On 2015, Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One launched OLIO, a sharing app connecting neighbours with each other and with local businesses in order to share surplus food rather than throwing it away.

The idea came when Tessa was packing up her apartment in Switzerland to move back to the UK. Some food was still left and she was asked to throw it away. She was not able to find for an alternative and then she thought, “Why isn’t there an app where I can share it with someone nearby who wants it?”

Together with Saasha, Tessa carried out a desk research in order to understand better the problem of food waste and she found out that 1 in 3 people are “physically pained” throwing away good food even if they have no alternative.

They validated their idea gathering people on a WhatsApp group, to test if people really had a significant amount of food to share. After collecting positive feedbacks, they found a development agency which invested in their new business idea and launched the minimum viable product version of the app. After that, the app was officially launched in the App Store and then Google Play.

The very first version of the app was extremely basic, and could only be used in 5 postcodes in North London. Today the OLIO community (the OLIOers) gathers people from 62 countries, counting 6.104.732 users and 65.312.492 portions of food shared.

The positive environmental impact of this sharing platform is also worth noting, with 191.782.035 car miles saved and 8.653.000.000 liters of water saved. In line with the values of the sharing economy, OLIO is a carbon negative company committed in the measuring of the organization’s emissions, which are reported publicly each year. OLIO sets internal carbon emissions targets, appointing a member of the team to be responsible and accountable for the latter.