It started with a personal abundance of tomatoes

I had extra tomatoes and a normal idea: make some sauce, freeze it, feel good about it.

Then, in the way these things go for me, "I can just do this myself" turned into "I can do this not just for myself, but for the whole community." Somewhere in that turn, a home kitchen project became twenty bushels, seventeen volunteers, two venues, and 203 litres of pasta sauce.

Why food, and why now

Food insecurity is one of those things you don't see. It doesn't look like anything from the road. Nobody's front lawn tells you they've been skipping meals so their kids don't have to.

But the numbers are not subtle, and one finding in particular stopped me cold. Researchers at PROOF, the food insecurity research program at the University of Toronto, looked at how vulnerability changed between 2019 and 2023 and concluded that:

Relying on employment income no longer protects Canadian households from food insecurity.

Read that again. Having a job is no longer a defence.

That isn't rhetoric — it holds up in the provincial data. More than half of food-insecure households in Ontario rely on wages, salaries, and self-employment as their main source of income, not social assistance. At Ontario food banks specifically, roughly a quarter of households now report employment as their primary income, double what it was before the pandemic.

Here's what it costs to eat properly while that happens: as of May 2024, a family of four in Ontario needed about $1,299 a month to afford a relatively economical, basic, nutritious diet. Not fancy. Basic. That's the bar, and a growing number of working households cannot clear it.

The part the food bank numbers don't capture

Across the country, 25.5% of people lived in a food-insecure household in 2024 — around 10 million people, including 2.5 million children, and the third consecutive record year. Here in Ontario, household food insecurity climbed from 17.1% in 2019 to 24.2% in 2023.

Roughly a quarter of Ontario households.

Now set that against the food bank numbers. Feed Ontario's 2025 Hunger Report counted just over 1 million people in this province turning to a food bank in a single year — the ninth consecutive year of increase, and a 165% jump since 2019. One in three were first-time users. One in three were children.

Two things worth being precise about, because these numbers get muddled easily. That million is people, not trips — the same report counts 8.7 million visits, because someone in need doesn't come once and stop. And it counts everyone being fed, not everyone who walks through the door. A five-year-old isn't lining up at a food bank; a parent is, on their behalf.

So: a million Ontarians relying on food banks, against roughly a quarter of Ontario households going hungry. The food bank figures are staggering, and they're still only the visible sliver.

That gap is the whole point. Most people struggling to put food on the table never show up in anyone's count. They stretch, they skip, they quietly buy less. Pride, logistics, not thinking they qualify, not wanting to be seen going in — the reasons vary and none of them make anyone less hungry.

That's why the third of this project's output set aside for food security was never earmarked for food banks alone. Some of it goes to them, and some of it I'll bring directly to anyone in the community who could use it — no program, no paperwork, no questions. Both routes matter, because only one of them shows up in the statistics.

I can't fix any of this. But I can turn a thousand pounds of tomatoes into a few hundred litres of genuinely nutritious food — vegetable-loaded, no added sugar, the kind of thing that costs real money in a jar — and put it where it's needed.

The part I'm proudest of: how it was funded

The logistics were the hard bit, but the funding model is the part I think is actually worth copying.

I sold bushels, not sauce. This mattered more than it sounds. I wasn't promising anyone a guaranteed volume of finished product — I was selling them a bushel of tomatoes that would get turned into sauce, the same way they'd do it at home if they had the time and the pot space. That framing kept expectations honest and kept me out of the business of guaranteeing yields I couldn't control. (It absolutely got tested. More below.)

Everyone knew about the 30% up front. Roughly a third of every bushel's yield was allocated to food security, and it was in the pitch from the very first post. Nobody was surprised by it. Buyers were knowingly subsidizing the donation portion, and that turned out to be a feature rather than a friction point.

I paid the farmer fair market value, in full, in cash. No asking for a discount, no leaning on a local business to underwrite a charitable project. Pair A Gardens got paid properly and then went and spent that money locally too. If a model only works by squeezing a farmer, it isn't a good model.

The pre-sale was a genuine leap. This is the part that doesn't show up in the happy photos. I was taking purchase commitments from what amounted to a Facebook post to virtual strangers — and a commitment isn't money. The money couldn't actually land until I knew what volume I was buying and what it would cost, and I couldn't know that until I knew how many people were in. Circular, and uncomfortable, and resolved only by deciding to trust the community and go first.

