Here’s the story of how Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One grew OLIO from an idea into a marketplace saving thousands of food items every week.
Tessa Clarke grew up on her parents’ dairy farm in North Yorkshire, England. It was 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 she grew up with the firm belief that food is meant to be eaten, not thrown away.
The ‘lightbulb’ moment came on December 17, 2014. Tessa was packing up her apartment in Switzerland, getting ready to move back to the UK. Despite her best efforts to eat everything, she was still left with 6 sweet potatoes, a whole white cabbage and some pots of yogurt. The removal men told her that all the food had to be thrown away, but Tessa 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 the problem was she didn’t know if they would 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 what she was offering. 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.
An idea ahead of its time
Tessa told some friends & family about her idea of a food sharing app, and they all thought she was crazy. Then in 2002, she met Saasha.
Saasha Celestial-One, the daughter of Iowa hippy entrepreneurs (hence the origin of her last name, Celestial-One) spent much of her childhood accompanying her mother on various missions to rescue things that others had discarded – wooden fixtures from foreclosed houses, plants from the greenhouse dumpster, aluminium soda cans casually tossed aside at the beach, etc. She always dreamed of starting her own business one day specifically in the area of food, which is a passion of hers.
When Tessa told her about the 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. Within an hour they had settled on a name and made their plan!
They incorporated the company on February 9, 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 they discovered truly shocked and terrified them.
Tessa says, “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!”
Don’t rubbish the problem of food waste
But just because it’s a big problem on paper doesn’t mean to say that people care about it. 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. The two friends 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 their food sharing idea.
What they settled on was a slightly bizarre ‘proof of concept’ involving Whatsapp! Tessa and Saasha invited 12 people who took part in their market research survey, and who said they were physically pained throwing way good food, and they put them all in a closed WhatsApp group. They all lived close to each other and they were asked for 2 weeks to add any surplus food they had into the group to see if food sharing started.
Tessa and Saasha waited with bated breath for what seemed like an eternity and then eventually someone added an item – half a bag of shallots! 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, Tessa and Saasha built the MVP (minimal viable product) version of the app. And working like crazy, exactly 5 months after they incorporated the company, OLIO was launched in the App Store in 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 world!
Tessa says “Our vision is for millions of hyper local food sharing networks all around the world. We believe OLIO can help create a world in which nothing of value goes to waste, and every single person has enough to eat – without destroying our Planet in the process.”
What is OLIO?
OLIO connects neighbours with each other and with local businesses so surplus food can be shared, not thrown away. This could be food nearing its sell-by date in local stores, spare home-grown vegetables, bread from your baker, or the groceries in your fridge when you go away. For your convenience, OLIO can also be used for non-food household items too.
OLIO is super easy! To make an item available, simply open the app, add a photo, description, and when and where the item is available for pick-up.
To access items, simply browse the listings available near you, request whatever takes your fancy and arrange a pick-up via private messaging.
Food waste is Environmentally catastrophic
Food waste is really, really bad for the environment. It takes a land mass larger than China to grow the food each year that is ultimately never eaten – land that has been deforested, species that have been driven to extinction, indigenous populations that have been moved, soil that has been degraded – all to produce food that we then just throw away. In addition, food that is never eaten accounts for 25% of all fresh water consumption globally. Gulp.
Not only are all of the resources that went into creating the uneaten food wasted (land, water, labour, energy, manufacturing, packaging, etc), but when food waste goes to landfill, which is where the vast majority of it ends up, it decomposes without access to oxygen and creates methane, which is 23x more deadly than carbon dioxide.
Every which way you look at it food waste is a major culprit in destroying our planet, and in fact if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the USA.
Some surprising culprits…
It’s easy for many people to dismiss food waste as someone else’s problem (“I don’t waste any food”) or to focus solely on the more visibly shocking examples of waste (unharvested fields of produce ploughed back into the earth, supermarket skip waste).
However the reality is that in the ‘developed’ world, more than 50% of food waste takes place in our homes. In contrast, less than 2% of food waste takes place at the retail store level (though supermarket practices are directly responsible for much food waste elsewhere in the supply chain.)
In the UK the average family throws away 22% of their weekly shop, which is worth £730 per year. In the US, the per-family equivalent is worth a staggering $2,275 each year!
So, the bad news is we are half the problem. But the good news is….. this means we can be half the solution!
Become a Zero Food Waste business with OLIO
Whether you’re a caterer, hotel, restaurant, office, retailer or any other food business or provider, OLIO’s Food Waste Heroes programme can be a sustainable solution to your business whereby we arrange to pick up and safely redistribute your surplus food to local communities.
- 24/7 pick ups
- Minimal operational disruption
- All food types accepted
- Approved Food Safety Management System
Source: https://olioex.com
