Brandy Bobier: 4.5 Million Pounds of Rescued Food

We sit down with Brandy Bobier, CEO and co-founder of Community Helpers Unite (CHU), an Indigenous-led nonprofit and social enterprise with roots in Winnipeg’s North End. Brandy was running a catering business when the pandemic hit, and she watched people in the North End and Point Douglas go without food entirely. So CHU started saying yes: emergency hampers at any hour of the night, food bundles for outreach workers heading into wellness checks with families involved with CFS, and extra food for agencies that couldn’t keep up.

Five years later, CHU supplies more than 40 Winnipeg agencies and 13 First Nations communities, and last year it kept over four and a half million pounds of food out of the landfill. It runs almost entirely on its own catering revenue rather than core funding.

We’re talking:

• Why Manitoba’s food waste problem and its poverty problem should be solving each other, and why so much good food ends up in Winnipeg’s landfill

• What changes when food comes before housing, mental health and addictions supports rather than after them

• Why CHU stayed a nonprofit social enterprise instead of becoming a registered charity, and what a “yes model” makes possible

• Running a no-yelling kitchen with a staff benefit plan in an industry that rarely offers either

Whether you’ve got leftover trays from an event and nowhere to take them, or you’re curious how a local organization reaches this scale without waiting on grants, this conversation shows what treating food as a human right looks like on the ground in Winnipeg.

As Brandy puts it: “Everybody likes to talk about housing first, addictions first, mental health first, education first. It’s always something else first. How do you make it to your housing appointment if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from? Food is the base of all of it.”

Get Involved:

• Search “food” and your postal code at 211manitoba.ca to find food programs nearby, or places that will accept surplus food from your event

• Book CHU for your next catered event; catering revenue funds their community programs

• Join the Main Street Walkers, who head out from 605 Main every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30 a.m.

Connect with CHU: communityhelpersunite.ca

Episode transcript:

Humans, On Rights – Episode 145: Brandy Bobier

Stuart Murray (00:00): This podcast was recorded on the ancestral lands of Treaty One territory, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Matt Cundill (00:20): This is Humans, On Rights, a podcast advocating for the education of human rights. Here's your host, Stuart Murray.

Stuart Murray (00:31): Community Helpers Unite, or CHU, is an Indigenous-led Winnipeg nonprofit and social enterprise that uses food recovery, meal service and employment pathways to address food security, with roots in Winnipeg's North End. Today I'm joined by Brandy Bobier, the CEO of Community Helpers Unite. Since founding CHU in 2021, she has helped grow it from a response to urgent local need into a network serving community organizations and Indigenous communities across Manitoba. We'll talk about what it means to treat food as a human right, and what dignity, listening and community-led solutions look like in practice. Brandy, welcome to Humans, On Rights.

Brandy Bobier (01:17): Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here today.

Stuart Murray (01:20): We're going to get into a lot. Your website is fabulous, by the way. There's so much great information. But for those who are listening, introduce yourself a little bit and explain what you do.

Brandy Bobier (01:30): Thanks so much. My name is Brandy Bobier. I am the CEO, co-founder and community connector for Community Helpers Unite. We are an Indigenous-led nonprofit. I'm a non-Indigenous ally, but our board and the majority of our organization's employees are Indigenous, and I walk alongside them to help raise them up and raise up their voices, and at the same time take direction from their knowledge and from community knowledge to make sure that we're feeding relatives with kindness, dignity and respect always, like family, because they deserve it.

I was actually a sole proprietor caterer pre-pandemic, and we opened Community Helpers Unite as a response to the pandemic, because there were so many people we saw in the North End of Winnipeg, and Point Douglas especially, who couldn't get food in the middle of a pandemic. I had already brought the Leftovers rescue food model here from Calgary. I reached out to them in 2019, and we launched in October 2020. But by February 2021, we saw there were these huge gaps. People couldn't get food if they were marginalized. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen.

So we created a rogue food security organization that just said yes, and just got the food out to the people, and started increasing the food supplies that were going out to the agencies with food programs, because there just wasn't enough. Everybody saw this huge increase of people who never would have accessed a food bank before, and suddenly here they are needing a food bank, right on top of the people who already needed food banks and emergency food services.

So yeah, it's worked out really well. We've run it really organically. We started out as a gap-filling organization, and we're still a gap-filling organization. We're actually proactive about being reactive. We keep a community fund, because we cater in a for-profit way as a social enterprise to create our own funding. We've never really had much funding from elsewhere, because we're not a registered charity. We're just an incorporated nonprofit.

Stuart Murray (03:34): Let me just back up for a second. Brandy, you started off on your own. You were in the catering business yourself pre-COVID. Have you always been interested in food? Where did that come from? What's your background? What got you interested in that area?

Brandy Bobier (03:49): I grew up in the North End of Winnipeg. I'm a St. John's graduate, St. John's alumni. I grew up in a food family. Our family was an Eastern and Central European family, for the most part, so lots of cooking going on, lots of big batch cooking, preserving, growing a garden, and always giving away to other people, giving away to our neighbours. So there was always a really good instilling of giving and of helping.

