Every day, FoodCloud employees unload boxes of produce that would otherwise have been thrown away at a huge warehouse in Tallaght.
It is one of three Irish depots used by the social enterprise to sort corporate food donations before they are passed on to charities. From early in the morning all sorts of things arrive in vans – pallets of fruit and vegetables, sacks of potatoes, packet after packet of pasta, rice and soup.
Along with hubs in Galway and Cork, FoodCloud’s Dublin storage center is part of a distribution network that saves thousands of tonnes of food every year. Large volumes are processed through the warehouses, while the organization’s app allows charities to collect directly from retailers. It estimates that over 140 million meals have been saved since its inception in 2013.
Co-founders Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O’Brien could never have imagined the current scale of the operation when they accepted their first donation as students a decade ago. On their first delivery run, a box of groceries was donated from a farmers market in Glasnevin to Don Bosco Care, a charity that supports vulnerable young people. A number of other partners came on board, but they soon had trouble getting enough food.
The turning point came when the pair were offered an in-store pilot at Tesco on Talbot Street in Dublin, leading to a nationwide partnership with the retailer in 2014. Today, FoodCloud technology also facilitates food distribution in the UK, Czech Republic and Slovakia as Ireland. It works with more than 600 charities and community groups in this country alone.
Ward has noticed a significant shift in attitudes towards food waste. “When we started FoodCloud, there wasn’t much awareness of the social and environmental impact,” she says. “When you were a retailer or at home, if you threw away food, it was seen more as a financial loss. We had to convey to the companies that this is not just an economic problem.”
She says companies are now also aware that good environmental practices are important to secure investments. “Food donations would normally have been considered CSR [corporate social responsibility] Primarily initiative and not the opportunity to be more environmentally friendly. I think the financial industry’s increasing emphasis on environmental responsibility means that companies have learned to look at waste differently.”
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“Businesses have learned to look at waste differently”: Iseult Ward of FoodCloud. Image by Naoise Culhane
The need for change is clear, but it is not an easy task. Globally, food waste is responsible for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, making it an even bigger contributor to climate change than aviation.
More than a quarter of food is wasted in the global supply chain, from farm to manufacturing to individual households.
Ireland generates 1.2 million tonnes of food waste annually, according to estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). About 45 percent of that comes from processing and manufacturing, with the commercial sector, including restaurants and retailers, accounting for 32 percent.
Households are responsible for 23 percent – about 250,000 tons per year, which corresponds to 150 kg of waste per household. The average household throws away around €700 worth of groceries every year.
FoodCloud is one of a growing number of tech-driven companies working to address the problem. Another popular app is Too Good To Go, where customers in restaurants, cafés and supermarkets can buy “great bags” of leftover food at heavily discounted prices. The app, which is available across Europe and North America, has gained over 150,000 registered users in Ireland since launching here in October 2021. Hundreds of companies have also signed up, including Fresh, Spar, KC Peaches and Applegreen.
Reducing food waste is necessary to fight climate change, but for many retailers, the money saved is still a huge motivator. Too Good To Go co-founder Jamie Crummie sees the platform as a safety net for grocery stores in uncertain times.
“It’s difficult for businesses to predict what traffic will be like on any given day or week,” he says. “The feedback we get from our partners is that it allows them to avoid a lot of sunk costs. They spend less money on waste collection but also make money from food that would have been thrown away at the end of the day.”
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“Header numbers are hard to predict”: Too Good To Go’s Jamie Crummie. Photo by Peter Varga
Other ventures encourage volunteers to collect and distribute surplus food themselves.
Olio, a food-sharing app also launched in Ireland last year, has partnered with Tesco to allow users to pick up groceries that cannot be donated to charities. Volunteers take the items home and then make them available for collection in the app. Wednesday night offerings at Rathmines included baguettes, chicken wraps, donuts and bacon rashers.
The app has received praise from many users, but it is not without its downsides. Some have expressed frustration at volunteers having to dispose of food themselves when not requested, shifting responsibility away from large retailers.
