Startup Series: OLIO
Today's guest is Tessa Clarke, Co-Founder & CEO of OLIO.
OLIO is a free app that exists to tackle the enormous problem of waste in our homes & local communities. OLIO works to connect neighbors so that surplus food and other household items can be given away, not thrown away. So that everyday things can be lent & borrowed, instead of bought. In addition, the OLIO app redistributes unsold food t to the community, enabling those businesses to achieve zero food waste locations. Its impact has been widely recognized, most notably by the United Nations, who highlighted OLIO as a "beacon" for the world, and Vivatech, who awarded it OLIO "Next European Unicorn".
Before OLIO, Tessa had a 15-year corporate career as a digital Managing Director in the media, retail, and financial services sectors. She met her co-founder Saasha while studying for their MBAs at Stanford University. Tessa is passionate about the sharing economy as a solution for a sustainable world and about 'profit with purpose' as the next business paradigm.
In this episode, Tessa outlines why food waste is a critical climate topic, what motivated her to co-found OLIO, and how the company addresses food waste. We also dive into why Tessa distinguishes between mission alignment and mission obsession, how OLIO incentivizes households and stores to donate excess food, and what sets the startup apart from its competitors. Tessa is a great guest.
Enjoy the show!
You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded December 16th, 2021
In Today's episode, we cover:
The difference between mission alignment and mission obsession, according to Tessa
OLIO's mission, approach, and an overview of the startup
Tessa's journey and motivations to co-found OLIO
How Tessa and her co-founder moved from researching the idea of food waste to starting a company
The existing problem of food waste at supermarkets and grocery stores
The breakdown of food providers between homes and commercial stores
The volunteer aspect of OLIO and how they are compensated
Key personas that make up the volunteer base
What motivates individuals and stores to give away their excess food
How OLIO decided to go down the venture-backed route rather than the not-for-profit route
What sets OLIO apart from other food tracking and waste reduction startups
Where composting fits into OLIO's work
Incentives for households to give away excess food
Voluntary offset market versus mandatory market when it comes to food waste
Policies that would move the needle on food waste and climate change
Earth Overshoot Day and the importance of tracking emissions
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
OLIO: https://olioex.com/
Earth Overshoot Day: https://www.overshootday.org/
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Hello everyone. This is Jason Jacobs and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guest is Tessa Clark co-founder and CEO of OLIO, a free app tackling the problem of food waste by connecting neighbors with each other and volunteers with local businesses so that surplus food can be given away, not thrown away. OLIO has grown to over five million users in five years. I was excited for this one because food waste is such an important topic and it's one that's not always top of mind.
Now there's a number of different ways to address the food waste problem, but OLIO has got a unique approach where they are literally putting an app on people's phones and enabling people that have extra food to take pictures of it, post it in the app and give it away to their neighbors. There's been a ton of interest around that people to people, but also businesses, supermarkets, restaurants that have a ton of food waste while they are actually paying OLIO to send a team of volunteers over 35,000 strong to come pick up that food and find it a home so that it doesn't go to waste or end up in the landfill.
So I was fascinated to dig in here and talk not only about the problem of food waste, but the OLIO origin story, the unique approach, what it is that makes it work since it isn't necessarily intuitive that it would do so, especially at the scale that they're operating and also just the best ways to address the food waste problem, OLIO aside, and what else matters, including some things that are outside of Tessa and OLIO's control like policy. At any rate, it's a wonderful discussion and I hope you enjoy it. Tessa, welcome to the show.
Tessa Clarke: Thank you. Great to be here.
Jason Jacobs: Well, great to have you, and we've covered food waste in the past once or twice and it's an important topic. We have not covered it from a European perspective. So, and also it's just such an important topic and big source of emissions that, that one or two episodes is not enough. So I'm eager to have you on to learn more about what you're doing with OLIO and I'm excited to have a great discussion.
Tessa Clarke: Me too. Any opportunity to bang on about food waste [laughs] I'm there.
Jason Jacobs: And before we jump in, you said one interesting thing when we were just chit chatting before we hit the record button and, and that was that you don't just look for mission alignment. You look for mission obsession. Maybe say a bit more about that before we dive into the company.
Tessa Clarke: Yeah. So we were talking about that in the context of recruitment, but to be honest, we apply it for everything actually, businesses that we partner with, certainly with investors as well. So in our view sort of mission alignment isn't strong enough because what we are doing is so important, it's so existential and it's gonna be so hard along the way. This is not just a sort of, you know, flip in and out and everything is solved overnight. And so we need everybody to be not just mission aligned, but mission obsessed. And it's that mission obsession that I think gives you the resilience that is required to take us on this journey.
