It’s Christmastime, the halls are decked with holly, and the pantry is stacked with food for the festivities. This season, there always seems to be a lot more food about, and not all of it will get eaten. But not everyone is lucky enough to have a well-stocked larder at Christmas. Many poorer families will be hoping the cupboard’s not too bare this Christmas, and praying that they’ll have enough festive fare to go round. For these families, wasting food is a luxury they can’t afford. How do we redress this imbalance? Two Trinity graduates, Aoibheann O’Brien and Iseult Ward, may have found a novel way to redistribute the fare.
They have set up FoodCloud, a virtual foodbank that connects charities in need of food with businesses that have too much food. As O’Brien says, “we’re pairing up surplus with scarcity”.
“Any business with surplus food who registers with us can upload details of their food and a time for collection,” says O’Brien. “And then the charity texts back a code, and they collect it directly from the store. So we don’t touch the food - we just connect them up.”
FoodCloud isn’t looking for leftovers from your Christmas dinner, though, or uneaten food from your favourite restaurant.
“There’s a lot of food waste in homes and in catering, but from a food safety point of view, you can’t really work with that,” says O’Brien. “People can be mindful of it themselves. I think 30 per cent of food is wasted in the home, so we’ve got to be more prudent ourselves.”
FoodCloud’s main source of surplus food is supermarkets, says O’Brien, because their food stocks are more manageable in terms of food safety. The first supermarket to get on board was Tesco in Talbot Street, and now 77 Tescos across the country are part of the FoodCloud network, says O’Brien.
The two women met at a social enterprise event while studying in Trinity College Dublin - O’Brien was doing environmental science, and Ward was doing business and economics. O’Brien had been living in London, where a lot of work is being done around surplus food, so she was keen to try out some innovative ideas for redistributing food in Irish communities. They started FoodCloud in 2013; the company now has a staff of six, and has just been named Ireland’s top social entrepreneur in a recent international competition, Join Our Core, co-sponsored by Ben & Jerry’s.
The holiday period brings an added challenge, says O’Brien, because most food retailers close on Christmas Eve for two days.
“So this year we’re matching charities that are open over those two days with the Tesco stores, so that when their doors close the charities will go along and take surplus food from the stores. We did it last year and it worked pretty well, so we’re planning it again for this year.”
O’Brien tells a story from last year which illustrates how community power can be harnessed. When a worker from Whitefriar Community Centre went to Tesco in Baggot Street to pick up surplus food to make up food parcels, he found “crates of food, turkeys, hams and everything”.
“And he thought, it’s eight o’clock on Christmas Eve, what am I going to do? His family is living in the area, so he sent out a text to all of them saying, look, I’ve got a lot of stock here, and he set it up like a shop, and within half an hour everything was gone, to people who wouldn’t have had it otherwise. So that was a really powerful story.”
