Tessa Clarke was moving house when she found a problem she could eventually build a business on. With a cabbage, some sweet potatoes and a few other bits of food left in her fridge on moving day, she hit on the idea of providing a way to share surplus food with neighbours.
Today, those left-over vegetables have grown into a social enterprise which has signed up 7 million people, up to a million of whom regularly engage every month.
The Olio app enables users to give away spare food – left over from a party, perhaps, or before going on holiday. They can also use it to offload clothes, books, toys, toiletries, cleaning products, packing boxes and other goods. Having begun as a WhatsApp group in a few London postcodes in 2015, Olio was supercharged by the pandemic, during which it grew fivefold.
Two-thirds of what is shared via the Olio app now comes from partnerships with major retailers, including Tesco and Iceland, and other businesses. The producers of TV programmes such as Love Island Aftersun, Dancing on Ice and University Challenge use Olio to share unused perishables. Health store chain Holland & Barrett is the latest group to sign up, and now uses the app in more than 700 stores.
Olio raised almost $50m in two financing rounds, the latest in 2021. It has found life tougher since, having to rein in its international ambitions as funding grew harder to come by amid rising interest rates.
But Clarke says the pandemic put a fire under Olio: it “changed the narrative” on the environment and made people value the benefits of a local community and knowing their neighbours.
Tackling food waste is ranked by some experts as the number one action towards reducing carbon emissions. With 7.5m tonnes of edible food, worth millions of pounds, wasted every year in the UK alone, it is also seen as a way to tackle hunger in the cost of living crisis.
“Pre-Covid, the climate crisis was called global warming and was going to happen to our grandchildren. In the post-Covid world it’s called a climate crisis,” Clarke says.
She fears, however, that we’ve gone straight from denial to despair: “I do think people are feeling very overwhelmed. They don’t know what to do. So providing really simple, feelgood solutions is more important than ever.”
Last week, there was potential good news for the firm when new environment secretary Steve Barclay said he was considering reviving a measure that would force large businesses to disclose the amount of food they waste. The change of heart came after campaigners, led by food waste pressure group Feedback, threatened a legal challenge.
Clarke says: “We are thrilled the government is responding. At the moment, food waste is taking place behind closed doors … We believe that if we monitor food waste and it is made public, pressure will be applied to business to solve the problem.”
Legislation could be important because Olio’s business customers pay it to take unwanted stuff away, and this provides the bulk of its income. A team of 100,000 volunteers collect the food and share it with friends and neighbours in return for first dibs on 10% of what they pick up, or just the warm glow of helping reduce waste.
Olio – a Spanish word originally meaning spicy stew which has also come to mean a miscellaneous collection of things – is groundbreaking in other ways: it is a tech firm founded and run by women – Clarke and her co-founder, whose given name is Saasha Celestial-One. Like many entrepreneurs, they had to be brave enough to quit salaried jobs and take a risk. But Olio faced much bigger hurdles than many of its contemporaries.
In the UK, less than 2% of equity investment goes to high-growth companies with female founders, according to analysis by Beauhurst, with 85% going to those founded by men and the rest to mixed teams. That’s no surprise given that the vast majority of the capital in Europe is deployed by men.
“It’s just a wall of men,” says Clarke. “Understandably, they gravitate towards solving problems that they understand and they feel passionate about, which is why we’ve seen so much investment in crypto and fintech and AI … and so little in community-based solutions and solving the climate crisis. Until we change the gatekeepers of capital, we’re not going to change the fate of female-founder businesses.”
Having set off on a well-trodden path from Cambridge University to management consultancy, Clarke began her corporate career at publisher Emap, where she helped develop trade journal Retail Week, before four years as head of e-commerce for Dyson, and a brief stint at financial group Wonga.
It wasn’t until she joined forces with old friend Celestial-One, a child of hippy parents who had also followed a corporate career, that she finally took action.
Clarke says it was years before she found the confidence to set up her own business, partly because she was “always sort of waiting for ideas to drop from the heavens” but also because there were no role models who looked like her.
Despite getting an MBA at California’s Stanford University, at a time when the likes of Facebook were taking off and raising millions of dollars, she admits she did not take that lead. “I basically wasn’t a guy in his early 20s who dropped out of an American university and was eating ramen noodles and all of that. That’s all I saw as an entrepreneur.”
Today, she says, her view has changed entirely and she tries hard to help other female founders. “I look at everything to do with my personality, what I enjoy, where I thrive, and it was kind of retrospectively obvious that I was going to be an entrepreneur.”
Age 47
Family Husband, two children (aged 11 and nine) and four stepchildren.
Education Degree in social and political sciences at Cambridge; MBA from Stanford.
Pay Undisclosed, “but a definite perk of the job is lots of surplus food!”
Last holiday “A couple of days over half term at Center Parcs with my family plus my co-founder, Saasha, and her family.”
Best advice she’s been given “Very cliched, but ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.”
Biggest career mistake “Not doing the hard work and introspection to find my true passion earlier in my career.”
Phrases she overuses “I asked the team and they said: ‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee’ and ‘Life is too short to be miserable.’”
How she relaxes “Listening to startup podcasts while batch cooking for the week ahead. Batch cooking is one of my top tips for living sustainably - it makes eating plant-based much easier, and you can massively reduce food and packaging waste too.”
• This article was amended on 29 November 2023. A previous version referred to 10,000 Olio volunteers collecting food, rather than 100,000.
