When was the last time you asked your neighbour to lend you a cup of sugar? With 24-hour shops on every other street and so many delivery services out there, we've lost some of our neighbourly outreach. Enter OLIO.
The goal of the app, to cut global food waste and redistribute nature’s bounty, is a challenging one. The premise, however, is simple: if you’ve got excess food you’re not going to use, share it. Take a picture, add it to OLIO and users in your area can come and collect it.
Similarly, if you’re running short on time or money at any point, you can fire up OLIO and claim a free meal or two of your own. There are no charges, no expectations, just a community of people working together to tackle the £13 billion UK household food waste problem that won’t disappear on its own.
“It’s difficult to balance the supply and demand of food in your household because life is unpredictable,” says OLIO co-founder Tessa Cook. “You might have to work late or go away. Or you just might not fancy eating what you’ve got. You go on a diet, or guests leave things behind – these are all things that are never going to change.”
And this is where OLIO, which Cook launched in 2015 with co-founder Saasha Celestial-One, fits in. The app was born from an idea the pair had after Cook was told by removal men that she would have to throw away her food. It has come a long way since first being used to share a bag of shallots and now provides a platform for perfectly good, excess food to be re-homed. It’s not just about making sure last night’s leftovers don’t go to waste either, although depending on your cooking abilities, someone might want them.
“We have lots of beautiful breads, cakes and delicious pastries coming onto the app through bakeries,” Cook told us. “Bakeries need to have fully stocked shelves until they close, but they also have to sell fresh every day. We’ve also got lots of gardeners at the moment putting on their homegrown marrows, rhubarb, courgettes, carrots, apples, plums...”
What makes OLIO effective is that it’s not an exchange system. You don’t have to offer something in order to accept a meal, as 33-year-old Krys Nartey discovered when she began using OLIO while suffering from severe pregnancy sickness.
“My condition was horrible, I was on unpaid sick leave," she says. "Between paying my rent, utilities and driving back and forth from doctors appointments, I was running extremely low on money and I couldn't really afford to eat more than breakfast cereals for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
“I was browsing the web for freebies I could use to prepare for the baby and I noticed on OLIO someone near me was giving away a great deal of fruit, cheese, bread and veggies. I nervously sent a request for some and I got an immediate response to come get as much as I could carry,” Nartey explains.
“I grabbed my shopping bags and did a pregnant lady waddle for 1.2 miles. Because I was by myself and unwell, it was a life saver.”
Jonathan Kilby used OLIO to feed his family after a career change tightened his budget. “One week we lived mostly on meals made from ingredients collected from fellow OLIOers,” he told us. “It feels good to know that, while this has been very helpful to us, we are also helping to reduce food waste.”
Because I was by myself and unwell, it was a life saver.
Krys Nartey, OLIO user
According to Cook, these stories are common. “Every week we have feedback or emails saying things along the lines of ‘Thank you. Without you, my family wouldn’t have been able to eat tonight’.”
“It’s impossible not to be incredibly moved by this and realise that what you’re doing has meaning and purpose.”