Derek Handley joins Eat My Lunch as Investor & Advisor

18.05.2016

Derek Handley joins Eat My Lunch as Investor & Advisor

Eat My Lunch, the online Buy One Give One business, today announced a partnership with New Zealand entrepreneur Derek Handley.

Derek joins Eat My Lunch as an advisor working with them on scaling the company and maximising the environmental and social benefits of the business model. He is also an investor.

“I am really delighted to have secured Derek as one of our partners,” says Eat My Lunch founder Lisa King.

“His proven strengths as a game-changing entrepreneur and his values and vision align perfectly with the goals we’ve set and our mission to create social change through something as routine as eating lunch,” says King.

Handley believes Eat My Lunch is a new company with the potential to create wide-scale social change for New Zealand.

“For the past few years I’ve been looking into new frameworks for uniting purpose and profit, and I am particularly interested in emerging leaders and businesses developing creative responses to some of our toughest social challenges. Eat My Lunch is just the first example I’ve backed in New Zealand but expect to support many more,” says Handley.

“There is a big opportunity for Eat My Lunch to look at new models to tackle food waste and child hunger in ways that are sustainable and scalable.

“These are the businesses that are poised to have the biggest impact and growth in the future. And this is the direction where I’m committed to with my foundation, Aera, and my investments.”

For every lunch bought, EML gives a lunch a Kiwi kid who would otherwise go hungry. The company expanded to Hamilton in March and plans to launch in Wellington in the coming months. In New Zealand, 29 percent of New Zealand children live in poverty and thousands go to school every day without lunch.

Many of the ideas inspiring Handley’s current investment approach were formed during his two years as Founding CEO of The B Team, where he and Sir Richard Branson put together a global leadership collective of iconic leaders catalysing better ways of doing business for people and our planet.

In June Eat My Lunch will be the first company to use PledgeMe’s new peer-to-peer lending platform, PledgeMe.Lend to launch a fundraising campaign by offering loan notes to pledgers.

Since its inception 11 months ago, Eat My Lunch has been the recipient of a number of awards and accolades including winner of the Excellence in Social Innovation at the 2015 New Zealand Innovator Awards, a Local Hero Medal at the 2015 New Zealand Local Hero of the Year, and Communicating Sustainability Award at the 2015 NZI Sustainable Business Network. Most recently King has been one of five speakers on the New Zealand Innovation Council’s 2016 Innovation Heroes Tour.

King, with the help of award-winning chef Michael Meredith, started Eat My Lunch with the aim to alleviate a nationwide issue by creating social change through something as routine as eating lunch.

Eat My Lunch is on track to delivering 250,000 lunches this year.

ENDS

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