When I was just finishing high school, I started doing custom cakes, and I kept doing custom cakes for 25, 26 years. Unfortunately, some arthritis put an end to that real fast. But I was already able to delegate a lot of it to other people and our staff, so it hasn't really been too big of a deal.

Stuart Murray (04:43): Okay, give me an idea about a custom cake. What are we talking about? Like a...

Brandy Bobier (04:46): Yeah, custom birthday cakes, the two- or three-tier birthday cakes, wedding cakes, things like that, and then of course holiday baking. When it was Classic Heats Catering and Baking, from 2018 to 2020, we used to do holiday dinners and catering, because my cake customers started asking me for catering to go with it.

My professional background is actually in construction management, so project management, both commercial and residential. I actually said to the home builder I was working for at the time that I couldn't come to the office anymore because I had to go get a kitchen. I love feeding people more than I love building homes for people.

Stuart Murray (05:30): Still building though, right? It's building.

Brandy Bobier (05:33): Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. So we did all of that, and then when the pandemic hit, I had just done the Wonderful Wedding Show for the first time, and I was like, okay, summer's full of cakes and everything. And nope, the pandemic hit three months later and I had to refund everybody, and I went deep into debt.

I was in the process of launching Leftovers Foundation Rescue Food, but Leftovers is a registered charity, so they have a lot of really stringent rules about where they can say yes and where they can say no, and they're agency to agency, and that's it. Which is fine, because the agencies are doing the work already, so why reinvent the wheel, right? I ended up leaving Leftovers at about the end of 2021, because we launched Community Helpers Unite, and it took them almost eight months to find a replacement, so I kept it floating for them from May 2021 until the end of December, when they hired a new city lead coordinator.

It's interesting, because they've rented warehouse space from me for the last five years, and now they've just moved on to another space because we're design-building a kitchen in that warehouse space to increase our production. Things just organically move.

When we started in the pandemic, it was literally just some small emergency hamper programs for action therapy workers. Mitch Bourbonnière has an action therapy group that he started years ago, and it grew exponentially, and it works directly with families that are involved with CFS. The action therapy workers would get calls saying, "Hey, can you go on a wellness check? There's a family, they're food insecure. We might have to apprehend kids from the home." Those workers would reach out and say, "Hey, Brandy, with Leftovers, can you give me a food bundle for this many people?" And I'd say, "Well, Leftovers is only agency to agency, but with Community Helpers Unite, we're accepting donations as well, so we can do it."

For the first while I would run to the warehouse at any hour of the night. Then we created some structure, and it got to a point where those workers could text me in the night and say, "Hey, I'm going to this wellness check. Can I go take food?" And I'm like, "Absolutely!" Then they would come to the warehouse, they'd have codes to get in, and then they would go do their wellness check. And at the end of the day, keep kids in their home, and get the families talking about what other resources they might have needed. Maybe food wasn't the issue. Maybe food was the issue. There's nothing worse than having a family that's fighting with each other because there's not enough food in the house for everybody.

Stuart Murray (08:11): Just before we recorded this, we talked about the civic election that just took place here in Winnipeg. For people who are listening, why is what you're doing so important in Winnipeg today?

Brandy Bobier (08:26): We're in a really different time right now. Post-COVID has been a really weird time. None of us have ever gone through this type of landscape with food security before. It's almost like there's a piece of the pandemic that created a dependency on free food resources that I'm not a big fan of. There are so many food banks out there, we shouldn't have a food security issue. But a lot of the food banks are serving the same people. The only one that's tracking in a large sense is Harvest Manitoba, but other food banks exist, and they're filling those gaps. And a lot of the food banks that Harvest supplies with food don't have enough food, so they end up getting surplus supplies from us by the pallet.

Then there's a small sector of people who are going to multiple different food resources every week, and it's almost like turning finding food into a full-time job. And it's because nobody ever has enough.

Last year we catered for emergency disaster services for most of the summer and into the fall. On the social enterprise side, that netted us a good-sized community fund profit, so we were able to create more programs based on that. One of them was our agency distribution hub. We knew that we could fund it for a full year to get it going and prove that it works, that it makes an impact. And not only did it prove that it makes an impact with these agencies, but it also proved that we could become one of the largest food recovery organizations in Manitoba, literally right next to Harvest Manitoba and Second Harvest Food Rescue. But we're doing it completely unfunded.

Stuart Murray (10:21): Let me ask you a couple of clarifying things, please, Brandy. Food rescue. You mentioned that you went to Calgary, you looked at what they were doing there, and you brought it back to Winnipeg. For anybody who's listening, what is food rescue? You mentioned an organization that goes agency to agency. Maybe speak a bit about what that means, give some examples, and then how CHU, or Community Helpers Unite, fits into that whole process.

Brandy Bobier (10:54): Absolutely. Manitoba has a food waste problem. At the end of the day, Manitoba has a huge food waste problem. Manitoba also has a poverty problem. High poverty and high food waste means they can help each other out.

While I was still a for-profit caterer, I reached out to Leftovers because they have this app-based model that matches up donors and agencies, and through their app, volunteers are activated to go and pick up and transport this food. So, recovery food or rescue food, whatever you want to call it: post-retail food. There are very stringent guidelines with grocery stores, distributors, producers, wholesalers, all of these retail food organizations. There are huge specs and stringent lines where they will say, "No, we can't sell that."

