Kate Webb - building a climate movement through hope and people-focused marketing

Meet Kate Webb, the new Head of Marketing and Communications at FoodCloud, a leading Irish social enterprise tackling one of the biggest contributors to climate change - food waste.

Kate unpacks the marketing strategies driving their impact — a must-read for anyone building a sustainability or mission-led brand:

• why brand activations and real-life experiences are key for sparking deeper in-person connections and inspiring awareness and action.

• how social media works best when real people — not brands — lead the conversation.

• how the most powerful marketing tactic in the fight against climate change is giving people hope and agency.

• and so much more…

FoodCloud connects businesses with surplus food to charities and community groups that need it. With a groundbreaking tech platform at its core, FoodCloud is rewriting the food waste story - turning surplus food into social impact at scale.

Since it started in 2013, FoodCloud has saved an astounding 150,000+ tonnes of food from being wasted - the equivalent of 350+ million meals. This food gets redistributed to more than 650 charities and communities in need each year in Ireland and over 4,000 internationally. By 2030 FoodCloud aims to have rescued enough food to have provided 1 billion meals.

It’s a large-scale social enterprise. The latest accounts for FoodCloud show income of almost €13 million in 2024, coming from a diverse mix of revenue streams, grants and donations. All income is reinvested back into their mission of tackling food waste.

And did I mention it was founded by a duo of power women - Aoibheann O’Brien and Iseult Ward.

If you’re serious about scaling a mission-led business through smart, human marketing - this conversation is your roadmap.

1. Can you share the story of how you first got into marketing?

One of my first jobs was with Nike, that’s where my marketing career really took off. I then moved to the UK and worked with big companies like JD Sports designing ranges and working out how they looked on-shelf.

I later worked in visual merchandising for Adidas building out what our product looked like in stores all over the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. I worked in New Zealand for the Rugby World Cup in 2012 and built a load of product and designs around the All Blacks rugby team. When they won the World Cup, I felt like I was on top of the world.

I moved back to Ireland and got a job with William Grant & Sons, an independent, family-owned distiller. I worked on Sailor Jerry, a counter-culture tattoo vibes rum. I created a video with Iggy Pop filmed in his incredible Miami home. I also shot a video with Paul Simonon from The Clash on a boat on the Thames to promote our clothing range.

We had decent budgets which allowed us to develop large-scale activations with global reach.

2. You’ve recently come on board as the Head of Marketing and Communications at FoodCloud, a leading Irish social enterprise. What made you decide to work for an impact-driven company?

I was made redundant from William Grant & Sons in 2024. It was tough and I did a lot of soul searching for my next step. I realised that in work, and outside of work, I was on a lot of DEI committees. I was also doing loads of fundraising for good causes, that was my joy.

I’d known about FoodCloud for years. I loved their work. I loved the fact that two women [Aoibheann O’Brien and Iseult Ward] got off their asses to tackle the issue of food waste. They had the smarts to understand that an app would help redistribute surplus food properly way before anyone else was using apps in this way.

In my first meeting in FoodCloud the focus was on impact. I felt so energised. Our end goal is always the impact we have on the 650+ charities we serve in Ireland and the 4000+ charities globally. If the impact of your work is helping people, then you go home feeling like you’ve done a good day’s work.

3. What does a typical day in the life as Head of Marketing and Communications at FoodCloud look like?

This week, I was at the Ploughing Championships. Next week, I’m attending the All-island Food Poverty Conference and a networking event for nonprofit leaders. I think a lot of marketers will tell you that the reason why we all love it is because no day is the same.

Day-to-day, I work in the FoodCloud offices above our Dublin Hub. We’ve got a hub in Dublin, Cork and Galway, the warehouses where the surplus food is received from businesses and distributed to charities.

A typical day there would be meeting all the teams at FoodCloud: our volunteering team, fundraising team, operations team, our funders and donors. That’s the nice thing about a marketing function, you get to work with every single team in the business.

The goal is to increase the impact. So the marketing team is working on finding solutions to things like: How could we get more volunteers or drivers to transport the food? How can we find more food companies to donate surplus product?

