JACK, EMMA AND JACQUES IN MILAN

On 5-7 March, our friends Jack and Emma from FoodCloud, and Jacques, President of the European Food Banks Federation, came for a visit in Milan. The purpose of the visit was an exchange of knowledge between the three countries - Belgium, Ireland and Italy - to encourage the recovery of surplus food and to promote a better management of the Fund for European Aid to the most Deprived (FEAD).

The history of FoodCloud is quite recent and stems from the meeting between two young university students - Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O'Brien - who had the intuition of finding a new way to recover surplus food from the supermarkets in Dublin. They decided to develop an app in order to connect the supermarkets - Tesco, Aldi and LIDL - with associations that deal with people in need. The app has also been developed in the UK where FoodCloud collaborates with Tesco and Waitrose. To date, FoodCloud has saved 12,961,216 kg of food from waste in Ireland and the UK - where it collaborates with FareShare - supporting more than 7,500 charity and community groups and collaborating with 4,000 food and retail partners. Moreover, thanks to the collaboration with Jack, who directed CrossCare in the Archdiocese of Dublin, they developed FoodCloud Hubs which operates with three warehouses in Cork, Galway and Dublin.

This visit was not only a pleasant opportunity to see Jack again, an old friend of Banco Alimentare, but also Emma, Chief Operating Officer at FoodCloud, presented us how their model works: a web platform supported by a call centre that allows to get the benefits of digital services without renouncing a relational involvement with the different players: retailers and charitable organizations. The results are impressive!

In addition to the logistical and management aspects, we focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and how food banks can contribute to achieve them. For instance, Goal 1 (End poverty in all its forms everywhere), Goal 2 (End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture) but also Goal 12.3 (By 2030, halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses). It was therefore an opportunity to explain to Jack and Emma the project Impatto+, developed by Banco Alimentare in collaboration with Fondazione Cariplo and Avanzi - Sostenibilità per Azioni, which consists in structuring a process to improve the knowledge of the impact of Banco Alimentare in the environmental field, training its employees and volunteers, and recognition in the country.

The days spent together involved a mutual exchange of knowledge and then we accompanied our guests to the headquarters of Banco Alimentare Lombardia to spend a day with our volunteers and see how they manage the activities of recovery and redistribution of surplus food within the Lombard headquarters.

Jacques, on the other hand, presented us a software for the management of the FEAD developed by the Belgian Federation of Food Banks, which is based on the monitoring and control needs of public authorities and can also provide data and information about the impact of food aid and social inclusion among the most marginalized. It is a tool which is fostering an operative dialogue between public authorities and those working in the field, improving the efficiency of interventions while documenting the need for food aid for millions of citizens at risk of severe material deprivation in the EU.

The competence and passion communicated by Jack, Emma and Jacques make us hope for possible future collaborations between Banco Alimentare, FoodCloud and the Belgian Federation of Food Banks!