And it's something that it's reaped its benefits enormously actually, when you look at the morale that we have at the company and the culture, because everybody is mission obsessed. So that immediately eliminates politics, for example, because we are all just pulling in the same direction, we're all here for the same thing and it's something that's far greater than any one of us individuals. So it creates a really, really amazing, very special company culture and that just makes the journey much more enjoyable. And it also helps with retention, which, you know, kind of in the current environment and we're operating in a tech space where people are sort of job hopping every 10 seconds. So recruiting for mission obsession, I think really helps mitigate against that.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. I mean, one, one thing I've, I personally have learned is at one point I was thinking of building a studio where we had this emerging media format. It was before I got into climate, but with this emerging media format we were gonna run experiments and apply in different categories. And it was actually really fertile ground. It was an exciting format. It had a lot of possibilities. There were plenty of categories that would have been fun to experiment in, but I just really struggled with the why. Because it's like, well, you have this, it's like, I'm gonna get up every day and be obsessed about this media format, right? [laughs] It's like for like to what end, like who cares?
Tessa Clarke: [crosstalk 00:06:16]. Yeah. That's what makes me actually, really, really kind of sad actually, because, you know, if I had a magic wand I would gift everybody sort of a mission obsession because when you have that sort of why in the morning, really does give you a reason to kind of leap out of bed and it does make life fulfilling. And I think ultimately almost all of us, I'm sure, kind of crave a purpose in life and I think having a really strong mission gives you that.
Jason Jacobs: Well, that's a good segue Tessa. So what is your mission obsession and when and how and why did that come about?
Tessa Clarke: Well, my mission obsession is solving the enormous problem of food waste and it really originated in my childhood. So my parents are farmers up in the Northeast of the UK. And when you grow up on a farm, you learn from a really, really young age, just how much hard work goes into producing the food that we all eat every day. So I lived on the farm with my parents and my two younger brothers and my parents had no qualms whatsoever with putting us to work.
As soon as we could walk and carry buckets, we were immediately enrolled into the workforce and, you know, whilst other kids and our peers would perhaps, you know, watch a lot of television or go to the movies or go shopping, that was not our childhood at all. There was just a lot of time kind of in the outdoors, looking after animals and moving animals and mending fences and harvesting and siloing and all that kind of good stuff. So when you grow up with that kind of upbringing, it's very natural that you develop a pathological hatred for food waste.
Jason Jacobs: And so growing up, seeing the waste, having it really [inaudible 00:07:54] to given how hard you were working. So maybe walk me and, and listeners through how that then translated to applying that professionally? So was OLIO the, the first time that those worlds collided? Or how did OLIO come about and how did that journey evolve for you?
Tessa Clarke: Yeah. So after my upbringing on the farm, I realized that much as I love my childhood, I did not want to be a farmer and I definitely did not want to be a farmer's wife. So I then proceeded to get as far away from the farm as I possibly could. So I went to university and then went to London and I pursued what could be describe as a fairly sort of classic corporate career. I think I rebelled against most of my family values. I became an avid consumer of stuff. You know, I look back now and that's a horror, sort of the lifestyle that I was, I was living, but my two sort of worlds, I guess, sort of work and my upbringing, recollided seven years ago now. I was living and working in Switzerland and moving back to the UK and our moving day, the removal men said to me that I had to throw away all of our own eaten food.
And obviously I was not prepared to do this. So much the irritation, I stopped packing and instead bundled up my newborn and my toddler and I set out into the streets, clutching this food, hoping to find someone to give it to. And to cut a very long story short, I failed miserably. The lady I was hoping to give it to just for some reason was not in her usual spot that day. So I got a bit emotional about the fact I've gone to all this effort to share this food and I had failed, but I wasn't to be defeated.
And so I went back to my apartment and when the packing men weren't looking, I smuggled the non-perishable food into the bottom of my packing boxes. And that was the moment I remembered so vividly sort of in my kitchen, in front of the cupboards, just thinking, “I am probably performing a criminal offense right now.” But to me it felt even more criminal to put perfectly good food in the bin when I knew that there was someone probably within a hundred meters of me who would like to have that food. The problem was they just didn't know about it.
And at that point in time I'd spent about a decade working in the digital world. I knew there was an app for absolutely everything and I couldn't believe there wasn't a simple app where I could just advertise my food and anyone who wants to, who live nearby could request it and pop around and pick it up. So that was the light bulb moment for OLIO.
I told several people about this idea of a neighbor to neighbor food sharing app and I think they all thought I had gone absolutely crazy. I've spent far too long on maternity leave and I should go back to work, but my co-founder Sasha, I told her about this idea and her eyes lit up. She immediately got it. And what we then did was research the problem of food waste and once we discovered just how enormous the problem of food waste was, we could not possibly turn our back on this. And we really decided to dedicate the rest of our lives to solving the problem of food waste.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And so it sounds like the initial premise was if you or anyone has food that they don't need, whether it be because it's just too much or the kids didn't like it, or they had a party and there was a bunch of leftovers or things like that, then rather than have it go in the trash and then to the landfill, to find a home for it so that it doesn't go to waste and makes the food that is produced go further?
Tessa Clarke: You are absolutely spot on. Yes. So the app is really easy to use. You just snap a photo of any food you've got that you don't want and then add it to OLIO. Neighbors living nearby, get an alert. They can browse listings, request what they want and then they pop round and pick it up. Because what we have discovered is that there are many reasons why people have too much food at home. First of all, it's very instinctive. We have been hardwired to hoard food. It is after all our life source. So it's natural to want to open the fridge, open the cupboards and see an abundance of food.
