Using Community To Battle Food Waste with Tessa Clarke, Olio

Today's guest isTessa Clarke, Co-Founder & CEO @OLIO (@TessaLFClarke)

Tessa is CEO and Co-Founder of OLIO, a peer-to-peer food sharing app preventing waste by connecting neighbours in hyperlocal communities. Tessa has been featured in Vogue and listed as a Forbes Top 50 Female Sustainability Leader.

OLIO was born out of a frustration shared by the two Co-founders, who couldn’t understand why it had to be so difficult to avoid sending perfectly good food to landfill. This frustration became a call to action when they began to dig into the problem, and understood what a huge market failure this really was. Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, and half of that food waste takes place in people’s homes. With 8.4m people living in food poverty in the UK alone, this just seemed incomprehensible. 

OLIO set out on a mission to build a more sustainable future where our most precious resources are shared, not thrown away. The ambition of OLIO is that by 2030 we can halve the food waste in people’s homes and the local community. 

OLIO’s food sharing platform empowers users to share surplus food, accelerating the sharing economy mind-set while building local communities. 

Since it was founded in 2015, OLIO has signed >2,600,000 users across 49 countries, and is the largest peer-to-peer food sharing network in the world. 

In today’s episode we cover:

• Tessa’s own journey to becoming a sustainability leader 
• The complexities and nuances of the global food waste challenge
• How OLIO managed to identify users, create a community, and leverage their platform to create sustainable change
• OLIO’s own business model, and the challenges faced as well as advantages enjoyed by impact-driven teams
• COVID’s effect on food systems and peer-to-peer sharing in the UK, and how OLIO kept its community intact, and even strengthened over the course of 2020

Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded December 22nd, 2020