Did you know that OLIO was born because of a fear of throwing food away?
From food to clothes and even borrowing a kitchen appliance, OLIO is bringing communities together as well as reducing waste. OLIO connects neighbours to each other and local businesses so that surplus food can be shared instead of thrown away. These foods could be close to their sell by dates, leftovers from a café or home-grown vegetables – no matter where they’ve come from, they’re not going to end up in the bin. Join the sustainable food revolution!
OLIO is currently carbon negative and have recently been awarded a B-Corp certification for maintaining a high standard of social and environmental performance. OLIO has been awarded Best Sustainable Brand of 2022, with lots of other accolades under their belts too. OLIO are truly changing the game when it comes to reducing food waste. They truly are a sustainable food business.
Do you want to hear their sustainable food waste journey?
TESSA’S STORY
She grew up on her parents’ dairy farm in North Yorkshire, England. She had an amazing childhood in so many ways, but one that had a constant theme running throughout it – work needed to be done. Feeding cows, mucking out, moving stock; it was relentless and ran late into the evening, every day of the year. As a result of this, she learned pretty much as soon as she could walk just how much hard work goes into producing the food that we all eat. And so grew up with the firm belief that food is meant to be eaten, not thrown away.
TESSA CLARKE, CO-FOUNDER OF OLIO
The ‘lightbulb’ moment came on 17th December 2014 – She was packing up their apartment in Switzerland, getting ready to move back to the UK. Despite their best efforts to eat everything they had, they were still left with 6 sweet potatoes, a whole white cabbage and some pots of yogurt.
The removal men told me that all the food had to be thrown away, but Tess just couldn’t bring herself to do this. And so she got her new-born baby and toddler dressed and set off armed with this food to find someone to give it to.
Unfortunately, the lady who she had hoped to give it to wasn’t in her usual spot outside the supermarket. She thought about knocking on her neighbours’ doors to see if they wanted it, but would they be in; and even if they were in, she didn’t really know them and it might be a bit awkward if they didn’t want it. Feeling thoroughly defeated she thought to herself – “This is absolutely crazy…. this food is delicious. Why isn’t there an app where I can share it with someone nearby who wants it?” And so the idea for OLIO was born…
She told some friends & family about the idea of a food sharing app, and they all thought she was crazy. But in February 2015 when she told Saasha, her eyes immediately lit up and we just knew that we had to work together to bring this app to life!
SAASHA’S STORY
Is the daughter of Iowa hippy entrepreneurs (hence the origin of my last name, Celestial-One – which her parents made up!) and she grew up in a large, relatively poor family. She spent much of her childhood accompanying her Mum on various missions to rescue things that others had discarded – wooden fixtures from foreclosed houses, plants from the greenhouse dumpster, aluminium soda cans (worth 5¢ each) casually tossed aside at the beach, etc.
SAASHA CELESTIAL-ONE, CO-FOUNDER OF OLIO
In salvaging and reselling these items, she not only earned her pocket money, but she literally learned that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. As a kid, she launched over a dozen scrappy micro-businesses, and she always dreamed of starting her own business one day specifically in the area of food.
Tessa and Saasha met in 2002 and have been close friends ever since. When Tess shared her idea for a food sharing app Saasha instantly knew it was genius and that she wanted to be a part of the journey bringing it to life.
FROM IDEA TO REALITY
They incorporated the company on the 9th of February 2015 and decided they had that year to prove it and make it happen, and if not they would have to go back and get proper jobs. The first thing they did was desk research in order to understand how big the problem of food waste was and what we discovered truly shocked and terrified them.
“A third of the food we produce globally is thrown away, and in the UK households are responsible for over half of all food waste. The average family throws away £700 worth of food each year. That adds up to £12.5 billion… £12.5 billion that is going straight to landfill!”
But just because it’s a big problem on paper doesn’t mean to say that people care about it. Sustainable food channels had to be built.
So, they conducted some market research using SurveyMonkey and through this they found that 1 in 3 people are “physically pained” throwing away good food. That’s a lot of people, who almost every day, are having to throw away food because there’s no alternative… there’s been no innovation since the rubbish bin! How crazy is that?!
But just because it’s a big problem and just because people hate throwing away food, that doesn’t mean to say they’ll take the next step, which is to share food.
They were understandably reluctant to invest their life savings building an app that people wouldn’t use, and so they needed a quick and low cost way to test the food sharing idea. What they settled on was a slightly bizarre ‘proof of concept’ involving Whatsapp! They invited 12 people who took part in the market research survey,. They all lived close to each other and they asked them for 2 weeks to add any surplus food they had into the group and they’d see if food sharing started. They waited with bated breath for what seemed like an eternity and then eventually someone added an item – half a bag of shallots! How very Crouch End
Many more items of food were shared during those two weeks. Once the trial was over they met face to face with everybody who took part and asked for feedback. The conclusions were unanimous…… “it’s amazing”, “ you have to build it” and, perhaps most importantly…….. “it just needs to be a bit better than a Whatsapp group”!
And so, with the support of their first investor, Simpleweb, a development agency, they built the MVP (minimal viable product) version of the app. And working like crazy, exactly 5 months after we’d incorporated the company, They launched the app in the App Store on 9th July 2015, quickly followed by Google Play 3 weeks later. The very first version of the app was extremely basic, and could only be used in 5 postcodes in North London.
But that didn’t matter, OLIO was live and ready to bring food sharing to the masses. Sustainable food is here.
Do you want to join the sustainable food revolution? Join Olio