Stuart Murray (11:48): Is a lot of that best before dates? Does that have an impact on it?

Brandy Bobier (11:51): No, actually. A lot of people still call best before dates "expiry dates," and really, expiry date is a bad word. Best before date is a better word to use. But it's mostly aesthetics.

One of the best examples I have is from one of our donors when I first started this, and I was blown away. That's why I still use the same example today. One of our donors, a distributor, said, "Hey, Brandy, can I post these pallets of honeydew melons on the Leftovers app?" I said, "What's wrong with them?" And he said they were slightly over-refrigerated on the trip up from South America. I said, "Okay, but what's wrong with them?" And he said, "Nothing. They're perfectly fine." But on the outside of the melon, where the stem would be, it's showing a little bit of signs of rot because it got over-refrigerated. "So we can't send them all the way to Thunder Bay and Kenora for the grocery stores. They won't be able to sell them." And I was like, oh. And he said, "Yeah, so they would go in the garbage here."

I started looking into that, and it happens all the time. With the development of CentrePort over the last few years, Winnipeg has positioned itself to be the ground hub for central travel into this part of Canada. So anything that's coming in on a truck, whether it's electronics, food, horses, anything, is coming to Winnipeg first. Those cross-docking stations, the distributors, all of them: if there's anything wrong with any of it, it goes in the garbage in Winnipeg.

In that situation with the honeydew melons, Leftovers was still small at that time too. I think we had maybe six agencies go and pick up all these honeydew melons. It was outrageous, all of them showing up with SUVs at the distributor's place, but we got them all picked up. They didn't go in the garbage. They ended up going out to a dozen different agencies and went into the hands of people who were going to eat them.

There's lots of stuff like that that happens. We have a production kitchen where we produce our meals, so we will upcycle certain things for our free meal programs. One of our donors came and said, "Hey, we have these pallets of blueberries, and they're not equal enough in size. They're going to be too tart, so we know we won't be able to sell them. Do you want these two pallets of blueberries?" I'm like, absolutely. We took them to the kitchen, and okay, yeah, they're pretty tart. So what we did instead was turn them into jam.

For the community walks and community outreach, along with the hot meals we make, we also do sandwiches. So we'll do peanut butter and jam sandwiches, up to 1,000 of them a day. And you know what's expensive nowadays? Peanut butter and jam.

Stuart Murray (14:55): Yeah, no kidding.

Brandy Bobier (14:58): We actually haven't bought jam in two and a half, almost three years, because we regularly get strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. We get it all in as recovery food, by the pallet, where it just didn't meet their specs. So we upcycle it, and that's where upcycling of recovery food comes in. We upcycle those berries into jam.

Stuart Murray (15:23): That's a fantastic thing, and I'm learning so much in this conversation. So you've got what you call donors, for example with the melons. So many melons would come in, and they would look at them. Some of them are fine, presumably, and some of them are not. How do these distributors know to call you? How did that relationship start, and how do you make sure that you're the first thought as opposed to an afterthought?

Brandy Bobier (15:55): It really is all about relationship building. We are not the first. There are many of us working in food recovery. Harvest Manitoba accepts recovered food. Their donors, certain grocery stores and things like that, will drop off recovery food where they're like, "This is our daily shrink. We had to pull this stuff off the shelf because it won't meet spec." At the end of the day, they take it to Harvest. There's also Leftovers Foundation Rescue Food. There's Second Harvest Food Rescue. There's the Loop app. There's the FoodMesh app. There's Flashfood, which you see with Superstore and Loblaws. They have the Flashfood app, where you can buy discounted stuff.

Stuart Murray (16:38): Who's "they"? Is this the general public? Could I get one of these apps and go on it?

Brandy Bobier (16:43): Yeah, the general public can go on the Flashfood app. Or Too Good To Go is another good one. 7-Eleven uses that one.

Stuart Murray (16:50): Too Good To Go.

Brandy Bobier (16:51): Too Good To Go. They post sandwiches and fruit cups and stuff that have met their best before date, but they can still sell them for half the price, things like that. So the general public can access those things.

Otherwise, most food recovery is business to business, because a lot of times upcycling of food is needed to give that food more life. Take foods that come in that are past or at their best before date, or prepared foods from the hospitality industry. Say there's a banquet. The kitchen staff made sure to keep good rotation time, so everything stayed food safe: "Okay, we're trading this out. Okay, we're trading this out." Then the next day, somebody like us or Second Harvest or Leftovers Foundation would go and pick up that food and send it to an agency that is upcycling it, making that food into a new meal so that it has more life, or preserving it.

Recovery from the hospitality industry and already-cooked food is very small right now, because there isn't any kind of food waste ban or anything like that. There's no infrastructure in place to say, "Hey restaurants, hey grocery stores that make prepackaged food, you have to make sure that goes to somebody."

