Lisa King: Social enterprise - the business of doing good

Unfiltered

English - December 04, 2018 06:00 - 48 minutes - 44.9 MB - ★★★★★ - 1 rating
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Lisa King is the Founder & CEO of Eat My Lunch, a social enterprise on a mission to make sure that no child at school goes hungry.

After finishing high school, Lisa turned down an offer by her parents to purchase a business and instead attended university. She then embarked on a 15-year corporate career in marketing with some of the world’s FMCG giants including Unilever, Heinz Watties, PepsiCo and Cadbury.

In mid-2015 while working as Global Marketing Manager for Fonterra, she came across the statistic that 28% of children in New Zealand go to school without lunch. This number changed Lisa’s life and inspired the start of the Eat My Lunch business from her own kitchen, teaming up with one of New Zealand’s top chefs, Michael Meredith.

Today Eat My Lunch has gone from a small business run out of a family home to giving more than 1 million lunches to kids at low-decile schools in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. They give out more than 2,000 lunches to schools every day, have had over 10,000 people volunteer, and currently operate a waitlist of two-to-three months.

Eat My Lunch exceeded its three-year forecast within just 12-weeks of launch and was profitable within six months. The company moved out of Lisa's kitchen following a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised $130,000, and last year the campaign raised a further $800,000 in an innovative debt crowdfunding campaign with PledgeMe.Lend.

Lisa has been recognized with a wealth of awards including three Westpac Auckland Business Awards in 2016, Deloitte's Fast 50 Rising Star 2016 and 2017, TVNZ Marketing Award 2016, a Women of Influence Award in both 2016 and 2017. Most recently she was named a New Zealand EY Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist for 2018.

Watch Lisa’s interview on #Unfiltered:
www.unfiltered.tv/public/lisa-king