Students vs Food Insecurity: The Sodexo Stop Hunger Challenge
Our annual Stop Hunger Challenge, in collaboration with Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation and Wells Fargo, brought together student teams from across the UK and Ireland working to address food insecurity in their communities. From over 20 submissions, nine projects progressed to structured sessions where they worked directly with a panel of 20 expert judges from Sodexo and Wells Fargo to refine their projects, strengthen their impact, and secure funding support.
The sessions brought students and Sodexo industry professionals together for focused feedback designed to help teams improve their storytelling, measure their impact more effectively, and build funding strategies. Through this collaborative process, judges provided tailored guidance that enabled students to clarify their next steps and develop actionable plans to scale their reach across communities in the UK and Ireland.
After our UK and Ireland session, all students left the sessions with a clearer plan for moving their projects forward and 83% felt better equipped to measure and articulate their project's impact and create a funding strategy: proof that expert guidance can transform ambitious ideas into scalable, real-world solutions.
Judges involved got the chance to explore a meaningful opportunity to contribute to youth empowerment and give back to their communities. By sharing their professional expertise, judges helped students strengthen their projects while getting firsthand insight into the innovative ways young people are addressing food insecurity.
100% of students confirmed that working with judges significantly enhanced their experience and learning, demonstrating the value of skills-based volunteering, enabling them to see the direct impact of their mentorship on the next generation of responsible leaders.
Across all nine projects, over 600 lives have already been impacted, demonstrating the effectiveness of student-led social enterprises in addressing food insecurity. Some stand out projects include Ugly Foods by Enactus Limerick, which rescues "unaesthetic" produce and sells it affordably to students, impacting over 200 people; BiaBox by TU Dublin, a subscription-based redistribution model delivering free surplus food to households; and Wonky Bowl by Enactus Southampton, which repurposes surplus vegetables into nutritious soups, saving over 100kg of surplus from landfill and producing more than 1,200 meals for those in need.
The Top projects from the Stop Hunger UK & Ireland Challenge teams will be announced and showcased at the NextGen Takeover the 15th of April 🏆
You definitely won’t want to miss this, so hurry up and secure your seat at the NextGen Takeover to see the BEST of student-lead innovation in the UK and Ireland