Stuart Murray (18:12): What I'm trying to get a sense of is this. Maybe this was pre-COVID, but it used to be that a lot of businesses would have a gathering, maybe a social gathering around Christmas, whatever it may be, and there would be food left over. At one point somebody could take that to, I'll just say, Siloam Mission or Lighthouse or other shelters. And then at some point, and I appreciate this from a health perspective, somebody said, "Wait a minute, we don't know how good that food is. People in the shelter would gladly take it, but there may be something in it that makes them ill." Are you telling me there are still opportunities? If anybody's listening and saying, "Okay, this is an eye-opening moment for me, because now I can really start participating," are you saying that has changed?

Brandy Bobier (19:10): There have been changes made to the Manitoba Food Donation Act, so it does take the liability from the donor and place it with whoever they give it to, like the shelter. Yes.

Stuart Murray (19:21): Okay.

Brandy Bobier (19:21): So it's up to the shelters. As an example, let's say there's a funeral. There are those little pinwheel sandwiches, there are fruits, there are veggies, the trays, that kind of stuff. Let's say there are two trays of each left at the end of the funeral. They've probably been sitting out most of the afternoon, but some good-intentioned soul is going to say, "I'm going to drop them off at a shelter." When the shelter sees them, they're going to throw the sandwiches out, because they're the food service professionals.

So as long as the end agency is a food service professional, they can assess whether that food is going to be good or not, and if it is, what needs to happen to it to keep it good until it goes to an end user. Like I said, with the pinwheel sandwiches, they're mayo-based. They're not going to take a chance. But they'll take the fruit trays and the veggie trays, gather it all up, make sure it's good and refrigerated, put the fruit into cups and serve it. Or with the veggies, they'll cut them all up and put them into a soup.

Stuart Murray (20:35): So Brandy, in essence, what you're saying to those who might be listening is that if I do have something left over, rather than throwing it in the garbage, there is an opportunity for it to go to a shelter.

Brandy Bobier (20:48): Well, there's an opportunity for it to go to many different places, whether it's a shelter or a community liaison type of centre. There are lots of different resource places now that are open very late. One of my favourite places to take food to is Rossbrook House, because on the weekends they're open 24/7, they have a full kitchen, and they always have youth there and staff there. They'll come out to your vehicle, grab everything for you and bring it in, and then their kitchen staff will assess what's good and what's not.

But it's also up to the individual person. The question I always tell people to ask themselves is: Would I eat this? Is this edible? Would I eat it? Would I feed it to my children? Would I feed it to my family? If the answer is "I don't know," then I wouldn't donate it. If the answer is no, don't even bother.

Stuart Murray (21:43): Yeah, it's about dignity, right? It's about having some dignity and understanding what you're doing.

Brandy Bobier (21:47): And the thing a lot of people don't realize is that people who are marginalized, who are on the street, don't have ready, immediate access to bathrooms. What if they get sick? It'd be a nightmare. I can't even imagine the feeling of having somebody say, "Here, have this food," and then you get sick an hour or two hours later, and you're scrambling around trying to find a bathroom because you're throwing up or you're going the other way. It's scary.

But at the same time, the shelter system, all the different shelters, the big five shelters on the peninsula in South Point Douglas, and a lot of the resource centres that are open late, accept food. Spence Neighbourhood Association is one of them. They do a nighttime program for youth, so their kitchen is operating late. They have food service professionals.

Stuart Murray (22:45): For people who are listening, and I'm one of them, if they went to the CHU or Community Helpers Unite website, which is a great website, so people listening to this, go to that website, it's fantastic. But if they said, "I'm hearing all this stuff about resource centres and shelters, but now the podcast is over. How can I find out where some of these are?" Can they go to the Community Helpers Unite website to find out which shelters or resource centres they can take food to?

Brandy Bobier (23:21): We serve over 40 agencies in Winnipeg, and with the bulk food services, we also serve 13 First Nations communities in Manitoba. But we don't have them all listed, because a lot of them don't have capacity to have people randomly dropping off. But what anybody can do is use a new resource out there that's amazing. It's a directory called 211 Manitoba.

Stuart Murray (23:46): 211 Manitoba.

Brandy Bobier (23:47): 211 Manitoba. If you type in "food," and this is good for people who are looking for food and also for people who are looking for places to take food. At 211manitoba.ca, you can type "food" and your postal code into the search, and you will get an entire list of food-based resources in the area.

Stuart Murray (24:08): Wow!

Brandy Bobier (24:08): It gives addresses, open hours, phone numbers, everything. So what I encourage people to do, if they have food they want to donate, is to go there and say, "Here's where we are with this event," and then look up what's close by to that event's address.

Stuart Murray (24:23): 211manitoba.ca.

Brandy Bobier (24:24): Yeah, and then phone whatever comes up and say, "Hey, can I drop off some food to you?" Yeah, it's amazing.

Stuart Murray (24:30): That is amazing. This is all fantastic news. When I went onto your website again, looking at what you do, I love the name. Community Helpers Unite, and to put it into CHU. It's very clever, having a bit of fun with something.

Brandy Bobier (24:49): It happened very organically.

Stuart Murray (24:51): Yeah, I bet. Okay, now you're using more puns. All right, talking about organics, right? But I love it, because it shows that there's energy, there's verve. You're alive, you're doing some great things, because you're helping and you're feeding community.