We will work late or eat out or order in, all sorts of things that happen in our day-to-day live, which mean that we don't follow through on eating all the food that we'd planned. We overcater for parties, we give unwanted food gifts, we go on diets, we go on holidays, et cetera, et cetera. So there's no sort of reasons why we might find ourselves with too much food. And what we have discovered is that actually nobody likes throwing away good food. It feels horrible to throw food in the bin. The reason why we do it is because we are no longer connected to our local communities, because we no longer have someone to give that food to.
And actually human beings have been sharing food, right since the beginning, kind of the evolution of our species. And that is what has made us so unique and so successful as a species. The fact that we have collaborated to share our most precious resource and actually kind of, you know, what's weird is, it's not sharing food with a neighbor. What's really weird is throwing food in the bin when there's someone within meters of you who would love to have it.
Jason Jacobs: And so when you and your co-founder were first getting started and you landed on this idea and hypothesis, where did you start? What was the first step once you got out of that research mode?
Tessa Clarke: Oh, I'll just touch briefly on the research mode actually, if you don't mind, [laughs] because it was so pivotal for us and it really, it gave us the fire that we have in our bellies that has kept us just driving relentless here, solving this problem. So what we discovered, now it's quite easy for me to explain this all to you, but this took a long time trying to piece together all these different bits of the jigsaw puzzle to see the shocking reality that we live in today.
So globally, a third of all the food we produce each year gets thrown away. It's worth over a trillion us dollars. Alongside that, we have 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night who could be fed on less than a quarter of the food that we waste in the Western world. And then the environmental impact of food waste is absolutely devastating. If it were to be a country, food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the USA and China. And that's because a landmass larger than China is used every single year to grow food that's never eaten. So that is land that has been deforested, species driven to extinction, soil degraded, indigenous populations displaced.
A quarter of humanities fresh water is used to grow food that's never eaten. And then that food goes on this really, really long resource and carbon intensive supply chain. And then when a third of it or more gets thrown away, sadly, the majority of it ends up in landfill and when food decomposes without access to oxygen it creates methane, which is 25 times more deadly than CO2. And so that is why, as I said, at the beginning, if it would be a country food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the USA and China.
And actually something called Project Drawdown, which hopefully many of your listeners will be familiar with, which is a collaborative piece of work by several hundred of the world's leading climate change scientists. They stack rank the top 100 solutions to the climate crisis and in position number one comes reducing food waste. And that comes above solar power, above electric cars, and above a plant-based diet. So we kind of went on this journey of realizing what an enormous problem food waste was. And then the real shocker was the discovery that in a country, such as the UK and indeed in the US half of all food waste takes place in the home. So a typical British family is throwing away 700 pounds Sterling of food each year, a typical American family string of about $2,000 per year. And that is where kind of half of the problem is taking place.
And on the one hand, that's incredibly depressing because that means that each and every one of us, we are responsible and accountable for half of that enormous problem I've just described, but if you flip it on his head, it can actually also be very exciting. Actually, if we're half of this problem, we can be half the solution as well and we don't have to wait for government, we don't have to wait for businesses. We can just empower everyday people to take action and to make a difference. So that was the kind of research phase and that really galvanized us to take action.
The next thing we did was do some research to figure out if anyone even cared about the problem of food waste, because obviously we'd identified it was a massive problem on paper, but if no one cares about it then, you know, it wouldn't, our app wouldn't go far. And we did a market research survey which showed that one in three people said that they were physically pained throwing away good food. And we use deliberate extreme language, like physically pain to filter out these sort of the false positives.
So that was another tick in the box. It was a big problem in paper. People cared about it, but it didn't mean to say that people take the next step in our hypothesis, which was to share food with a stranger. Sasha and I really wanted to test that hypothesis before sinking our life savings, building an app, but in all probability, no one to use. So we invited 12 people who all did that market research survey, lived close to one another, didn't know each other, didn't know us and we asked them to take part in the experiment. So for two weeks we put them on a close WhatsApp group and we said, Daniel has got surplus food, here are bunch of neighbors that might be interested in taking it. And we waited with bated breath for one or two days to see if anyone would share any food into that group and thankfully they did. And actually, quite a lot of sharing then took place over that two weeks.
We then met and debriefed with all of those people afterwards and they told us a couple of critical things. First of all, they said, you must build this app, please. Second thing they said was it only needs to be slightly better than WhatsApp, which was a really, really important piece of advice for us. We didn't put in millions of bells and whistles. We just launched the really streamline version of the app. And then the third thing they said was, how can we help? And that was the genesis of what is now today, our Ambassador program. So they were the first sort of 12 hardy souls that helped us really kind of kickstart that high political sharing by clearing through their cupboards and putting it in the app and spreading the word and telling their friends. So that was how we got started.
Jason Jacobs: And when was that?
