A Laois woman is preparing to give a speech at the COP29, the United Nations’ 2024 Climate Change Conference, being held in Baku, Azerbaijan from November 11 to 22.
Laura Kirwan, from Borris-in-Ossary, is Sustainability Lead with Dublin company, Nutritics, and will be speaking at the UN for the second year following two appearances in 2023.
Dr Kirwan went to school in Mountrath Community School and studied Human Nutrition (BSc) at UCD before moving to Italy to work for the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma.
“I actually found out I was going to EFSA when I was on my way to work in a chip van at the Ploughing Championships,” the Borris-in-Ossary native told LaoisToday.
Dr Kirwan returned from Italy to complete her PhD in UCD looking at cost, nutritional adequacy and environmental impact across Ireland.
Following a short spell working for the European Food Information Resource (EurFIR), Dr Kirwan joined Dublin company, Nutritics, a global leader in food data technology.
“Nutritics is the software that I used in my PhD,” she said. “It is software that’s used across food service: menu planning, labelling, and digital menus as well.
“We manage allergens, nutrition, and sustainability metrics across really well-known companies. In the UK, for example, there’s Wagamama, Carluccio’s, and a lot of those brands.”
Nutritics were involved at COP28 last year, with Dr Kirwan delivering two speeches at the event held in Dubai.
Nutritics led the way in transforming how food sustainability was measured, providing real-time data on the nutritional, allergen, carbon, and water footprints of over 250,000 meals served at the event.
The Dublin company won a global tender to deliver all the menus at COP28, comprising of 268 digital menus, all including allergens, nutrition, and sustainability information.
Dr Kirwan will be delivering her speech at COP29 on the subject of Climate Smart Chefs – a project whereby the European Union funded Nutritics to create a new tool for chefs around the world.
“Chefs already use our tool to design their menus and their digital menus, and do their allergen and nutrition analysis,” Dr Kirwan said.
“What this does now is layer environmental impact data into the system so that chefs can actually look at the sustainability of their food, their recipes and menus, at the same time as nutrition and allergens and cost.
“We’ve already trained 164 chefs to use the system. We went to Italy to an cooking school where we did a four-week online course where chefs had to analyse all the recipes in the system.”
Dr Kirwan will be presenting the results of these analysis at her COP29 speech later this month.
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