Within one community, there can be a business that’s throwing away perfectly good food and just around the corner there’s a charity that’s struggling to feed people in need,” says Iseult Ward of FoodCloud, a remarkable social enterprise which she co-founded with Aoibheann O’Brien in 2012. “We wanted to connect the two.”
Ward, who is 26, was studying business and economics at Trinity College, Dublin, where O’Brien, 31, was completing a masters in environmental science. Neither were particularly tech-savvy – they bonded over “a love for food and a distaste for waste” – but that didn’t deter them from using technology to address the problem. “We developed an app that would help businesses notify charities when they had surplus food available,” says Ward.