Photo: StefanSzczelkun / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

New Zealand Listener: On one page was a story about kids going to school hungry and on another a report about “dumpster divers” living off the food thrown out by super­markets. For Dunedin woman Deborah Manning, that morning’s newspaper outlined both the problem and the seeds of a solution: surely someone needed to simply connect the good food that was getting dumped with the families going hungry?

For five months, she researched, talked to supermarkets and social service agencies and wrote food safety manuals. Then she ditched her job as a lawyer and threw herself into the complex business of matching waste with want.