The Food-Sharing App That Helps Hundreds of Irish Charities Just Went International

One of the crucial skills of a true leader is the ability to build on her own success. For the past two years, that’s exactly what Iseult Ward, an Irish social entrepreneur and one of TIME’s Next Generation Leaders, has been doing. As the co-founder and CEO of FoodCloud, a food-sharing service that facilitates food donations to charities, Ward has been instrumental in tackling food waste and fighting hunger across Ireland. What’s more, on Thursday, supermarket giant Tesco U.K. announced that they would be partnering with the Irish service to help people throughout Britain as well.

The FoodCloud service works like this: Supermarkets or bakeries, which often have excess food at the end of the day, can sign up and use the service’s app to upload details of any leftover food they wish to donate. A text message is then sent to local charities and if staff at a charity want to accept the donation, they can text back and collect the food.

The service originally launched in Dublin in Oct. 2013, before spreading throughout Ireland in 2014 with the help of a partnership with Tesco Ireland, one of the biggest supermarket chains in the country. When TIME first profiled Ward as a Next Generation Leader, in November of last year, she said that she was hoping to expand FoodCloud into Britain one day.

Less than a year later, that goal is being realized as Ward and FoodCloud co-founder Aoibheann O’Brien have teamed up with U.K.-based charity FoodShare to trial a FareShare FoodCloud app in Tesco supermarkets in Britain. The partnership will see British-based stores using the app technology that Ward and O’Brien use for their Irish service in order to connect with the FareShare’s network of charities in need, which includes homeless hostels, women’s refuges and breakfast clubs for disadvantaged children.

According to Tesco’s own figures, their U.K. operations saw 55,400 tons of food go to waste last year — about 30,000 tons of which could have otherwise been eaten. Though the U.K. trial with FareShare FoodCloud will start small, in just 10 stores throughout the U.K., it could soon mirror FoodCloud’s success in Ireland. Ward first approached Tesco Ireland unsure of what to expect — “we literally just went into a Tesco and said that we had heard feedback from charities and we [want to start] working with you,” she says — but that move soon saw a successful trial run and then a national expansion throughout Ireland, helping more than 300 charities across the country.

Ward is excited to work with FareShare in order to bring the FoodCloud “solution in to the U.K. to ensure that more charities can benefit.” Bu harnessing that hunger to do more, Ward is working to stamp out hunger altogether.

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