Tessa Clarke: That was the summer of 2015. We did all of that and it took us five months to the day to go from starting working on OLIO to getting the first version of it launched in the app store. So we were definitely sort of in a hurry. And then we spent the first, kind of the second half of that year just restricting the sharing to a couple of postcodes or per couple of districts in London to really kind of get that model working. And then it was January 2016 when we made the app available across the UK.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And so at that time, was there any business model associated with it or was it just about getting an engaged user base that's getting value from the product?
Tessa Clarke: I'm sort of laughing because we've had so many business model hypotheses that have kind of changed and I've been tested and rated over the time, but I think it's fair to say that in the early days, our focus was absolutely on user engagement and growth rather than monetization. We knew that for this type of model monetizing, you know, 10,000 people was never, never going to work. This was a model where we needed to get hundreds of millions and billions of people sharing a surplus food on the app.
And it's only kind of in the past two years that we've really developed a very robust business model. And we've done that through something called our Food Waste Heroes programme. So in our early days, we had a very significant conundrum. Our early adopters hated food waste and therefore they had nothing to give away. And we had somewhat naively hoped that businesses would use the OLIO app to bring extra customers into the store, to cross sell, up sell, for brand awareness and stuff like that. And we quickly discovered that they were far too busy running their core business to mess around messaging members of the community via an app.
So we were a food sharing app with no food, which I'm sure you'll agree was pretty useless. So we thought, well, why don't we solve this conundrum by taking the people who have plenty of time and no food waste and match them with the businesses that have lots of food waste and no time. And that created our Food Waste Heroes programme. So now we have 35,000 trained volunteers and we matched them up with their local business, which could be a supermarket or a corporate canteen or a bakery or a quick service restaurant. And on their allotted time and day that volunteer will pop out of the house across the road. They'll go collect all of the unsold food from that business. They'll take that food home, add it to the app, within minutes their neighbor is requesting it. A minutes later, they're popping round to pick it up.
And that takes that food from having been considered a waste stream in the store to instead one to two hours later being fully redistributed into multiple homes in the local community. And those businesses are paying us for that service because at the moment they're paying a waste contractor to take that food away. And instead, they're now paying OLIO to ensure that food is redistributed and eaten. And they're doing that for a couple of reasons, not just kind of [laughs] out the goodness of their hearts, they're doing it because their customers are calling time on food waste and really kind of naming and shaming companies that are seen throwing away food on social media.
Their employees are filling out employee satisfaction surveys saying, I hate being paid to throw away perfectly good food every day. And then also as the race to net zero is now on and more and more companies have really meaningful ESG goals, you're not gonna achieve any of those whilst still throwing away food. And so that's led to a really, really kind of positive momentum for the food waste here as business. And we're also now increasingly finding that we are also more cost effective for our clients than the waste contractor, which is great news.
Jason Jacobs: So it's fine if you don't have a state of handy, but I'm, I'm just curious. What percentage, if you take a supermarket, for example, what percentage of their waste stream is food waste?
Tessa Clarke: What I can tell you is that supermarkets are generally throwing away, perhaps half a percentage point of what goes through their stores. And this is actually kind of back to the piece we were talking about earlier on about sort of food waste, where does food waste take place? Because when you talk to people it's super intuitive to think, "Oh, most food waste takes place at a retail store level." When you talk to people about that, that's the first place they go, But actually that couldn't be further from the truth. So in the UK, if you look at all food waste and where it's generated, just 2% of all food waste takes place at a retail store level And half of it takes place in the home.
And the reason for that is just simple math, there's 28 million households throwing away 20% of the weekly shop in comparison to 10 or 15,000 supermarkets throwing away half a percentage point. But half a percentage point, it sounds like a very small amount, but when you actually go to a store and physically see how much it is, it's still a shockingly large amount of food. And clearly it's perfectly good, perfectly edible food that should be eaten, not being binned.
Jason Jacobs: Do you still have a big percentage of food providers that are, that are homes or what, what percentage is coming from these stores?
Tessa Clarke: It's roughly sort of half half, although the amount of food that's now coming from the businesses is growing very, very rapidly because there has been a real step change in how businesses are thinking about this as of 2021. And so we are growing very, very quickly with supermarkets, with quick service restaurants, with the rapid delivery companies, and with the corporate caters in particular.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. So the only, the only ones that are paying are the businesses. So that's where the money comes-
Tessa Clarke: The businesses pay. Yeah. Whereas all the sharing, you know, between you and I, that's all done for free. You give your food away for free and someone else picks it up free. I should also stress that whilst the businesses are paying us to ensure the food's redistributed, the food is given away for free by our volunteers on the OLIO app.
Jason Jacobs: And the volunteers, they're not compensated in any way for their time, they're just doing it to help the cause?
Tessa Clarke: They are not monetarily compensated. No. So they are volunteering because it's just an amazing volunteering experience on a number of levels. First of all, you get to go to that store. You pick up all of that surplus food and just on a very, very visceral level you realize, “Wow, if it wasn't for me, this beautiful food would be going in the bin.” So you immediately feel pretty amazing just through that act of kind of rescuing it from the store. You then take it home and you give away all this free food to your local communities. So you're like Santa Claus in your local community. You're a pretty popular person.
