Menus for good

Last month, Canadian not-for-profit Mealshare made its official launch in Toronto. It’s is a straightforward initiative that’s so smart, you’ll be sorry you didn’t think of it yourself: buy a designated menu item from a partner restaurant, and Mealshare will donate a meal to a person in need. One for one.

“We don’t see any reason that every restaurant shouldn’t offer Mealshare items,” says co-founder Andrew Hall.

Mealshare, founded in 2013, is currently active in six cities across the country — Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Halifax — and 39 small communities, and has partnered with charities including Breakfast Clubs of Canada, Feed the Children and now, in Toronto, the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre. The organization teams up with charities that are already serving meals, Hall explains; restaurants pay the organization for every Mealshare-sponsored item they sell, and Mealshare uses most of that money to purchase a meal for someone in need.

There are 16 restaurants in Toronto that feature Mealshare items on their menus, including Top Chef Canada winner Carl Heinrich’s Richmond Station and all three locations of the popular Terroni chain; in Vancouver, the list of participating restaurants is 30 deep. Hall says that it was at first a struggle to get eateries to sign onto the program; now, “it’s a mix of us approaching restaurants, and them approaching us.

“We aim to work with the top restaurants in each city that are already pushing the industry ahead,” Hall says. “We figure that if we can get the top restaurants to participate, we’ll have others follow what the successful restaurants are doing.”

Mealshare is currently active in about 200 restaurants across the country, and Hall says there’s hope that the charity will expand further. “Next year, we’ll see which cities are the best targets for more growth,” he says. “It’s been an exciting couple years so far and we can’t wait to see how far we can take the program.”