldn’t sell. The GVFB took about 100,000 pounds, distributed as much as they could through their networks, then turned between 25 and 30,000 pounds into apple juice. Through a third-party juicing company in Abbotsford, the GVFB was able to produce one litre bottles for about $2 each.
Juicing and other forms of food preservation not only extend the shelf life of donated produce, but present other opportunities. With the right branding and grocery store contracts, Long thinks the GVFB could make a profit. “All of a sudden, some of this surplus food — fruits, vegetables, whatever it may be — can become a revenue source for a charity. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that story?”
But can you have too much of a good thing? “My biggest fear is that 10 more farmers will come to me and say they want to be a part of this tax credit thing. The problem a lot of the time is where we want to send the food doesn’t have the infrastructure — the refrigeration or the equipment — to receive the volume of food, because it’s usually large pallets.” Long envisions a network of larger storage depots across the province that can receive donations and then distribute them to smaller food banks.
“I drive my team crazy,” he says, laughing. “I have a catchphrase I’ve said for years: ‘There’s no shortage of food, there’s a distribution problem,’ and it’s just becoming more and more prevalent.”
The cost of food waste
Canada’s largest food rescue organization, Second Harvest, released a landmark study entitled The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste (ACFW) in 2019. Just this past October, they provided an update, which found that 19.4 per cent of edible food produced in Canada (8.83 million tonnes) is wasted, an increase of 6.5 per cent over five years. This avoidable food waste is worth around $58 billion.
The cost isn’t just born by farmers or others working in the food industry. For consumers, this inefficiency makes our food about 12 per cent more expensive at a time when many people are struggling to afford it. When we waste food, we also waste time and resources that went into producing it. Second Harvest estimates that the green house gas emissions from avoidable food waste is equivalent to around 253,223 flights between Vancouver and Toronto. The amount of water wasted correlates to what flows through Niagara Falls over 53.6 days.
Giving ugly potatoes a chance
There are many reasons why food isn’t making it to our tables. Part of the problem is that we expect our produce to be perfect. “I get it,” Heppell says. “Food is so expensive that you want it to look good and to last.”
To compete against each other for the pickiest customers, grocery stores are adopting increasingly higher cosmetic standards for the produce they source. Farmers, faced with ever more unpredictable growing conditions due to climate change, are struggling to meet these standards consistently. Food that doesn’t make the grade because it’s the wrong size, misshapen or blemished most often becomes animal feed, composted or landfilled.
Long has heard many such stories from farmers. One farmer spent $180,000 growing corn on the cob last summer that was ultimately rejected by a large grocery chain. The corn was a half-inch too short. “It was some of the nicest, plumpest, most beautiful corn I’ve ever seen,” he says. The GVFB ended up with about 4,500 totes of it to give to those in need. “I have nicer food in the fridge at the food bank than I do back home.”
Over the last five years, food resale apps have seen to it that less food falls through the cracks. These apps connect businesses like The Odd Bunch, FoodHero, Too Good To Go or Flashfood to customers to sell food that is surplus or close to its expiry date at a discount. The Odd Bunch specializes in “odd-looking” produce distributed in mixed produce boxes.
Some major grocery chains are now offering imperfect produce. President’s Choice, owned by Loblaw Companies Limited, sells a no-name line of imperfect produce called “Naturally Imperfect.” Heppell’s Potato also has an Ugly Potatoes Bag that you can find at Langley Farm Market and Lepp Farm Market.
Dr. Tammara Soma, Research Director and Co-Founder of the Food Systems Lab at Simon Fraser University, points to the benefits of getting as close as we can to where our food comes from. “As a planner, I’ve identified the importance of investing in different types of food infrastructure, not just supermarkets.” She suggests seeking out farmstands, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farmers’ markets and food co-ops.
If we’re only getting produce from the grocery store, Dr. Soma explains, it’s their version of produce that we’ll come to know and expect. “People will say, ‘Oh that carrot’s ugly. It has two little legs.’ But if you’re a gardener, if you’re used to working on a farm, you’ll know there’s nothing unique about that. The more we can invest in localized food production, the more we cultivate acceptance of diversity.”
As Potato Ty, Heppell has been using his platform to shed light on the realities of farming and that potatoes are sometimes… ugly. “I think we need a more educated end consumer who is more connected to how their food is grown. I always encourage people to try their hand at gardening. There is power in growing your own food and understanding the difficulties and how easily produce can grow wonky.”
What’s next?
Every election, we get to take a closer look at who we are as a province. The crowds waiting in the rain at Cloverdale Fairgrounds on October 19 also showed us what we need — and the scale of the task ahead. Reflecting on the issue of food waste, Long says, “It’s so amazingly complicated, but it’s so cool when you can do things like Tyler’s doing.”
Not even an atmospheric river can put a damper on Heppell’s plans. “We usually do six or seven events per year, but they are becoming too big. We’re now working with a ticketing company. Events will still be free, but this will put some control on it.” While future events may be less frequent, he’s looking for ways to expand their impact. “We’re going to be planning for a really big event next year, we’re thinking August, to try to give away a half-million pounds of produce.”
But first he needs to focus on the farm. “My skillset is at capacity, and was surpassed by the last [event].We need to put together a team of experts to help us take [Ugly Potato Day] to the next level.”
Heppell’s Potato
4945 184 St., Surrey
heppellspotatoes.ca | @heppellspotato | tenservings.ca