It's very sociable. You do it from the convenience of, of your own home. It's often, generally kind of done outside of, of working hours. And it's incredibly rewarding to give stuff away for free to other people because everybody who's coming to pick it up from you wants it. And sadly in this day and age, sometimes people need it as well. And our volunteers just tell us, it's just an incredibly rewarding, gratifying experience to do that.
We do also allow them to keep up to 10% of what they collect, if they would like as a thank you. And for some of our volunteers, that's a really important part of volunteering, but for the vast majority, they volunteer because they just hate food waste and they want to help play their part in fixing the climate crisis. And they enjoy doing something that's really empowering for their community.
Jason Jacobs: So interesting. There's been such strong adoption from the, the volunteers. It, I mean, it almost sounds like a, like a really mission-driven version of, you know, of, of like a DoorDash driver or something, but without the compensation.
Tessa Clarke: Yeah. We have over five times more volunteers than there are collection slots available. So a collection slot is a really coveted thing. It's a really, yeah, enjoyable experience [inaudible 00:26:20].
Jason Jacobs: And w- are there a key personas, uh, that make up that volunteer base? I feel like there must be some good learning there in terms of what types of people are inclined to, to do this really amazing volunteer work, or is it, uh, a widespread, is there a long tail? Has it, is it people from [inaudible 00:26:36]?
Tessa Clarke: [laughs] They're all wonderful, wonderful people. They reflect the OLIO user base overall. So between two thirds and three quarters of our community is female. We have all ages represented from 18 to 80, but we do tend to over-index in the to 24 to 44 year old age range. And as I said, people do it for a variety of different reasons, but generally it is just this deep seated belief that food waste is wrong and they want to play their part into righting that wrong that they can see absolutely everywhere they turn in the world.
Jason Jacobs: Do the people that are giving away the food tend to also be the people that are consuming the excess food or, or does it tend to be that you're one or the other?
Tessa Clarke: So that's a really interesting question. And what we have found is that there's generally about 20% of our community only ever give stuff away. Very, very consistently. They have no interest in going to pick stuff up. They just want to conveniently give something away to a neighbor. And then we have found, there used to be a large portion of people who would pick stuff up only, but over time, the portion of people who pick stuff up only is just going down and down and down. So now today, roughly 50% of our community both give and take and then roughly 30% take only and roughly 20% give only. And so you can see that really nice sense of community and reciprocity coming into play.
Jason Jacobs: And what about in terms of affluent or are these people who are worried about how they're going to eat or is it really more that it's just not being wasteful that's driving their motivations?
Tessa Clarke: So again, we have a complete mix of people. We do find that people who are giving stuff away, slightly index more affluent and people who are picking stuff up slightly index less affluent. But the reality is that we see people from all walks of life who are giving stuff away and all walks of life who are picking stuff up. The most important thing about OLIO is we absolutely do not position OLIO as being for people in need because unfortunately, you know, the size of the food waste problem is multipliers larger than there are hungry people to eat all the surplus food that our society generates. So if we're gonna solve the problem of food waste, we need everybody to get involved and, and everybody should play a role.
Of course, we do have some people because in every community, unfortunately, nowadays there are people who are struggling. And yes, we do have people who are having a tough time who will use the OLIO app, but what they tell us that they love about it is that there's no stigma associated with using OLIO precisely because we positioned it as being about modern, sustainable, everyday living. And so it's not like kind of going to a food bank, which does have a strong sense of stigma associated with it often. And they don't have to, there were no quoters, they don't have to go to their doctors to get a chit of approval. They can just use the app just like anybody else and that's really, really important for them.
Jason Jacobs: All right. And I, I've noticed that, I mean, this is, uh, obviously a really mission-driven company. It is a company and also it's a heavily financed venture backed company. When you were just starting out and you knew you wanted to focus on this problem and you had this kind of initial entry point around sharing, did you wrestle with whether this should be a company or not or did you always know that for-profit commercial enterprise was the right answer for OLIO?
Tessa Clarke: So, no, we didn't wrestle with it at all. We were very, very clear that the scale of the food waste problem was so mindbogglingly large, that it, it had to be solved at scale. And both Sasha and I, we were not able to identify any charity that has scaled as quickly as Airbnb, for example, or all of the other sort of tech startups or scale ups. And so for us, it was very clear that what we needed to do was to really marry profit with purpose. So we think that business can be an incredibly powerful force for good, if it has got its mission and purpose, really at its core.
And we get really frustrated actually, nowadays we think that society is living in this really constraining dichotomy where we say, “Well, if you do good, you must be a charity.” And if you're growing really fast and, and scaling and enormous, then you will be a business, but you're probably having all sorts of negative externalities. And we believe that the new path has to be this third path, which is profit with purpose.
