With the number of people using foodbanks across the UK rising dramatically and homeless figures also, a new website is trying to make the task of finding local soup kitchens easier for the homeless by using location software to direct them to their nearest
Comics Sean Lock and Lee Mack, as well as actress Naomie Harris, launched NextMeal.co.uk last October alongside founder Martin Stone – who’s also behind Muswell Hill Soup Kitchen.
Since then the website has grown to help 40 rough sleepers-a-day in London, according to its creator, with planned launches across the rest of the UK as well as Dublin and Europe in the pipeline.
Optimised for smartphones, the website uses GPS location software to determine a user’s location before offering a number of suggested places to eat from a database.
According to Stone, the decision to make Next Meal a website rather than an app was made in a bid to ease accessibility and visibility to search engines.
The Next Meal founder said: “We are just a couple of blokes working in a soup kitchen and we came up with this idea on a scrap of paper really but it all about doing all you can to get people off the streets, that’s very important. It has been going very well in London and we’re hoping to roll it out across the rest of the UK as well as in Dublin and other places in Europe.