It worked. But I want to be clear about what kind of plan it was: one that only existed because I had faith in people I'd mostly never met, and decided it would work out.

Everything else came in as contribution. Cash donations, garden vegetables, jars, borrowed pots, volunteer hours.

The thing I was chasing: lift food security without undercutting anyone. The volume existed because people genuinely wanted fresh, economical sauce for their own freezers. Slicing 30% off the top didn't diminish what they got. The farmer got paid. Everybody in the chain came out ahead.

Getting people on board

I socialised it with friends and family first, then went wider. The posts did a few specific things on purpose:

• Named the price plainly — no one had to ask
• Showed the math — litres per bushel, cost per litre, what the 30% meant in practice
• Made the ask concrete — tomatoes, money, jars, olive oil, pots, or hours. Not "support us," but "here are six specific things I need."
• Didn't oversell it — I said "anticipated output," not "guaranteed," because I genuinely didn't know

Seventeen people, with less than two weeks' notice, gave up hours of a September weekend to chop tomatoes that weren't theirs.

What a chopping day actually feels like

I want to put this bit in because it's the part I didn't anticipate and it's the part I'd do it all again for.

Saturday was a day of chatter. I spent a good portion of it trying to convince everyone that the correct response to an instruction is "yes, chef" — and the room collectively decided that what the day really needed was to give me a roasting while we roasted the tomatoes. Fair.

Somebody brought kremrole. We had pizza. Phone numbers got swapped. New Facebook friends were made. People who'd never met spent six hours elbow to elbow over cutting boards and left knowing each other.

People drove more than 50 kilometres to be there. Some brought their partners along. One mum brought her five-year-old, specifically because she wants him growing up understanding what it looks like to show up for your community — he spent the day washing tomatoes and picking up kitchen skills, and after six hours he still didn't want to leave or stop helping.

That wasn't a side effect of the project. In hindsight, it might have been the main product, and the sauce was the excuse.

Sourcing, and the people who made it possible

The thing nobody tells you about scaling a kitchen project is that the food is the easy part. Space and equipment are what actually constrain you.

• Tomatoes: 20 bushels from Pair A Gardens, sourced on a few days' notice
• Kitchen: St. Andrew's United Church Pakenham, whose space was the backbone of the whole operation
• Ovens: Pakenham 1840s General Store and Bakery let us use their ovens all day Saturday — and I was still using their deep freezer days later
• Vegetables: Nature's Apprentice Farm (carrots, peppers, celery, basil), Lanark County Food Bank's Blakeney Gardens (tomatoes and a mountain of garlic), Brendan Wylie of Wylie Acres (more garlic and basil)
• And a lot of back gardens: individual community members turned up with their own produce, which added up to a genuinely meaningful share of what went in the pot

One logistical note for anyone attempting this. What you're actually looking for in a space is narrower than "a kitchen": several sinks, a lot of flat cutting surface, and somebody willing to hand you a key so you can come and go as you please. That last one matters more than you'd think — a project like this runs on odd hours, and needing to work around someone else's availability changes what's possible.

How we actually made it

Saturday: cut and roast. Tomatoes quartered and halved again into eighths, laid cut-side up in single layers, roasted hard. Basil went in with the tomatoes. Vegetables chopped the same day, ready for Sunday.

Sunday: build and finish. Onions and garlic fried, then tipped into large totes along with the chopped vegetables and the roasted tomatoes. All of it blended together, then distributed into pots to simmer and cook the vegetables through. Cooled, bagged, vacuum sealed.

We reversed the order partway through — originally the plan was to add tomatoes and veg to the onions in the pot and blend at the end. Doing the blending in totes first and then splitting into pots was simply more practical at volume.

The final recipe, for anyone who wants it: tomatoes, bell peppers, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, olive oil, Italiano seasoning, salt, pepper, and paprika. Zero added sugar. Veggie-loaded and thick — not chunky, but with real body to it.

What changed, and what went wrong

Four things worth being straight about — two promises I revised, and two genuine mistakes. I think they're the most useful part of this whole write-up.