And we would like to believe that if you are a business that does not have purpose at your core, if you're not having a positive impact on people in planet, then you should be losing the license to live. And we were very, very clear that being a business rather than charity was gonna be most effective way for us to get to scale and to solve this problem as quickly as possible. Plus Sasha and I are from the business world, neither of us have that non-profit or charitable experience. So we wouldn't have been playing to our strengths either.
Jason Jacobs: And I mean, so many times you hear about these really important missions, but consumers are so fickle that when they're actually implemented, no matter how noble they are, people just don't use it at scale. And one that sticks out of my mind is like personal behavior chain for carbon footprints, right? I mean, it's like, there's a lot of talk about that and how, you know, it all with the consumer and stuff. And maybe there's some, you know, some hardcore crazies that are gonna go and like actively measure and track and reduce and compete and [inaudible 00:32:48], but like most people just aren't, right? But you're, it sounds like you're seeing some real scale. So what do you think is different about OLIO that has enabled the excitement of the reality to map to the excitement of the vision?
Tessa Clarke: So I will say it is a challenge. There is what we call internally sort of the intentionality gap. So most people have great intentions, but getting them to actually follow through on those intentions and take action is really, really, really hard. So we have spent a ton of time going really, really deep on behavioral psychology and trying to figure out how we can harness that sort of powerful school of thought and apply it through technology to have a positive impact for humanity.
I think sort of at a macro level, one of the ways in which we think about this, when people ask us who is our competitor, they often expect us to say another app. And I always say, no, our competitor is the bin or the trash cans, as you would say. So we have to really, really focus on providing a user experience that is as close to the bin as possible in terms of efficiency, but that massively over-indexes, it is the bin in terms of feeling enjoyable and fun and delightful and making local friendships and relationships and giving you back your impact data.
So we spent a lot of time really focusing on that through the product, but we have also, recognizing that behavior change is really hard. It takes a really long time. We have also expanded the product proposition beyond just food sharing to provide more mainstream entry points into OLIO for people. And so the first way in which we did that was through creating a non-food section in the app. And this was actually very much sort of following the behavior of our users.
So our users in the early days started adding a shower head or some carpet cleaner or something like that. And initially I was taking down all of those listings on the backend and quickly realized that, “Hey, this wasn't scalable.” And then B, “Well, why are we fighting that?” Because actually we hate waste of any variety and why would I sort of get rid of a shower head or half a bottle of carpet cleaner? And so what we did was we created a new non-food section in the app, and that has grown really, really rapidly.
So this is for stuff that people, they don't wanna sell, they don't wanna ship it halfway across the country. Charity store might not want it, might not be open, might not be nearby. They just want it out of their house. They just want it gone. They just want to press a magic button and a happy smiling, Heber shows up and takes it off their hands. And so the non-food section we found her has been a great entry point. It brings people into the OLIO community. They have that experience of connecting with a neighbor on the doorstep. They realize that it's fun, it's safe, it's easy. And so it then starts to change your mentality from, why would I share food with a stranger to, well, actually, why wouldn't I give away my food to a member of this community that I'm already part of?
Jason Jacobs: One of the companies that we've partnered with and actually their CEO has been on the show it's called Ripley. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they're, they're helping big enterprises catalog physical stuff to better utilize it internally and then find homes for it externally, whether it be giving away or, or selling. But there's definitely some parallels there in terms of just utilizing our precious resources more efficiently and if we can't utilize them more efficiently finding people or entities that can so that, so that they don't go to waste.
Tessa Clarke: Yeah, 100%. We, waste is not just what goes into the bin. Waste is any resource that is sat by idle and not being utilized. And so to that point, about a month ago, we launched a new section of the app called Borrow, which connects people with their neighbors to lend and borrow everyday household items. Because the typical American home, for example, has over 300,000 things in it. The vast majority of which is not being used. We don't all need a cat carrier or a drill or an ice cream maker, or how many kids, fancy dress costumes or board games or books.
There are all these things that actually we could be lending and borrowing with our neighbors because it makes no sense for me to be groaning under all this sort of clutter [laughs] and feeling guilty about the fact it's not being used whilst two doors down, someone is buying exactly the same stuff to also use for five or 10% of its useful life. So we completely agree. We have got to change our mental model so that when we're thinking about consumption, our default is to think what resources can I utilize that already exist in my local community? And you go there first before then buying something brand new.
Jason Jacobs: Now, where does something like composting fit into all of this?
Tessa Clarke: [laughs] Don't get me talking about composting. So composting clearly is much better than landfill when you, uh, let's just kind of focus on food specifically because of the methane issue that I touched on earlier on. But unfortunately, a lot of people think that they're being environmentally friendly through composting food. They're like, “Oh, well, that, that doesn't matter. I've composited it. It's okay.” Well actually, unfortunately kind of, you know, 90% of the carbon footprint of food is what takes place prior to it arriving in your home. And so by composting it rather than sending it off to landfill, you're only saving on that last 10%. So whenever I put something into my compost bin that is not kind of shells or peels or stuff like that, I do consider that a failure because all of the water and carbon resources that went into producing that food, that food should have been eaten.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And the food that you deal with, is it mostly packaged food or do you deal with loose foods like produce and fruits and, and things like that?
