On Cloud 9 with Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O'Brien

You might think that addressing Kofi Annan, pitching to Richard Branson or being named among Time Magazine’s “Next Generation” leaders might factor in Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O’Brien’s pinch-me moments since co-founding FoodCloud in 2013.

Today, though, they seem more thrilled to talk about what has just come through the doors of their food depot – a consignment of Lindt chocolate bunnies.

As the award-winning social entrepreneurs gamely pose in a fridge for a photo, we scout around to see what else is in stock: Alpro almond milk and chia seeds, tins of sweetcorn, cannellini beans and chopped tomatoes, bags of pasta, potatoes and turnips, boxes of Rice Krispies and Cornflakes, Glenilen yoghurts, Dubliner Irish cheese – the list goes on.

One time, they were even offered 600,000 peanut bars.

“I do get excited walking around the depot looking at the food,” admits Iseult.

“That could have been wasted,” qualifies Aoibheann.

And this is precisely the problem that FoodCloud aims to tackle. Each year as a nation, we throw away one million tonnes of food despite the fact that one in eight Irish people suffers from food poverty.

What does FoodCloud do?

FoodCloud brings businesses and charities together to redistribute food from those who have too much to those who have too little. It does this through an easy-to-use app, working with 800 businesses, including Tesco and Aldi, and 2,300 charities across Ireland and the UK, with over four million meals redistributed to date and counting. Which is rather remarkable considering that FoodCloud started out as a college project in 2012 with just one farmers’ market and one local charity.

While living in Dublin, Aoibheann and Iseult both have roots in rural Ireland.

Raised in Portumna, Co Galway, Aoibheann’s father Michael is a vet with the Department of Agriculture. She initially studied law and accounting in UL, before moving to London to work in investment banking, where she first became aware of organisations trying to tackle food waste in the UK.

But when she returned to Dublin to study for a master’s in environmental science at Trinity, she found that there was no equivalent movement here.

“There was very little happening in the whole area of surplus food in Ireland,” she recalls.

Iseult grew up in Phibsboro in Dublin, but her father is from Donegal and her mother is from Kerry. Mindful of the economy in the early days of the recession in 2009, she chose to study business and economics at Trinity where she first discovered the concept of social enterprise.

“I think everybody at the time had become very disillusioned by the for-profit sector and also, to an extent, the charity sector,” she says.

“The idea of being able to take the benefits and the best practice from both to be able to create an enterprise that actually put people and communities first but was also commercially viable – I was really attracted to that.”

An event for would-be social entrepreneurs in February 2012 brought the pair together and that June they facilitated the first donation of leftover – but high-quality – food from the Honest2Goodness market in Glasnevin to a local youth centre.

“It was very much a college project but it really inspired us both to say: ‘Right, if this is one farmers’ market in Dublin, can you imagine all the manufacturers, all the production, all the supermarkets around the country? But how can we actually do this at scale?’,” says Aoibheann.

Basically, the idea behind FoodCloud was to develop technology to allow a retailer to upload details of whatever surplus food they wished to donate that was still fit for human consumption (eg fresh produce that would not be sold the next day, short-dated product, slightly damaged packaging or excess product due to a mistake in ordering) with a time period for collection. A text message would then be sent automatically to a charity in the area, which would collect it directly from the business.

Challenges

To bring it from concept to reality, however, Aoibheann and Iseult faced many challenges – from developing an easy-to-use communication system to getting a handle on the nitty-gritty logistics. For example, if a shop wanted to donate surplus frozen products, what local charity would have the facilities to store them?

Fortunately, they had the support of the LaunchBox and LaunchPad accelerator programmes at Trinity. So, in October 2013, they got their big break when Tesco agreed to trial FoodCloud in their Talbot St store in Dublin.

“They were quite immediately interested and fortunately took a leap of faith in two recent graduates and felt that they would like to see it working in a store,” says Iseult.

“We worked very closely with them to develop a solution that would really work for that store, and once we were happy with how it was working in that store then we expanded the trial to 18 stores over six months.”

Indeed, such was its success that after six months FoodCloud had its first national contract with the supermarket chain, and after impressing Tesco CEO Dave Lewis, FoodCloud was launched in Tesco stores in the UK in January, with an average of 60 stores adopting the technology every month.

“We’re aiming to be in all of their large stores in the UK by the end of this year – that’s 900 stores,” says Iseult. “And then by the end of 2017 we’re hoping to be in all of their stores, so that’s over 3,000 stores – and then also bring other retailers on in the UK next year.”

FoodCloud is also working with 79 Aldi stores, family-owned supermarkets like Pettitt’s SuperValu in Wexford and independent bakeries and cafes across Ireland. Participants pay a fee to use the service but benefit by reducing their overall food waste costs while also allowing them to contribute to their communities and fulfil certain obligations, eg as members of the Bord Bia Origin Green programme.

Meanwhile, charity partners include groups that provide services like breakfast and after-school clubs and meals on wheels, organisations like St Vincent De Paul who support single-parent and low-income families, women’s refuge centres, homeless hostels etc. For example, COPE Galway uses FoodCloud donations in innovative ways, including cookery classes to teach people how to prepare a healthy meal on a tight budget, while KARE in Raheny, Co Dublin, has been able to open two community kitchens thanks to savings made using FoodCloud.

But having made a significant impact at retail level, Aoibheann and Iseult now want to go a step further and work with farmers, producers and distributors.

To this end, they have opened three industry-standard warehouses in Dublin, Cork and Galway to allow FoodCloud to take larger donations – which to date have ranged from 11 pallets of frozen yoghurt to 40 pallets of sparkling water – and redistribute them in more manageable quantities to charities, with full food safety and traceability from start to finish.

Charities pay a small subscription fee called a shared maintenance fee, while the FoodCloud hubs also receive Government funding for salaries for the depot staff and have also benefitted from corporate and individual sponsorship, eg JP McManus funded the fridges for the hub in Cork. Volunteers in Dublin and Cork also help to distribute food at retail level where charities do not have access to transport for collections and deliveries.

Working with the agri community

Aoibheann and Iseult hope that the initiative will help tackle waste further down the food chain, hand in hand with the agri community.

“I suppose our real ambition is that you could be an egg farmer in west Cork, you could be a distribution centre in Naas, you could be in Lakelands Dairies in Monaghan and if you have surplus food that’s still good to eat and there’s a little bit of a window there, we can work with you to make sure that we’re using it to address some societal problems that we have,” explains Aoibheann.

Indeed, both women believe that Ireland can build on its reputation for agriculture and food production to become a global leader in addressing food waste. In a sobering statistic, 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted internationally, while 1 billion people do not have enough to eat.

And while it might be just the start, Aoibheann O’Brien and Iseult Ward certainly deserve to be on cloud nine with all they have achieved with FoodCloud.

For further information, visit www.foodcloud.ie