Q&A: Foodcloud connects local food sellers with charities

In this week’s Q&A Kehlan catches up with Iseult Ward from Foodcloud.

Foodcloud, which was established in August 2013, helps to connect supermarkets and food sellers with charities in their area.

This makes sure that foodstuffs, which may ordinarily be thrown out, are passed on to the charities who can use them.

Firstly, tell us what Foodcloud is all about?

Foodcloud is a social enterprise which connects businesses who have surplus food, with local charities in their community.

We have a platform and an app which helps businesses to quickly upload details of any food which they have left that they can’t sell but that is still perfectly good to eat.

Then a text message will go out to a local charity to notify them of the food that’s available.

Take, for example, foods that would be in storage like potatoes or carrots.

They will have a date, like a best before date, with a quality control mark to say that these goods are better before this date, but they’re not necessarily worse after.

When foodstuffs reach that date... food which is still edible and good to use is thrown out and wasted.

So, what we do is to allow a platform for them to get this perfectly good food to charities in their area.

Charities will get notified that there is a store in their area that has food for collection at a certain time.

The charity can then text back to confirm if they can collect the food.

We talked when you were just starting out, how have things developed since then?

Since we last talked we’ve been able to get a very definitive national footprint.

We now have a presence in twenty-seven counties around the country.

We have 150 supermarkets donating across Ireland, to 330 charities.

We have over 1.5 million meals equivalent which has been donated across Ireland.

However, we’re still working hard on getting more businesses on board along with more charities.

We have started getting a lot more interest from the food industry with different businesses getting in touch.

We’re really pushing out to get more charities and more authorities that have a food service and that could potentially benefit from this.

French councillor Arash Derambarsh successfully lobbied to bring a ban on supermarket food waste. Would you like to see something similar here?

That would be great if it happened here. However, there is one key difference between us and France.

They have a history of donating food to charities.

So, a lot of the infrastructure is there to facilitate that type of law.

In Ireland we still have work to do to create a much more efficient system.

If we can increase the ability and the capacity of the charities, we can then increase the number of people that can be helped with this.

So we need to introduce supports and incentives on both sides.

If we introduced this law, with the right infrastructure as well, we could make a huge difference and be in a position to tackle the problems on a national scale.

• www.foodcloud.ie