Tessa Clarke: So it depends. So the food that people are sharing from their homes, often the kind of the first starting point for people is they'll do a cupboard clear out. Most people have got stuff kind of lurking at the back of the cupboards that is a good intention. There's never gonna happen and that's really easy way to get started. We also find that people share a lot of fruit vetch from their homes because that is perishable, your plans change. So that's kind of, I say kind of the mainstay of people giving stuff away from their homes.
In terms of, from the businesses, we see an enormous amount of baked products because the marginal cost of producing an extra loaf of bread is close to zero. But the opportunity cost when you've got empty store shelves and people just don't buy when there's empty shelves. So it is a rational, economically rational thing for a business to make sure that it always has lots of bread products available for sale. And so what that means is that at the end of the day, unfortunately, there's an enormous amount that is surplus. So we do see a lot of bread products and pastries. We also see a lot of sandwiches and yogurt pots and fruit pots and things like that, stuff that has a used by date of that day.
And what's really unique about the OLIO solution is that because the demand for the food is so high, we can get that food redistributed within, on average an hour. And that's kind of really, really magical for these businesses that are kind of, you know, closing a store, let's say eight or nine or ten o'clock at night. We can still pick up all of the unsold food and guarantee that's been redistributed by midnight, which is yeah, just a really, really powerful solution for them.
Jason Jacobs: Now, you mentioned that from the home standpoint, the people that would be sharing their food are the hardcore people that may be try to optimize what they purchase to begin with so they have less waste. And you also mentioned that the businesses pay and that it makes sense for them for the reasons that we already talked about around their employees demanding it and net zero commitments and, and that ultimately it should be cheaper than what they're already paying the waste haulers. For the home, the people that are sharing in the home, is the only incentive that it's the right thing to do for the planet, or is there any self-interest for them to do so the way that there is for businesses?
Tessa Clarke: So I think it's fair to say that different people have different motives for why they share from their home. So there's definitely a core of people who hate throwing away food and so it just feels unpleasant to them and so it's far preferable to give something away. I think there's then another group of people who are much more motivated by the community aspect of things. OLIO is a really easy way to get to know people in your local community. And we often hear from people who have just perhaps moved into a new city or moved into a new neighborhood and they'll start using OLIO as a way to connect with people.
Jason Jacobs: Like food sharing as the new puppy. Is that what you're saying?
Tessa Clarke: Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's also not just for Christmas as well, like a puppy. And then I think there are people who give food away because they are aware of how much, how much hunger there is in every community and so they feel very guilty about the fact that someone else could be eating it. And then there are some people who are motivated purely by the climate crisis. They know how water and carbon intensive food is. And so they really enjoy getting back their impact data that makes them feel great about what they're doing.
Jason Jacobs: Uh-huh [affirmative]. And this reminds me a little bit of like the voluntary offset market versus the, the mandatory market. I mean, do you think there's a role for mandatory? Is there a role for regulation? Like we've talked a lot about carrot, but is there a role for stick in helping the cause with food waste?
Tessa Clarke: Yes. [laughs] Yes, there is. The stick that I would most love to be applied would be for businesses to have to publicly report their food waste data, because I truly believe that Sunlight is the best form of disinfectant. And if this information was public, that would lead to an overnight change in terms of businesses, willingness to engage with organizations such as ourselves and make sure that that food is redistributed rather than thrown away.
And again, if I'm [inaudible 00:43:39] around the world for a day, I'd love to extend that mandate beyond just food and to apply it to waste more generally. Absolutely, every industry certainly that I've looked at is criminally wasteful. And if we had to pub- if they had to publish that data, I think that would really galvanize significant change. I also think that we need to look at date labeling. In most countries, there is a wild amount of confusion amongst consumers about the myriad of different dates that is put on food and it's not helping anybody and we need to streamline and standardize date labeling. So that it's really focused just on one thing, which is the safety of the food. So yeah, that would be my, my two first asks.
Jason Jacobs: And on that policy and regulatory side, have there been examples of policies that are either in place or that have been proposed that you're aware of either in the UK or elsewhere? And from a resource standpoint, have you thought about, or do you put any resources towards advocacy on that front as a company?
Tessa Clarke: So there are several bits of regulation that I think are very positive. So in the US you've got the Good Samaritan law, which essentially provides protection to the donor in the chance that someone gets sick from that food. Now, actually in most of the countries, you are protected by the current laws and so you don't technically need Good Samaritan law. But I think what is helpful about the Good Samaritan law is it is just so clearly signposted to people that you are protected and you don't need to worry about it. That, that could be very powerful.
Also, in the US and I think in a couple of other countries, you can get tax deductions if you are a business that redistributes your food. The caveat I would make there is that at the moment those tax deductions apply only if you redistribute to charity. And unfortunately the charitable sector is not capable of redistributing all of the industry surplus, nowhere near. So in the UK, the charitable sector at the moment is redistributing 5% to 10% of the surplus.