4. What marketing platforms or tactics are driving the best results for FoodCloud right now - name your top two?

One big tactic we’re moving more into is people-focused communications - bringing the human element to life. We’re focusing on close-ups of our people in action: handling food, at the charity, in the vans. We’re capturing the behind-the-scenes of the people in our community and the communities we serve.

Once you focus on the people in action, you feel the joy, you feel the commitment, you feel the impact. Your content and stories become less fact-based and have a lot more energy to it.

The second thing, PR is enormous for us. A lot of our stakeholders are reading the big news publications. Because we don’t have massive corporate budgets, we work very hard to come up with innovative story angles to get FoodCloud featured in the media.

We focus on storytelling, as opposed to a press release with a load of ‘this is what we achieved.’

The wonderful thing is that there’s such a feel good factor to what we do so we get quite a lot of PR. People are much more interested when other people tell our stories - it doesn’t connect as much when it comes directly from a company. That’s one of our jobs on the marketing team - to connect with the people around us who share the same values as the FoodCloud brand: the food personalities online, the volunteers, the staff in our charities.

5. What has been your favourite brand moment at FoodCloud, and why?

The Ploughing Championships blew me away. I’d never been to it before. Everything in the FoodCloud world is there - the food companies, the growers and the farmers, government officials, and AIB who is a major sponsor of ours. We put up a really nice, colourful blue stand with some great interactive elements.

The engagement from the people we met was just incredible. People were taking our materials and saying they were going to teach their team, their students or their kids about it. It was really inspiring.

I came out of it feeling so, so good, full of ideas and full of connectedness. I felt so proud being there with FoodCloud. We make such a positive impact in the world of food. That has been my favourite moment so far.

6. FoodCloud operates the FoodCloud Kitchen food truck, which pops up at corporate and community events and festivals throughout Ireland serving delicious, waste-free meals. What is the top win a brand activation like this brings for your company?

It’s the education piece - showing the public how delicious and exciting surplus food can be.

There is a misconception that surplus is food that someone else doesn’t want, but that is anything but true. Surplus is an abundance of food that would otherwise go to waste. Our chefs put that into practice by making menus out of pulling together random surplus ingredients - it gives you such delicious, different food. It’s inspiring!”

The food truck challenges people’s perceptions of what they might think of as waste food. It gives them creative ideas for how to make simple and quick meals from food they would have thrown away. All of this helps serve our vision to ensure no good food goes to waste.

We recently did a brilliant activation with the Cork on a Fork food festival. We hosted an afternoon tea on a train using surplus food. The food was unbelievable, just as good as you’d see in any cafe or restaurant.

7. Activations are a big part of your strategy at FoodCloud, getting out into the community and showcasing in a really hands-on way what the company is about. Can you say more about that?

Yes - you can’t beat real-life connections. We brought the food truck to Earth Rising recently at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and to Bloom Festival. It’s a very visual representation of the brand and organisation.

I think activations for any organisation, especially nonprofit, are key. You’re making connections. You get a fan for life, as opposed to a brief interaction on social media. When you’ve met someone in real life and they’ve gone away thinking, ‘Wow, that’s inspiring’, they’re probably going to connect with you in a deeper way in the future.

8. It’s an exciting time for you at FoodCloud because you’ve recently come on board as Head of Marketing and Communications, and you are leading a brand new marketing team of three people. What is one area for growth that you will be exploring as a team in the near future?

Being really clear and consistent in our messaging.

With FoodCloud, we have quite a lot we need to ask people for. It’s our job to make sure that the messaging is really clear, so that people know exactly what we need, whether that is volunteers, or food donations or funding. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved.

For example, always having a call to action. Because sometimes in the past we might have put out a post about something we’ve done, but we weren’t particularly asking someone to do something or asking them to feel something.

Now when someone requests content from our marketing team, we ask them ‘Why are you doing this? How are you trying to make someone feel? What do you want them to do?’

