FoodCloud was a college project set up by Aoibheann O’Brien and Iseult Ward. It later became a tech start-up that connected businesses who had surplus food with charities who needed food.
Five years on 8,300 tonnes of food, more than 18 million meals, have been diverted from landfill and FoodCloud employs 30 people tackling food waste from almost 2,000 businesses in Ireland and the UK.
Until late 2016, FoodCloud transactions involved small consignments of food collected by individual charities from the delivery bays of supermarkets and shops to serve the most disadvantaged people. In October 2013, they got their big break when supermarket group Tesco Ireland came on board. Now 274 Irish food retailers connect with 303 charities through FoodCloud.
Their warehouse in Cork and Galway takes pallets of food from Irish businesses including supermarket distribution centres and food producers and deliver it to charities. Amongst the vast haul are two pallets of Nutrigrain bars, which would have ended up in landfill or an anaerobic digester because their best before date is looming. In a cold store, whole ducks and turkeys from Aldi’s Easter range are stored, frozen down to extend their life. It’s a long way from that first box of bread, milk and sausages.
They quickly learned of the barriers in the modern food system to that simple idea of connecting surplus to scarcity.
Ultimately, they would like to see all food waste eliminated. In the meantime, they try and ensure surplus food gets to people who need it.
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Source: The Straits Times, 24 June 2017