Tessa Clarke talks about how she created Olio, the app that is ending food waste. Olio connects people to others in their neighbourhood to share surplus food. She reflects on her journey creating a simple MVP to reaching 4 million users.



Tessa: It is possible to test your hypothesis without spending a penny

In the early days. You just need to find the super, super early adopters. They are people who you don't have to sell to, the minute you tell them you have got this thing that can solve their problem, they want to kind of rip it out of your hands and they don't care what it's called. They don't care what the colors and the design and the branding is. They just want that problem solved.

Clément: You are listening to Tessa Clarke, co-founder and CEO of Olio. In this episode, we'll be talking about food, and how she created and developed a simple solution to help fix this complex issue.

Laura: This is the spaceship podcast, part of the spaceship masterclass, where we support change-makers and entrepreneurs in their journeys to solving big challenges our planet is facing.

Here we bring the theory to life by featuring thought leaders and impact entrepreneurs from around the world. 

And in this episode we met Tessa Clark to talk about her startup Olio .  The Olio app connects people to others in their neighborhood to share surplus food. When you think about how much food goes, uneaten at our dinner tables, or it gets thrown out by local supermarkets. There is more than enough to go around and that's not to mention the fruits and vegetables that we harvest from our own gardens that we sometimes don't even know what to do with. I mean, there's only so many carrots that one can eat

Clément: Tessa started only in 2015 in the UK with a very basic version of the app.

And it was a pretty quick success. Now, all you has more than 3 million, 600,000 users. That means we are talking about almost 20 millions portions of food shared through the app.

Laura: We are really, really  interested Tessa,to hear a little bit more about how you tested the appetite for this solution. I mean, the problem of food waste is clear and the statistics are very, very poignant, and I am very curious to know how you actually went from understanding this problem to testing whether or not people were interested in even considering this idea of sharing.

Tessa: Yeah. Great question. And we went through a pretty methodical process, actually a quick bit methodical process. So I had an experience when I was moving country and found myself with some foods that the removal told me I had to throw away. But being a farmer's daughter and someone who has a keen appreciation for just how much hard work goes into producing food. I wasn't prepared to do that. So I kind of set out into the streets to try and find someone to give my food. To cut a long story short, I failed miserably. I went back to my apartment and not to be defeated, I smuggled the non-perishable food into the bottom of my packing box. And that was the point at which I realized this was crazy the lengths I was going  to avoid throwing away perfectly good food. And I knew there was an app for everything, and I couldn't believe it wasn't an app where I could just easily post my food and neighbors living nearby could request it and pop around and pick it up.

So that was the sort of light bulb moment, I guess, if you like for, for the concept of Olio the first thing my co-founder session I did was to research the problem of food waste to find out if this actually was a problem bigger than my personal experience. And we very quickly discovered that it's an enormous existential problem with a third of all the food we produce globally each...