Welland's one-day food drive returns Saturday — 68,000 pounds collected last year by more than 200 volunteers

By The Canadian Chronicle · Friday, November 6, 2026

Community · Ontario · The Canadian Chronicle

Published Friday, November 6, 2026 · 2 min read

On Saturday morning in Welland, the food drive comes to your front door. Residents across the city will leave bags and boxes of non-perishable food outside before 10 a.m., and an army of volunteers will spend the day collecting them.

A tradition since 1992

The Welland Food Drive has run every year since 1992. It is an independent, volunteer-led initiative, organized locally to increase food support for the people who need it most, working with the organizations that serve the hungry in Welland.

The timing is deliberate. The drive lands at the start of November, stocking local food bank shelves ahead of winter and the Christmas season, when demand is at its highest.

Last year's numbers

In 2025, Welland donated 68,000 pounds of food in a single day. The drive also raised $46,727.

More than 200 volunteers did the collecting. The drive's organizers describe it as one of the largest one-day food drives in Canada — a claim the 68,000 pounds backs up for a city of Welland's size.

How to take part

The instruction to residents is simple: leave a bag or box of non-perishable food outside your front door before 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, November 7. Volunteers handle the rest.

Welland's drive runs the same morning as food drives and collection campaigns opening across Ontario this month. It also lands in the week the Salvation Army reported 31 per cent of Canadians skipping or reducing meals over grocery costs — the local version of the answer to that number is a bag on a doorstep.

What the shelves need

The drive collects non-perishable food — the canned goods, pasta, rice and staples that food banks can store and distribute through the winter. Monetary donations raised alongside the food go to the same local organizations.

The need behind the drive is not abstract this year. The Salvation Army's 2026 analysis, published this week, found 31 per cent of Canadians have skipped or reduced a meal because they could not afford groceries, and 15 per cent have used community food supports — both the highest figures in the study's four-year history.

Welland's answer is organized at the level of a street: one morning, one bag per household that can manage it, and a volunteer network that has run the same route for more than three decades.