Brandy Bobier (25:05): Absolutely.

Stuart Murray (25:06): This is a little bit off topic in some respects, Brandy, but why are you not a registered charity, for people to give donations to?

Brandy Bobier (25:16): I'm not a big fan of government systems.

Stuart Murray (25:18): Okay.

Brandy Bobier (25:19): I don't like the way they spend the money that we pay them. I don't like the way tax dollars get spent, for the most part, especially at the federal and provincial levels. For me, creating a registered charity means we get to have Revenue Canada saying how we can and can't spend the money that we make. Because we cater for profit, sometimes we're bringing in a high volume of profit. I would never want to have Revenue Canada say to me, "Oh, you held a fundraiser saying it was for Dell computers, and you bought Apple computers instead. That's misappropriation of funds. That's not what you said it was going to be used for. We're taking your charitable status for three months."

Registered charities serve a purpose, and for really structured organizations that are doing one specific thing, it can be a good thing, because you need year-over-year operational funding. Otherwise, how do you pay your staff and give them job security other than doing annual grant writing? But with what we do, we've been able to effect more change as a social enterprise than we would as a registered charity.

As a registered charity, we wouldn't be able to say yes to something like this: "There was a house fire, and two people perished. There's going to be a sacred fire for them, but the family doesn't have any money for food to have feasts every day. Can you guys provide dinner for 40 to 60 people every day for the next four days?" We can say, "Yeah, absolutely." Whereas if we were a registered charity, we would have to have funding to do that, and we would have to have a specific fund for disaster response or crisis or something like that, and then allocate to exactly those budget lines.

It's those federal and provincial budget lines, even municipal, but specifically federal budget lines, that drive me crazy. If you are doing the work and you're making an impact that you can prove, it shouldn't matter if you have $10,000 in your meal budget line and $10,000 in your supplies and equipment budget line, and maybe you only used half of your equipment budget line and need more for the meals line. You can't do it. You have to say no. And that's where I see the "no." Our model is that the answer is yes. It's a yes model.

Stuart Murray (27:47): Yeah, because you're a social enterprise, right?

Brandy Bobier (27:50): Yeah. At the end of the day, we're a nonprofit, but we're a social enterprise in order to sustain ourselves financially. We do apply for funding. We apply for grant funding for projects and for certain roles that can be funded, and training grants and things like that, because we employ people with barriers to employment. So we're able to identify a need, assess whether it's in our wheelhouse, whether it's something we can actually assist with, and then we react and go ahead and do it. And then at the end of the day, we figure out how to make it all work. We just say yes, and then get it done.

It's like in the pandemic when we started: let's just get food into the hands of the people who need it, and figure it out after. What's the big deal? It's just food. But at the same time, it's not just food, because everybody likes to talk about housing first, addictions first, mental health first, education first. It's always something else first. But my question to those people is, how do you get to focus on any of that other stuff if you're hungry? If you don't have food and you don't know where your next meal is coming from, or you only have food for today, how do you make it to your mental health worker meeting? If you haven't eaten since yesterday, how do you make it to your housing appointment, or go view apartments with your housing worker? Food is the base of all of it, and food is medicine. That's where we have to start, I think.

So that's where we start. We make sure everybody's fed, including our staff. We're a food organization, and kitchen work pays very little. It's not a highly paid industry. So instead, we're able to offset that for our staff by providing them with food security. Any of our staff have the opportunity to take food home from the kitchen. We do a communal meal for our staff. Our staff cook for each other, because we have two shifts. One meal happens right after lunch goes out, and one meal happens right after dinner goes out, and they cook for the whole group. It's amazing. And they can go to our warehouse anytime they need to, to pick up food, produce, frozen food, stuff like that. If they need to make themselves an emergency food bundle, no problem.

Stuart Murray (30:17): You talk about people who have different issues. You talk about poverty, you talk about all these things, and it's always those things before food. Food should come first. How is it that society has allowed that to happen? We seem to want to focus on one silo of a bigger problem, and you're never going to solve that bigger problem with just one silo. If somebody's unhoused and they get them into accommodation, that's fantastic. I don't mean to say that it's not. But as you say, is there a mental health issue? Are there other things going on? Do they have the ability to make food or get food? It just seems that we struggle with this. Of course, we just had a civic election. We'll have a provincial election at some point, and a federal election, and these conversations never seem to have the opportunity to happen. It's not about perfection, because there will always be issues, but we don't seem to even get to that collective conversation. Why, in your opinion, are we not able to do that?

Brandy Bobier (31:18): I kind of feel like you answered your own question when you mentioned the silos, because that's what they do. They group it into little silos, and they go, "We're working on this this term. Oh, this will be next term." But for food security, next term never comes.

Like I said, we provide 40 agencies in Winnipeg with food by the pallet every month. I'll give you some stats to give it context. Our 2025–2026 impact report showed that we moved just over four and a half million pounds of food that would have gone to the landfill, and instead we got it to people and animals.

