Tessa Cook and Saasha Celestial-One are co-founders of OLIO (https://olioex.com). Tessa grew up on her parents’ dairy farm in North Yorkshire and she was very conscious of how much work goes into producing food. It convinced her that food should not be wasted. The
“lightbulb” moment came when she was planning to move from Switzerland to England and realised she had quite a lot of surplus food . She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away so went around the streets looking for someone to give it to . The  idea of an app to distribute unwanted food came to her.
Her friend Saasha, daughter of American “hippie entrepreneurs” , immediately saw  it as a great idea. She had spent much childhood time with her mother on missions to rescue things others had discarded . She had wondered how to do something constructive around food.

They explain how globally over 1/3 of all the food we produce is wasted, which is worth $1 trillion; and over $100bn of this takes place in the home. OLIO addresses this problem by connecting neighbours with each other and with local shops & cafes so that surplus food can be shared, not thrown away. Users simply snap a photo of their items and add them to OLIO. Neighbours then receive customised alerts and can request anything that takes their fancy. Pick-up takes place – often the same day – at the home, an arranged store, an OLIO Drop Box, or another agreed location. Items typically found on the app include food nearing its use-by date from shops, cafes and markets; spare vegetables from the allotment; cakes from an amateur baker; or groceries from household fridges when people go away, move home or start a diet. All the food on OLIO is either available for free, or for a ‘pay as you feel’ donation to charity.

‘We piloted the app in the second half of 2015, and then made it available across the UK at the end of January 2016. Since then we’ve had over 150k users sign up and over 200k items have been shared! Demand for this surplus food is incredibly high with 40% of items being requested in less than an hour, and 80% in less than 24 hours. Our growth has been fuelled by our 10,000+ volunteers – OLIO Ambassadors we call them – who have reached out to offer to spread the word about OLIO in their local community. We’re also very excited by our “Food Waste Heroes” programme whereby we match our volunteers with a local business such as a bakery, supermarket, deli or street food market, to collect any unsold food at the end of the day (after charities have taken what they need) and re-distribute it to the local community via the OLIO app. You can watch more about our “Food Waste Heroes” programme on our website.

We also have a non-food section on the app which is used to share household items for which there is currently no real marketplace, but which a neighbour would gladly take e.g. toiletries, cosmetics, light bulbs, cleaning products, mugs etc, and non-food now represents approximately 30% of all listings.’
At its heart OLIO is all about community, and using mobile technology to reconnect neighbours with each other – over the road, round the corner – so that our most precious resources can be shared, not thrown away.

 

May 8th update

Our volunteers rock! Since OLIO’s inception, we’ve had 10,867 peoplereach out to us requesting to become volunteers + over 70,000 items of food have been shared by our volunteers alone. To showcase their impressive impact, scroll down to check our quarterly Volunteer Impact Infographic. Also, did you win our £700 competition? Find out below…

What we’re reading…

1. Why Anthony Bourdain is becoming an activist against food waste (The Hollywood Reporter)  2. Weird weather means wonky asparagus – at lower prices (The Guardian)  3. UK supermarket trials new innovative mushroom packaging to fight food waste (Food Ingredients First)

OLIO is Co-Founded by Tessa Cook and Saasha Celestial-One and backed by Accel, Quadia and Mustard Seed, and a handful of high profile angel investors.