Once you have those three pieces of information, you can make the post or story more targeted and impactful: ‘Do we need to raise some donations for that?’, ‘Can we get a volunteer to speak about that so it resonates with our community better?’

9. Where does social media fall in your marketing strategy?

LinkedIn works really well for us right now. A lot of our stakeholders are on LinkedIn.

But what gets us more engagement is if our founders Iseult or Aoibheann do a post, or one of the thought leaders in the company. Because people want to hear from real people - it’s more authentic.

When FoodCloud posts, it’s just not the same anymore. We’re moving more into people-focused content that actually comes from the person, as opposed to branded, cleaned-up content. There’s so much AI-driven content these days and people are disconnecting from it. We have to be clever.

We’re 100% organic on socials. We can’t pay for content - we don’t have the budget. We can’t just go, ‘Let’s have a campaign on food waste.’ That wouldn’t work. What works well for us is to collaborate with B2B companies or leaders in the food industry who share our purpose - real people telling our story.

10. Can you tell me about some of your collaborations?

We’re talking to Sprout & Co at the moment, one of our new partners. They have amazing activations.

Two purpose-driven organisations coming together like that can be very powerful. For collaborations, you have to stay focused on the organisations that have similar purposes to you and your audience.

We met Orla McAndrew at The Ploughing Championships, an incredible celebrity chef from Cork who is zero waste. We took a video with her for our Instagram.

That type of support and connection is so important. We can tell each other’s stories so well. We can share audiences and create more impact together. FoodCloud exists in a lot of small regional areas. We’re grassroots—on the ground and connected—so this type of engagement is powerful for us in the long-term.

11. You’ve worked for some top brands through the years: Nike, Adidas and global whiskey brands. How will this corporate experience help you in your work as Head of Marketing for a social enterprise?

There are a lot of transferable skills from the corporate world to the nonprofit world, and vice versa. I would encourage people to move in and out of both.

The two main areas that I find most useful are consumer understanding and research.

What you get from a company like Nike or Adidas is an incredible understanding of your consumer. We would never have released a shoe or a top without understanding who was going to buy it. They do an awful lot of research into consumer mindsets and the needs of the customer. They create products inspired by people’s needs.

In the nonprofit world, you often don’t have the budget to do research, but it’s really working blind if you don’t do it. There’s lots of ways to do research in a lo-fi way with AI that cost next to nothing.

12. What marketing tactic do you feel is best to change hearts and minds and get people on board with your mission?

It’s hope - giving people the feeling of hope and agency to know that they can do their part for the climate. Even if it’s just small - putting less in the bin or donating a tenner or volunteering for a morning, it all adds up.

We’re really getting down to that one person and giving them the feeling that, ‘I can do something here. If I connect with these people and what they’re about, I can make an impact.’

Because it is very difficult what’s happening with the climate crisis. The amount of food waste in Ireland and globally is shocking. We’re trying to focus on the positive things that are happening in the climate space to give everyone the feeling that they have agency and try to bring them on side to help.

People who volunteer with FoodCloud or connect with us at events generally come away feeling inspired. There’s this lovely feeling: ‘Okay, climate change is happening and the world can be difficult right now, but it’s not hopeless. There’s many small things that I can do to create change.’

13. Are there any marketers or founders you look up to for inspiration?

I love Adam Grant, his books Originals and Think Again. He’s got his own podcast and he’s doing a podcast with Brené Brown. I love his energy and thought process. Anyone who’s on a low budget and needs creativity, check out Adam Grant, you’ll come away with some brilliant ideas.

I’m hugely inspired by the co-founders of FoodCloud, Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O’Brien. They’re rockstars in the industry, so highly respected. If there were more leaders like those two women in the world, we would be in a lot better place.

They are highly intelligent, creative people. But they are also so emotionally intelligent. They’re so mindful of every employee, every stakeholder and every customer. It’s very refreshing for a CEO and a Director of Development to not be driven by ego.

I think that’s why people stay so long at FoodCloud and that’s why they attract so many supporters. Because our founders live what they say, they walk the talk.

Now it’s time to take action - connect with FoodCloud and support their incredible work: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn