In today’s environmentally-conscious times, it’s especially scary to know that one-third of all food produced globally goes to waste. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gasses (after China and the USA).
In the UK, home food waste is worth £800 a year to the average family, rising to $2,275 (around £1,780) in the US. Globally, the value of wasted food is worth over $1 trillion (around £780bn) a year. And with 2.2 billion people set to join the planet by 2050, there is a clear need to increase global food production while preventing wastage to mitigate an impending global crisis.
This is where Olio, a Tech Nation Upscale alumnus, comes in. Founded in 2015, the company has developed an app that prevents food waste by connecting neighbours with each other and with local businesses so surplus food can be shared, not thrown away. To date, almost 2.5 million portions of food have been shared through Olio’s app by more than 1.4 million users.
The lightbulb momentCofounder Tessa Clarke came up with the idea of an online marketplace for food sharing when packing up to return the UK after living in Switzerland. After failing to give away leftover food to a neighbour, she knew that something had to be done.
“I was brought up on a farm so I know how much hard work goes into producing the food we eat every day,” she says. “Throwing it in the bin seemed equally criminal to smuggling the food in my packing boxes.”
Cofounding Olio with long-time friend Saasha Celestia-One “scratched a growing entrepreneurial itch” for Londoner Clarke, who previously held board positions at Dyson and Wonga. “It was a confluence of the right idea, the right time in my life and the right cofounder, who was also extremely passionate about solving the problem.”
The techThe first version of Olio’s app was built by Bristol-based Simple Web in exchange for a small equity stake in the company. Once Olio raised its first round of funding, the tech side was brought in-house and developed using the React Native framework.
“We often say that our largest competitor is the rubbish bin, so we need to provide an experience that is just as convenient but more importantly feels great and is super social, fun and easy,” says Clarke.
Community is at the heart of Olio’s model. People can share unwanted food by uploading a picture of it to the app, which sends an alert to neighbours who can browse and request to pick up supplies. The service is free for both parties.
Olio began generating revenues last year by recruiting volunteers called Food Waste Heroes to pick up unsold food from local businesses, take it home and distribute it to local communities via the app. It’s a more sustainable alternative for those businesses, which would usually pay waste contractors to take that food to a landfill. Instead, they pay Olio, which counts Pret A Manger, Selfridges and Virgin Trains among its biggest clients.
Clarke explains that concept of Food Waste Heroes was introduced to bolster food supplies in Olio’s early days. “Our early adopters hated food waste, therefore they didn’t generate much of it. Obviously, a food sharing app with no food isn’t much use.”
Looking aheadOlio is exploring new revenue stream opportunities to execute “in the next 12-18 months” while raising investment for the fourth time. The company secured $6m of VC investment in a round led by Octopus Ventures last year, and Clarke describes fundraising as an “ongoing challenge” for the business.
Hiring talent is another, and Olio has grown to a team of 20 “mission-obsessed” people representing 15 nationalities. Two-thirds are female and one-fifth self-identifies as being neurodiverse.
“Our belief is that we want to build a product that will be used by one billion people in the next 10 years, so it needs to work for everybody,” Clarke says. “It’s brilliant to have a very diverse team who can help us do that.”
Taking Olio to a “mainstream” audience is a key ambition for its founder in 2020. The company runs an Ambassador Programme which invites its users to become ‘digital’ or ‘community’ ambassadors, evangelising for the company and its mission online or in their local community. More than 40,000 people have joined to date.
“Growing without a marketing budget is a challenge, and our Ambassador Programme was a solution to that,” says Clarke. “We want a lot more people using the app and sharing food. Currently, I’d say we’re doing about 0.01% of our full potential. Once we’re at scale, then the impact we’ll be able to have will be transformational.”
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