A college project devised by two students to redistribute food for sale in retail outlets close to its sell-by date has become a remarkable success in Ireland, so much so the concept is catching on in Britain with the potential to be adopted throughout the world.

Aoibheann O'Brien still remembers the first box of food five years ago. She and co-founder Iseult Ward picked it up at a farmers' market and dropped it off to a youth services centre in Dublin.

The delivery was a dummy run for their college project FoodCloud. It became a tech start-up which connected businesses that had surplus food with charities that needed food. Five years on 8,300 tonnes of food, more than 18 million meals, have been diverted from landfills. FoodCloud employs 30 people tackling food waste from almost 2,000 businesses in Ireland and the UK.

Until late 2016, FoodCloud transactions involved small consignments of food collected by individual charities from the delivery bays of supermarkets and shops to serve the most disadvantaged people.

Their new headquarters, a large warehouse near Dublin, is a food redistribution hub and call centre. In the UK, more than 1,600 branches of Tesco and three Waitrose stores are now posting donations of food.

 "There's a lot of energy and loads of people behind it," adds Aoibheann O'Brien. "People felt intuitively that this was a really good thing to do."

https://food.cloud/