In 2025, the global network of food banks accomplished something remarkable: it rescued half a million tonnes of food that would otherwise have gone to waste, converted it into two billion meals, and delivered those meals to 40.5 million people—more than the combined populations of New York and Los Angeles.
The figures, published in the annual report of the Global FoodBanking Network (GFN), reflect a year of unprecedented scale in the food banking sector. Deepened partnerships between food banks, farmers, and retailers redirected surplus and imperfect produce away from landfill and toward families in need, at a scale the sector has never seen before.
The environmental math is equally striking. Intercepting half a million tonnes of food prevented approximately two million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions from entering the atmosphere—roughly equivalent to taking 473,000 cars off the road for a year. Every meal served is both a human impact and a climate one.
"Food banks—ever agile, responsive and resilient—continued to serve as safety nets around the world, connecting local communities to nutritious food, despite the challenges," said GFN president Lisa Moon.
The 2 billion meals figure came as GFN member food banks served 2.5 million more people in 2025 than in 2024. The growth reflects both improved collection and distribution infrastructure and the expansion of food banking as a model in regions where the concept is newer. Food banking has spread rapidly across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa over the past decade, and those networks are now contributing meaningfully to global totals.
The GFN, which coordinates food banking organizations across more than 40 countries, has spent years building the systems that make large-scale food rescue possible: cold storage infrastructure, partnerships with major supermarket chains, agreements with agricultural producers to accept cosmetically imperfect produce, and logistics networks that can move perishable food quickly. The 2025 numbers show those investments paying off in the most direct way possible.
Food banking is sometimes characterized as a stopgap—a temporary measure while structural poverty and food insecurity are addressed through policy and economic change. The GFN is clear that food banks are not a solution to hunger, but a tool for communities while longer-term solutions are built. What the 2025 numbers show is how much good those tools can do in the meantime.
Behind every statistic is a logistical chain: a farmer who called a food bank instead of plowing under a surplus crop, a volunteer who sorted donated goods on a Saturday morning, a driver who delivered meals to a distribution point across town, a family who received food when they needed it. Two billion times, in 2025, that chain held.
Forty million people fed. Two billion meals served. Half a million tonnes of food rescued from landfill. The numbers are almost too large to picture—but they are built from individual acts of generosity and coordination, stacked up into something that genuinely changed lives.