I say people and animals because we're a very low-waste organization. We're not zero waste yet, but we're getting there. Any food that comes into our warehouse gets weighed and assessed. For anything that's not fit for human consumption, we have big rolling bins. They look like those big laundry bins. We unwrap whatever it is and put it in the bin, and the bin gets closed up. A couple of times a week, some farmers come and pick up that food from us for animal feed. That keeps us from having the cost of someone like Compost Winnipeg coming to pick up. At our production kitchen, we do have Compost Winnipeg bins, because it's a production kitchen and we have to keep it contained in a different way.

So we do a mixture of working with Hutterites and farmers, working with the agencies that are feeding people, working with the compost organizations, and then recycling, of course, because the packaging is all recyclable. We reuse any boxes we get produce in for bundles going out the door, or for mixed items. Say an agency shows up with an SUV and needs food for 10 bundles they're doing at their location. No problem. We fill the back of their SUV, and anything that's loose, we put in boxes, so it makes it there in good time and good shape. So we do it very full circle that way as well.

Then any food that comes in that's assessed as still fit for human consumption, but is really ugly or has to be turned into something for anybody to want to eat it, like those melons with a little bit of rot. Nobody's going to look at that and go, "Oh yeah, I want to eat that." But if it's already cut up in a fruit cup, nobody's going to know what the outside ever looked like. Those are the types of things we will send to organizations like a soup kitchen.

We provide food to some of the shelters so that they have extra for their programs, and to offset their food budget, because none of the shelters are funded properly for food. N'Dinawemak had some of the best funding for food for the first five years it was open, and things only changed about a year ago. We were the primary food service provider for N'Dinawemak from the day it opened on December 1, 2021, until March 31, 2026. That was when they closed N'Dinawemak, because the province was renovating it under the Your Way Home: Ending Chronic Homelessness in Winnipeg project. It should be opening within the next few months as a resource centre for the relatives on the street. But we don't know what it's going to open as. We haven't found anything else out. We're waiting for more info.

Stuart Murray (35:03): Okay. So you may be a food provider again, as you have been.

Brandy Bobier (35:08): Yeah, we hope so. At the same time, though, when they moved all of the relatives out of N'Dinawemak at 190 Disraeli, N'Dinawemak opened a group of apartments and spaces for these folks to move into permanent housing that would be staffed. Unfortunately, they decided to switch the food services to WRHA food services, which is basically hospital food services. I don't agree with that, because the relatives got used to having good-quality comfort food that was nutritionally balanced for the last five years, and now they're on food that's not adequate in portion size and barely meets the minimum standard for Canada's Food Guide.

Stuart Murray (35:53): Brandy, at the outset we talked about not making this into a political podcast, but this is really your podcast, so you have free rein. How does that decision get made, to move to the WRHA?

Brandy Bobier (36:11): There's some controversy around how that decision was made, and I won't get into that. But under the province's Your Way Home plan, I believe the main part of the mandate was to streamline services, and for some reason the province didn't want to streamline services through us. The WRHA is the bigger organization.

Stuart Murray (36:29): Totally, I get it. I understand that. And this isn't about trying to take a shot at them.

Brandy Bobier (36:34): Nope, not at all.

Stuart Murray (36:35): The bottom line is that streamlining services is one attribute, and I get it. Government is always looking at how it can streamline. That's kind of its role. But when you look at streamlining, where does food fit into that? And again, I want to give you a shout-out for your website, because it's a great website. You talk about the notion that food, particularly for some communities, the way it's prepared is important, as opposed to just how it's delivered or how it arrives.

Brandy Bobier (37:07): Absolutely.

Stuart Murray (37:08): And that would change dramatically with the approach CHU, Community Helpers Unite, would take versus the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.

Brandy Bobier (37:16): Well, yeah. Everything that comes out of the WRHA's commissary kitchen, it's an industrial commissary. Everything is mass-produced. Everything is processed in some form or another. It's not scratch-based cooking. What a lot of industry doesn't realize is that mass production of food, and the processed foods that are there for convenience to cut down on labour and skilled labour, produces foods that are higher in sodium and higher in saturated fats. Even though they're meant for people with dietary restrictions, they're still processed. There are chemicals in them. At the end of the day, scratch-based cooking is cheaper. It's healthier. It's more nutritionally dense. It's better for people.

But the food service industry has gotten such a rap for being entry-level everything, all the time, and not having enough skilled people in the workforce. Food service people are treated like absolute garbage, for the most part. When we stepped in in 2020 and 2021 and launched, I said we'll never have a kitchen like the kitchens I came up working in, in restaurants, when I was a teenager. Never would I have a kitchen where somebody felt threatened, or felt like they weren't enough, or felt that because they got an order wrong, they should lose their job or be reprimanded for it. People make mistakes, and everybody needs to learn somewhere.

So we opened our kitchen in such a way that we could start helping people build skills and learn, so that we could develop more of a work-ready workforce and more skilled-level jobs. Because when we look at affordability and median wages, culinary anything doesn't fit into median wages. And good luck working at a restaurant, or anywhere in food services, and having a group benefit plan in place.

