Dinesh Manickam

Founder

Dinesh Manickam is the founder of No Food Waste [1], an Indian non-profit working on hunger from Coimbatore.

Dinesh Manickam is an Indian social entrepreneur and a co-founder of No Food Waste, a surplus-food redistribution organisation started in Coimbatore on 16 October 2014. He serves as its executive director.

Career

Manickam is a production engineering graduate from Coimbatore. With two fellow graduates, Padmanaban Gopalan and Sudhakar, he began collecting surplus food from events and households and distributing it to people living on the street, starting with two shopping bags and a single volunteer travelling by public transport.

No Food Waste now collects surplus food from wedding halls, institutions and homes, repackages it and distributes it to people in need, and has expanded from Coimbatore to other districts of Tamil Nadu and to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The organisation reports having served more than four million meals.

Recognition

No Food Waste has received the Pollination Project award for 2014-15, a State Youth Award from the Government of Tamil Nadu in 2017, a National Youth Award from the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports in 2018, and the Commonwealth Youth Award for the Asia region in 2019, and was granted special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 2021.[2][3][4]

No Food Waste

No Food Waste collects excess edible food from events and eateries and distributes it to hungry communities, while also raising awareness about food waste. It operates food-recovery networks across several cities.

No Food Waste reports the following, on its own site: