Ottawa's À la carte food recovery program has hit a major milestone, and the organizers behind it want the rest of the city's hospitality industry to help push it further. Ottawa Tourism and La Tablée des Chefs announced that the program has redistributed 500,000 meals to people experiencing food insecurity in the community over its first two years, and they're now looking to expand it to include all hospitality organizations across the city.
How the program has grown
À la carte launched in 2024 with eight founding partners. It has since grown to 23 local hospitality organizations, and in total the program has diverted 150,000 kilograms of food from landfills while conserving 148 million litres of water. Ottawa Tourism and La Tablée des Chefs marked the program surpassing the 500,000-meal mark as a major milestone worth celebrating with the hospitality partners who made it possible.
What organizers are saying
Michael Crockatt, President and CEO of Ottawa Tourism, said the program's growth shows what the city's hospitality sector can do when it pulls in the same direction. "It demonstrates what is possible when an entire industry comes together around a shared purpose," he said.
Nancy Champagne, General Manager of The Lord Elgin Hotel, said her team wasn't sure they'd be able to take part when they first heard about the program. "When we first looked at it, we were like, oh no, we can't do that, we're a small team," she said. Her comment points to one of the barriers organizers are now trying to clear away as they court new partners: smaller operations that assume food recovery requires more staff or logistics than they can spare.
Jean-François Archambault, founder of La Tablée des Chefs, laid out the program's broader ambition plainly. "The ambition is to get everybody who has excess food to be donating it," he said. That's the pitch organizers are now making to hospitality businesses across Ottawa that haven't yet joined, whether they're hotels, restaurants, caterers or event venues with food left over at the end of a service.
Why it matters for Ottawa
For a city with a sizeable hospitality and tourism sector, the program offers a direct way to redirect food that would otherwise go to waste toward Ottawa residents who need it. The 150,000 kilograms diverted from landfills and 148 million litres of water conserved are environmental wins, but the headline number for most Ottawa residents will be the 500,000 meals that reached people facing food insecurity in the community, meals that came from kitchens already operating across the city rather than from a new charity drive.
What's next
La Tablée des Chefs will host the second Ottawa edition of its La Grande Tablée gala later this month, giving the program another chance to raise its profile among hospitality businesses that have yet to sign on.
Sources: Ottawa Business Journal, Ottawa Tourism (official release)