Once it's fully scaled, the sector believes it will be able to redistribute a quarter of the industry surplus, which leaves three quarters with no solution. And so we would like any of those sorts of deductions to apply to just redistribution per se, not restricted just to charitable redistribution, but to also include community redistribution, because we're only gonna get to zero food waste if, with community redistribution as well.
So there's Good Samaritan law, there's tax rebates. In France, they have passed some legislation which mandates that businesses over a certain size have to make their surplus food available again, sort of to charitable groups for redistribution. So that has really, again, it's kind of really prompted that debate and that discussion, that energy around redistributing surplus food. So that, that's sort of main ones that I'm aware of.
Jason Jacobs: And we talked before about profit and purpose and how some believe that they're at odds, but you believe that they can be deeply intertwined and I believe that too. And when they are deeply intertwined, it's special. Just because they're deeply intertwined doesn't mean that situations don't come up where there is some tension between the two. Are there any acute situations like that, that have come up for you along the way where you've had a hard time balancing the two, or maybe have to turn down something that would have made good business sense and went against impact or, or vice versa?
Tessa Clarke: We haven't yet had that situation. No, because for us profit and purpose really are in lockstep with one another. If we can redistribute more food then we're having more impact and that is also where we monetize. And I really think that we've got to move on beyond this conversation about profit and purpose being in conflict with one another. And, and to me it feels very reminiscent of, I'm sure, kind of one or two decades ago, people were asking business leaders, how do you reconcile treating your employees well with generating profits? And we have now moved on beyond that conversation, right? We know that if you treat your employees well, then you create that virtuous circle, which drives the profits. And I believe that the same is true for profit with purpose.
Jason Jacobs: For anybody listening that's inspired by the work that you're doing, where do you need help? Who might you like to hear from, if anybody?
Tessa Clarke: So we are always looking for a couple of things. So first off, any one who works in sort of the food industry. So for any businesses that are throwing away food that want to stop throwing away food, we'd love to talk to them. OLIO's Food Waste Heroes programme exists in the UK and Ireland and we are also starting to expand into Singapore and Latin America. So we'd love to have conversations with food businesses. We're always looking for media opportunities and like any founder, we're also always looking to build relationships with prospective investors.
Jason Jacobs: That's great. And is there anything I didn't ask that I should have, or any parting words for listeners?
Tessa Clarke: There is one parting concept I would love to leave with your listeners, which they might or might not have come across, but something I feel very passionately about, and that is, it touches back on this sort of consumption problem that we mentioned earlier on. So the concept is Earth Overshoot Day, and that is the day in the year in which humanity has used all the resources that the earth can replenish in the year. And when, it was first measured back in 1969, Earth Overshoot Day was the 31st of December.
And so what that means is humanity used in a year, what the earth could replenish in a year, essentially back then we were living in equilibrium with the planet. If you fast forward to this year, Earth Overshoot Day was the 29th of July. And what that means is that every single thing that every single one of us, seven and a half billion people are consuming after the 29th of July, is net, net depletive to the planet. And, you know, I've got a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old [laughs] even they understand that that is profoundly unsustainable. And the trajectory we're on at the moment sees us consuming as if we have three planets by 2030, and consuming five planets by 2050.
And it's very clear to me that we cannot continue with business as usual. We need to completely reinvent our economy and our economics and transition from this linear extractive wasteful model of consumption to one that is circular and sustainable. And that's really ultimately our vision for OLIO. We want to get to 1 billion OLIOs by 2030. We want people to be connected with their neighbors so that when they want to consume the default will be what resources already exist in my local community that I can take for free, or I can lend and borrow rather than extracting resources from the planet and, and pushing humanity, quite frankly, to the brink of extinction.
Jason Jacobs: I hadn't heard that concept before. I mean, it, it sounds similar to net zero, but instead of talking about carbon you're talking about waste, which makes total sense, I just, hadn't heard it framed in that way and Earth Overshoot Day, I hadn't heard of that as well. I'm gonna look it up.
Tessa Clarke: Yeah. Please do check it out. It is, it's a terrifying concept. And when you kind of really get your head around it, you realize we cannot continue with an economy and economics that worshiped at the altar of infinite GDP growth in a resource constrained world by definition, that, that cannot continue. So I'm really excited though, because that means that we're on the dawn of a massive revolution in terms of how we do business, how we live, how we consume. And I believe that kind of when we get out the other side of that, we will live in a world in which we are all healthier, wealthier, happier, but it's gonna be a bumpy ride [laughs] getting there, I think.
Jason Jacobs: Well, you're working on part of the solution. So Tessa, thank you so much for making the time to come on and share what you're up to with OLIO and your journey and wishing you and the team, every success.
Tessa Clarke: Thank you so much. Thank you.
Jason Jacobs: Hey everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note that is .co not .com. Someday we'll get the .com, but right now .co. You can also find me on Twitter @jjacobs22, where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. They've always made me say that. Thank you.