So when we launched our kitchen and started catering and doing food services, we said no, we're not going to do that. We're not fitting into that box. We're going to lead by example, and we're going to have a no-yelling kitchen. We're going to have a professional kitchen where everybody's treated fairly, equally, with respect, kindness and dignity. Nobody is spoken down to. I've actually had to fire management people, supervisors, because I found out they were acting that way, or I saw it myself. I walked into the kitchen and saw them acting that way, and it's like, nope, you don't belong in our kitchen. Go to a restaurant where that's still reasonably acceptable, and see how that goes.

We also put in place a group benefit plan for our staff, not just for management. Any of our staff who work more than 20 hours a week are eligible for a really well-priced benefit plan. We do that through the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, because it's affordable and it groups us with other employers across the country. It's comprehensive. Beautiful. Imagine you're a single person making minimum wage, working in our kitchen. All of a sudden, my three months have passed, and I can go to the dentist. I can pay for my prescriptions and just pay the dispensing fee. Holy smokes!

People who might not be making the wages they want to be making suddenly have access to these other benefits, and they know they can get food from us. It helps people grow, to know that they have a benefit plan behind them, that they have supportive employers, and that they have access to food whenever they need it. It helps make sure that people are growing into their lives, growing into their own independent success. And we've retained most of our staff for years and years because of it.

Stuart Murray (41:24): Yeah, for sure. Brandy, one of the things I want to explore a little bit is that you're a social enterprise. I'm meeting you for the first time on this podcast, but I can tell you are an incredible entrepreneur and an incredible leader in terms of what you're doing in this organization and in the community. Can you talk a bit about how you fund yourselves? I know you do catering and other things, but maybe get a bit more specific on how your business model works at Community Helpers Unite.

Brandy Bobier (42:05): We are a super straightforward social enterprise as a nonprofit. We have some programs that get grant funding, just small grants here and there to buy certain things we need. We work with the North End Community Renewal Corporation. They have a small annual grant fund that we take advantage of every year, so we can buy T-shirts for our staff, or if we have extra, some toques or hats for our staff. That adds to the togetherness, adds to the branding. And then things like volunteer honorariums. When we have youth coming into the kitchen who aren't sure if they want to work in kitchens, but they want to learn, they can volunteer in our kitchen and the honorarium is covered.

The province funded us through the From the Ground Up program. We were able to obtain some funding from them toward our kitchen build. Our production kitchen right now is in an old building, and we outgrew it a long time ago. We need more room, and we need some specific appliances for the upcycling that we do. Our new kitchen is being design-built specifically for the food we work with, the way we work, the production we want to increase, and the communities we feed. A mindfully built and planned kitchen is the next step for us, and the From the Ground Up program gave us a little bit of funding toward that.

We also have some grant applications out with the city, and a couple of partner applications with registered charities. As a nonprofit social enterprise, we can still partner with registered charities to apply for grants that we otherwise couldn't. One of our main partners in food recovery and distribution is the Chalmers Neighbourhood Renewal Corporation. Leilani, their director, and I wrote a couple of grants and put one into the Winnipeg Foundation. We're waiting to see what happens, because that will benefit both of our organizations. It would give them more capacity to take more food from us, and give us more capacity to make meals as well as give them food.

So it's all about those business relationships. Otherwise, the way we fund ourselves is 100 per cent through catering. We do an average of $2 to $3 million in catering a year.

Stuart Murray (44:39): Wow! Congratulations!

Brandy Bobier (44:41): Yeah, we're big.

Stuart Murray (44:43): No kidding! Congratulations.

Brandy Bobier (44:45): We cater citywide and up to two hours outside the city.

Stuart Murray (44:51): Oh, okay.

Brandy Bobier (44:52): That's full service, delivered. With the catering, we do everything from a 15-person workshop or a board meeting...

Stuart Murray (45:00): Yeah.

Brandy Bobier (45:01): ...all the way up to meals for 2,500 people at a community event.

Stuart Murray (45:04): Wow.

Brandy Bobier (45:05): For example, our partnership with the North End Community Renewal Corporation. For the last 24 or 25 years, they've put on Picnic in the Park in August. For the last four years, we've provided them with lunch for 2,000 people: hot dogs, chips and drinks. Not only do we provide the food, but we also set up our tents on site, and our volunteer teams come out with me, because I love serving at those big events. Community events are my favourite thing, community events and community walks. I love it. We have a group of about 22 volunteers who come out to that event. We set up our two tents, we run four service lines, and we start handing out the food until it's gone.

Stuart Murray (45:51): Wow! That's amazing. That's incredible.

Brandy Bobier (45:55): And the youth who come out to do it, we've had some of the same youth working with us for almost four years now. Every year they know Picnic in the Park comes, with those action therapy workers who lead them. They're like, "Yeah, we know August is coming around, and we're going to go and serve a bunch of food."

Stuart Murray (46:13): Wow. Brandy, it is extremely cool. I can't tell you how much I was looking forward to this conversation. From how I connected with you, and from your energy, I could tell this was going to be something I would enjoy, and I have.

I always use this expression, Brandy: as the sand in the hourglass runs to the end of our conversation, two things. One is, if somebody's listening to this podcast and says, "Wow, I am so excited to find ways to help out," what advice would you give them, whether with respect to CHU, Community Helpers Unite, or any other way around food? How can people get involved?

