Iseult Ward – Solving a Food Crisis

In 2012 Iseult Ward, a student at Trinity College in Dublin Ireland, launched a platform dedicated to helping connect food suppliers with non-profit organizations to help cut down on unnecessary food waste. Growing up, Ward lived in a socioeconomically deprived area, which brought the issue of hunger much closer to home for her and was where her passion for the cause originated. She was appalled by the idea that there was so much food waste in the world when right down the street were people who desperately needed something to eat. It was a terribly paradoxical situation, and one she was determined to help with.

Her first launch, an app called Foodiverse, which worked to connect a local farmer’s market with a neighboring homeless shelter, fell flat on its face. There was only a single donation of courgetti and some brie soup, which unfortunately was not enough traffic to be genuinely helpful to the shelter.

Obviously, this was very discouraging; however, just a year later, in 2013, she received backing from Tesco, as well as an alliance with the store itself. This time the platform was launched as FoodCloud and it has remained that way since. By 2017, FoodCloud was providing close to a million meals a month through its redistribution process. That was only the beginning though, and today that number has jumped to 338,900,000, which is equivalent to roughly 425,528 tons of surplus food.  Not only that, but the platform helped to save organizations nearly two million euros through their partnerships with more than 8,000 different non-profits.

Although this is largely an international organization that affects the UK, Ireland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, FoodCloud has partnerships with numerous massive grocery stores including shops like Aldi.  Hopefully one day, FoodCloud will be able to extend its borders, helping to alleviate socioeconomic deprivation all over the world.