Growing-up, I've always had millions of "crazy" ideas whizzing around in my head, and some sort of enterprising activity on the go. Whether it was co-founding a Fair Trade initiative on the school grounds aged 13, receiving a distinction in Young Enterprise aged 15, or building an import/export eBay business aged 18.
I have to admit, despite the success of each of my ventures, I never thought of any of them as much more than an experiment, an adventure, a “let’s give this a go and see what happens” type of thing (or, upon moving to London for university, a means-to-an-end). Nevertheless, that didn’t stop the ideas from whizzing around, and never more so than the times I would see someone sleeping by the side of the road, going hungry, or begging for money and food.
Whenever I see that, something physical happens to me that I can only describe as a tightening, a clenching, a lump in my throat, which I just can’t ignore. It sends my brain into overdrive and it has done for as long as I can remember.
I start picturing how it would feel to be alone, lost, hungry and helpless while an army of well-loved, well-fed and well-dressed individuals march past me, averting their gaze. I think to myself – “what would that feel like, even just for 5 minutes?"
I’m lucky enough that I don’t know how this feels, not even for 5 minutes, but I’m overtly conscious that a rising number of people are experiencing how this feels every single minute, of every single day.
Because of this, at times I’ve found myself sat by the road-sides, listening to heart-breaking stories and feeling frustrated that I can’t offer much more than a warm smile, the change in my pockets or a sandwich from the local shop.
“There must be something I can do about this” “I must be able to come up with something bigger and more sustainable than what I’m doing right now.” So – I started to think-up some more ‘crazy’ ideas!
Now, I’ll be honest, most of these were actually crazy (not-to-mention wildly overcomplicated), but eventually, among them all was Foodinate – a simple, scalable, sustainable, meal-for-meal program. For every Foodinate-branded meal enjoyed in a participating restaurant, we would ensure a meal is provided for a local person in need - at no extra cost to the customer. I knew it wouldn’t be the be-all-and-end-all of my grand masterplan, but it would be a good place to start!
With that, I graduated from the University I worked so hard to get into, packed up the Psychology degree I may never use again, and went full steam ahead with my idea.
I launched Foodinate in 2016 and in less than 12 months of being in operation it has won 9 business awards, landed multiple full-page articles in the national press, and generated over 6,000 meals for homeless people across Manchester. In fact, we are already preparing to go national, with an ambitious target of 1,000,000 meals in the next 5 years.