Three recipes became one

I pitched this with three sauces: a classic, a veggie-loaded one, and a spicy one. We made one veggie-loaded sauce.

At volume, three recipes means three of everything — three simmer streams, three sets of seasoning decisions, three labelling schemes, three chances to get something wrong while tired. The veggie-loaded version was the best of the three anyway, and splitting our attention across two more would have made all of them worse.

Next year I'll offer one option from the start. It isn't a compromise; the quality is just as great, and it's just more practical this way.

Jars became bags

I'd planned to jar a portion of it, particularly the food-bank-bound share, and went as far as sourcing donated mason jars and reading up on safe canning.

Canning at this scale would have buried us. The jars, the processing times, the pH testing, the equipment, the sheer time per unit — it would have doubled the work of the finishing day at minimum.

And then the obvious thing: we can just freeze it.

That deserves more than a shrug, because it's genuinely a superpower. Freezing means no preservatives, no acidification, no processing calculations, no shelf-stability chemistry at all. What comes out of the bag is exactly what went in — tomatoes, vegetables, herbs, oil. A jar off a grocery shelf has to survive a warehouse, a truck, and months at room temperature, and it's formulated accordingly. Ours doesn't, because a freezer does that job for free.

Vacuum-sealed bags also stack flat, take a fraction of the space, weigh less to transport, and cost a fraction of what jars do. The only real constraint is that the recipient needs freezer space — which turns out to be the thing worth solving, rather than reformulating the food around a shelf.

The burn

About 25 litres scorched. Not carbonized (no black colour) but noticeably burnt on the nose and on the tongue. At that volume, that's not a rounding error.

The instinct is to blend it into the good batch and let dilution solve it. I nearly did. Instead we ran a small test: a proportional sample of burnt-to-clean, seasoned exactly as the real batch would be, tasted properly. If the burnt note had survived seasoning, the plan was to keep it separate and season it aggressively as a spicy variant — heat and smoked paprika are genuinely good at covering a mild scorch.

It passed. The seasoning carried it, and the batch went in.

The lesson isn't "don't burn things." It's test before you commit, especially when the decision is irreversible. Blending was a one-way door and I'd have had no recourse if I'd walked through it blind.

The yield

This is the bigger one.

I projected roughly 15 litres per bushel. We got about 10. That's a third less than I told people to expect, and I had to go back to every buyer and say so.

The cause was the roasting method. Most home sauce is simmered down from raw on a stovetop, which reduces gradually and retains more liquid. We roasted hard first, deliberately, because oven space was abundant and pot space wasn't — pushing reduction into the ovens was the only way the volume worked at all. The trade-off is a deeper, more concentrated sauce and a meaningfully lower final volume. I knew that in theory. I underestimated it in practice.

What I did about it: told everyone directly, explained the mechanism rather than hand-waving it, noted that concentrated sauce stretches easily with a can of tomatoes or some pasta water, and offered a full no-questions-asked e-transfer refund to anyone who wasn't happy.

Not one person chose to refund. Every single buyer was happy with what they got and glad to have been part of it.

I don't say that to pat anyone on the back. I say it because it's the whole argument for being honest when the number comes in under: the model rested on selling bushels rather than guaranteed litres, and that framing only holds up if you're as straightforward when the yield disappoints as when it delights. People are far more forgiving of a shortfall explained than a shortfall discovered.

The numbers

• 1,000 lbs of Roma tomatoes (20 bushels)
• 17 volunteers across two days
• 203 litres of finished sauce
• ~6 litres returned per full bushel purchased, ~3 per half
• ~1,600 bowls of pasta, give or take
• ~30% directed to food security

Total cost came in under $1,100. The tomatoes were $1,000 of that. The rest was produce I didn't have time to source for free (bulk onions, mainly), some olive oil — most of it was donated — and freezer bags.

A note for next year's budget: I don't expect to get vegetables donated at that scale twice. Even at a modest $100 per twenty bushels, that needs to be a line item rather than a happy accident.

The unsold bags, and breaking even

Once every buyer was sorted, about 30 litres were unspoken for, and I was still a couple of hundred dollars short of covering costs. So I put those bags up at $10 each — not to make money on this, just to get back to zero.

One person bought all thirty. Then she donated half of them straight back to the food bank and kept the rest for her own freezer.