Brandy Bobier (47:03): I like to tell people to volunteer. Volunteerism is what got me where I am. I hate to date myself, but I think I've been volunteering for about 30 years in different aspects. Volunteerism is a great way to help out. It gives you something fulfilling that you can do, often on a regular basis, where it'll make you feel good and you'll be making a difference. Winnipeg is a giving city, but there are never enough volunteers. People will volunteer, but regular, recurring volunteers are amazing.

Outside of that, the only thing we ever look for is who wants to work with us, who wants to order catering from us, and what corporate sponsorships are out there. If you're a corporate person and you think Community Helpers Unite is doing wonderful things, and you want to know how to get involved, reach out. Reach out through our website, or reach out to me directly. My email is director@communityhelpersunite.ca. Check out our social media. Check out our website. And if you're interested in getting involved, we do offer tax receipts for monetary donations over a certain amount, because we have registered charity partners who will write those receipts for us. It's super easy to do. And otherwise, order catering.

Stuart Murray (48:25): Yeah. Okay.

Brandy Bobier (48:26): That's the best thing.

Stuart Murray (48:28): And your website, which I'll put into the notes, is...

Brandy Bobier (48:31): communityhelpersunite.ca.

Stuart Murray (48:33): I love that. Fantastic. So Brandy, I said two things, and that was one. The second thing is, when you agreed to do this podcast, and again, thank you so much for finding the time to do it, I really appreciate it, was there one question in the back of your mind where you said, "Man, I hope he asks me about this"? Something I haven't asked? Your plate's pretty big, I can tell that. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but maybe as we get toward the holiday season, as the weather starts to turn cold, is there anything at all you want to share?

Brandy Bobier (49:15): As we get into the holiday season... can I do a little promo?

Stuart Murray (49:15): Go for it.

Brandy Bobier (49:15): There are a number of different organizations and people we work with who are running different drives because it's the holidays. One is Karina Blumgren. She's an amazing volunteer in the community, and she runs her winter gloves and hats fundraiser. You can find it online. Also, Mitch Bourbonnière does Mitch's Socktober in October, but at 605 Main, or if you reach out to Mitch directly online or to me, they take donations of socks, mitts, hats and scarves year-round.

Stuart Murray (49:56): Children, adults, doesn't matter?

Brandy Bobier (50:00): Mostly adults. Honestly, mostly adults. But at the same time, anything works. Socks especially are always in need. Hygiene products too. If you're a travelling person, those small little bottles you get at hotels...

Stuart Murray (50:15): Put them in your bag, bring them back and donate them, right?

Brandy Bobier (50:18): Exactly. Bring them all back and drop them off.

Stuart Murray (50:20): Yeah, I hear you.

Brandy Bobier (50:22): Any kind of travel-size hygiene products, and also women's hygiene supplies, are all very, very welcome and very, very needed by a number of agencies. We're happy to take all of those things at our locations, or you can take them to any location you see fit. You can also use 211manitoba.ca for that. Look up hygiene products.

Stuart Murray (50:48): Wow, you are really promoting 211 Manitoba. That's fantastic.

Brandy Bobier (50:51): You know what? It's made my job a lot easier, honestly.

Stuart Murray (50:54): Isn't that interesting. Okay.

Brandy Bobier (50:56): As an organization that doesn't serve the public directly, 211 Manitoba has made my job easier, because it gives me one place I can send people to, and they can actually find resources.

Stuart Murray (51:06): That's fantastic. What was the address on Main Street, Brandy, that you mentioned just before?

Brandy Bobier (51:11): 605 Main is the building. There's a community walk that runs out of there twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 9:30 a.m. If you're interested in learning more about doing community work, community outreach, show up Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 9:30 a.m. and go for a walk with them. The Main Street Walkers are amazing. You'll meet some people who can tell you some good things, and you'll get to create some impact.

Stuart Murray (51:42): And are they primarily delivering food when they do the walk, Brandy?

Brandy Bobier (51:48): We provide them with hot meals and sandwiches for that walk, but they have everything. They have weather-appropriate clothing. They have socks. Sometimes somebody will bring smudge so the relatives can smudge. They'll bring bottles of water, and when it gets cold, we have a couple of ladies who like to bring hot chocolate. It's just a really great group of people who want to make a difference.

Stuart Murray (52:11): Well, again, I have to say I just love your approach. I love your energy. I love how you explained all of this, and the fact that you and your team are clearly, clearly making a difference. Brandy, thanks for doing this.

Brandy Bobier (52:25): Thank you so much.

Stuart Murray (52:26): I really, really appreciate you taking the time to share. And again, go to the website, Community Helpers Unite. It's a great website with lots of great information. Chalmers is on there, the catering, all that good stuff. So Brandy, thank you so much for joining us on Humans, On Rights.

Brandy Bobier (52:46): Thanks very much, Stuart. Thanks for having me.

Matt Cundill (52:48): Thanks for listening to Humans, On Rights. A transcript of this episode is available by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode. Humans, On Rights is recorded and hosted by Stuart Murray. Social media marketing by Buffy Davey. Music by Doug Edmond. For more, go to humanrightshub.ca.

Matt Cundill (53:09): Produced and distributed by the Sound Off Media Company.