Caitlin Weich, who blogs about sustainability under the name Wasteless Wanderess, is a regular user in Dublin but has pointed out that these initiatives are not addressing the problem of overproduction.
As she wrote earlier this year: “Rather than having Tesco and other partner companies bear the cost of disposing of their waste – either to biogas power generation initiatives or to industrial composting plants – they are now handing their waste over to Olio Food Waste Heroes. . These people are volunteers who take on Tesco’s waste and do the job of distributing the groceries that Tesco bought and didn’t distribute.
“A multimillion-euro company can avoid the consequences of its overproduction-based system and give itself a pat on the back for ‘avoiding’ food waste.”
Weich argues that corporate responsibility must consist of avoiding waste in the first place. “I get at least one giant bag of fresh pastries in every single Olio collection,” she wrote in the blog post. “So why do [retailers] always making more than they can sell? They do this because nice full shelves with a wide selection is a selling point for them. It makes them money. Showing the abundance of products people can buy and showing that you never have to go to another store because all the shelves are always full adds value to your offering. It gets more people going there and dropping off their money.”
Nonetheless, platforms like Olio are helping to change our perception of waste – and in particular the notion of ‘best before’ labels as a sign of food safety.
EPA research shows that more than half of Irish consumers throw away food because it is past its best before date. SuperValu and Marks & Spencer recently removed the best before date from some fruits and vegetables to reduce waste. The move was supported by Safefood, which states that foods that have passed their best-before date are perfectly safe to eat, even if they’ve started to lose some of their flavor and texture. However, products must be consumed before their expiration date to avoid health risks.
Positive Carbon, a Roscommon-based start-up, takes a different approach. The Enterprise Ireland-backed company, founded in 2020 by former FoodCloud employees Mark and Aisling Kirwan, provides waste surveillance scanners to commercial kitchens across the country. Its technology uses artificial intelligence and laser sensors to track everything that ends up in kitchen bins, giving restaurants and hotels a clearer picture of their waste habits. The data enables companies to optimize shopping and preparation habits, resulting in less food being thrown away.
Positive Carbon’s partners include large catering companies such as KSG and Gather & Gather, as well as university and hotel food providers.
Mark Kirwan, a software engineer, says food service companies rarely keep track of what’s being thrown away — a missed opportunity given that about 60 percent of food waste in the sector is classified as avoidable, according to the EPA. “Supermarkets are always monitoring what’s going in and out, but restaurants typically have little to no data on these things,” he says.
One participating hotel recently noted that its pizzas were only half eaten and large portions typically ended up in kitchen bins. It’s making them smaller now, to an extent it hopes will help reduce waste. Another restaurant reduced its fish orders after realizing large quantities were being thrown away each week, saving thousands of euros.
Positive Carbon has received investments from APX, a German venture capital firm backed by Porsche and media conglomerate Axel Springer, and Austrian investment firm Gateway Ventures. Entry into the European market is planned, initially with a focus on Germany, Austria and Italy.
FoodCloud also has expansion in mind. The company recently received funding from Irish Aid to conduct a pilot study in Africa in partnership with the Global Food Banking Network.
It will look at four countries – Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana – that have been identified as potentially suitable and then select one for a pilot project.
“There are food banks in these countries that are doing a great job, but this type of technology could be a great additional support for them,” says Ward. “It is an excellent opportunity to share what we have built and developed here in Ireland.”
However, she is aware that food insecurity is also a problem in Ireland. “Many of our charity partners here are seeing increased demand for their services due to the increased cost of living,” she says. “It’s a trend that we expect could increase in the coming months, especially in winter.”
The growing need for food donations speaks to a sad new reality for many – something that cannot be forgotten, she says, amid celebrations of new milestones.
https://www.independent.ie/news/environment/the-waste-warriors-saving-millions-of-meals-from-the-bin-41892263.html The waste warriors save millions of meals from the bin