There was immediate interest in the same volume from other people, and I turned it down. Once costs were covered, every additional bag I sold would have been a bag that didn't go to somebody who needed it. So I sold exactly what break-even required and stopped. That's the whole rule: the sale exists to make the project sustainable, not to make it bigger.

Where the donated portion is going: the Lanark County Food Bank, The Longer Table, and community members who just need a bit of help filling a freezer. That third category matters to me — not everyone who could use six litres of pasta sauce is connected to a formal program, and not everyone who needs help is going to ask a program for it.

What I'd do differently

• Share real yield data, don't promise a number. If I were trying a new recipe or starting from scratch, I'd run a small scaled-down batch first. But the honest truth is that yield will always move with how much donated veg turns up, so I don't mind that we didn't know precisely. What I can do is publish what actually happened — roughly 10 litres per bushel with this method — so the next person starts from a real figure instead of a guess. Next year we still won't promise a set volume, but we'll set expectations much closer to the truth.
• Standardize the roast target with a scale, not an eye. A test tray weighed before and after tells you exactly how far you've reduced. Across multiple ovens and volunteers, visual judgment drifts.
• Assign someone to each pot. The burn happened because a simmering pot at that volume needs continuous attention, not periodic checking.
• Confirm oven and tray capacity before scheduling anything. The number of trays your ovens hold per cycle is the single variable that determines whether the day is feasible. I worked that out later than I should have.
• Don't compress it into two days. This is the big one, and it shapes everything below.
• Build partner relationships earlier. The General Store and the church said yes on short notice out of pure generosity. Next year they deserve a conversation in June, not a scramble in September.

Next year: the freezer is the superpower

The response to this has been overwhelming, and the honest conclusion is that we need roughly four times the production.

Four times the volume in one weekend is not possible — we were already at the ceiling of what two venues' ovens could handle. But there's a way around it, and it comes down to one realization: roasted tomatoes freeze.

That single fact breaks the whole thing open. Cut, roast, freeze. Thaw and simmer weeks later. The urgency disappears and the process gains a stop-gap. It stops being one impossible day and becomes a sequence of manageable ones.

Here's the shape:

• Chopping bees through August — weekend and weeknight events across Almonte, Pakenham, and Arnprior
• Bushels brought in waves rather than all at once
• Roasting distributed across multiple partners with good ovens, the way the bakery did for us this year
• Roasted tomatoes frozen and held until go-time
• A veggie chopping team running on its own schedule
• One rented commercial kitchen with a large-capacity (150L+) simmering kettle for the finish

The final weekend becomes almost boring by comparison: mass pureeing of already-prepared ingredients, one big simmer, and bulk bagging and sealing. Everything hard has already happened, spread across six weeks and three communities, in rooms full of people talking to each other.

The bit I'm still working out: what is an hour worth?

I gave every volunteer some sauce this year. It wasn't a formula, it was an instinct — people should go home with something tangible in their hands.

Next year I want that to be a real equation rather than a gesture. My rough sense is that four hours of help is worth about a bag of sauce, and the question is where that comes from in the distribution between paid bushels and donated volume. One option: charge $5 more per bushel, so every ten bushels sold funds an eleventh that goes to volunteers.

I'm not fully settled on it, but here's why it matters to me. Trading your time for food is a completely legitimate transaction. There's a real dignity in being able to put in an afternoon and take home food you helped make, and that route should be open to people whether or not they have $45 to spare.

Funded by those who'd rather pay than chop, supplemented by donated produce and proceeds, and powered by the number of people who turn out to be willing to work a Saturday for their neighbours. That's the idea, anyway. I'd welcome thoughts on it.

Thank you

To everyone who donated tomatoes, vegetables, jars, money, pots, or hours: this doesn't happen without you. A thousand pounds of tomatoes is an absurd thing for one person to take on and a genuinely lovely thing for a community to do together.

With so much love for the community,
Tavis

Sources

• Feed Ontario, Hunger Report 2025 — feedontario.ca
• PROOF, University of Toronto — proof.utoronto.ca
• Public Health Ontario, Food Insecurity & Food Affordability in Ontario, April 2025 — Ontario Nutritious Food Basket costing
• Food Banks Canada, HungerCount 2025 — foodbankscanada.ca