Olio

A game changer for food waste that connects people

OLIO’s mission is to eliminate the food waste in people’s homes across the world. OLIO’s food sharing platform empowers users to share unwanted or surplus food, helping to develop the sharing economy mind-set, and building local communities. Since it was founded in 2015, OLIO has signed up more than 1,600,000 users across 49 countries. Here’s a short video to see how it works.

Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, while 800 million people go to bed hungry every night. It takes a land mass larger than China to grow the food each year that is ultimately never eaten with dramatic negative impact– land that is deforested, species that are driven to extinction, soil that is degraded – all to produce food that we just throw away. Moreover, food that is never eaten accounts for 25% of all fresh water consumption globally. And when food waste goes to landfill it decomposes without access to oxygen and creates methane, which is a 23x more polluting greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Every which way you look at it, food waste is a major culprit in destroying our planet.

OLIO believes that small actions, every day, can lead to big change. Collectively – one rescued cupcake, carrot or bottle of lotion at a time – we can build a more sustainable future where our most precious resources are shared, not thrown away. The ambition of OLIO is that by 2030 we can halve the food waste in people’s homes and the local community.

Scaling Internationally

OLIO hits two impact themes of Social Impact Ventures as it targets to make the food supply chain more circular whilst increasing social cohesion in neighbourhoods. In OLIO, Social Impact Ventures has found incredibly mission-driven female entrepreneurs, a passionate team and impactful co-investors. It is impressive how OLIO has been able to attract both impact driven co-investing funds (Mustard Seed, Norrsken, Quadia) as well as commercially oriented VC’s (Octopus Ventures, Accel) across different countries in Europe.