The hyperlocal sharing app taking on Facebook Marketplace & cutting food waste – Olio co-founder Tessa Clarke

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UKTN

Technology, Entrepreneur, Tech, Business, Hr, Sales, Uktech, Investing, Funding, Entrepreneurship, Marketing

5 • 6 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2023

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tessa Clarke, CEO and co-founder of Olio, talks about the business model behind the food sharing app, the company’s plan to be the be the “Mailchimp of food redistribution”, organic international expansion and the plan to take on Facebook Marketplace by moving into second-hand items.

Clarke launched Olio, which lets people list surplus food and second-hand goods, in 2015. It has since attracted over 6.9 million users who have given away over 95 million portions of food. Listings on the circular economy app grew fivefold during the pandemic and the company has expanded beyond the UK to 63 countries. Olio, which has raised more than $50m in funding, has entered partnerships with businesses including Tesco and Pret. It has plans to rebrand later this year.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Anywhere where there is food that is either unsold or unserved, our real-time hyperlocal
0:10.4	redistribution model can ensure that that food is eaten, not thrown away.
0:17.2	Our bigger picture ambition really is to build a new model of consumption, one where the default is to consume locally and to consume secondhand.
0:31.5	What we discovered absolutely blew our minds. We could not believe that this wasn't on the front page every newspaper.
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1:24.1	Hello and welcome to the UKTN podcast, a weekly conversation with founders of some of the UK's
1:30.6	high growth tech companies. Each episode, we will talk through the founder's personal journey,
1:35.7	their vision for their business and their views of the wider tech industry. I'm Jane Wakefield
1:40.8	and I'm joined today by Tessa Clark, the co-founder of online marketplace
1:45.5	OLEO.O.LOW. Lovely to have you on, Tessa. Great to be here. Tell me a bit about how you came to found
1:51.4	OLEO and a bit about the app. So the light bulb moment for OLEO took place just over eight years ago now.
1:59.9	I was living and working overseas and moving back to the UK.
2:04.6	And on moving day, the removal men told me I had to throw away all of our uneaten food.
2:09.4	And I'm a father's daughter, so I have a pathological hatred for food waste and was absolutely not prepared to throw this food in the bin.
2:17.0	After setting up to the streets, try and find someone to share this food in the bin. After sitting up to the streets
2:18.2	try and find someone to share this food with and failing miserably, I resorted to smuggling the
	...

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