Harrison Gardner

Welcome to the Tools at Hand podcast.

My name is Harrison Gardner, and today I've got with me Isolt Ward.

Isolt is the co-founder and CEO of FoodCloud, a social enterprise that she started with Yvonne O'Brien while they were students at Trinity.

Since 2013, FoodCloud has redistributed the equivalent of over 400 million meals.

connecting surplus food from retailers and food businesses to charities and community groups across Ireland, the UK and beyond.

In 2024 alone, they rescued 15 million euros worth of food.

In my opinion, it's one of the most exciting businesses that's been built in Ireland in the last few years.

And I'm really grateful that you came in.

Maybe we could start with a little bit of an origin story of you right before you started Food Cloud.

What was the moment right before Food Cloud came into being that you were feeling the things that you were feeling and I guess the problem that you were trying to solve?

Wow.

I have a lot of questions, but the first one that just comes to mind there is, how does that even happen?

How does it happen that there is so much food that you're calling surplus food, which is almost a euphemism for something that's usually getting thrown in the bin.

How does it even happen that so much food gets created, brought to shops, and then eventually ends up in a landfill?

Can we talk about gleaning just for a second?

Yeah, of course.

So the idea is that the machine goes through and does the machine's job and then people come through and basically collect all the waste that the machine missed.

Because it's just being efficient or because it just drops a few things on the way?

And is that still the case?

But it's an amazing, it's an amazing process for someone to go and do that.