Sustainable Merton is supporting OLIO – the food sharing app, on its mission to stop good food from going to waste!
OLIO is a free app connecting people with their neighbours and with local shops so surplus food and other items can be shared, not thrown away. So if you love food, hate waste, care about the environment or want to connect with your community, OLIO is for you!
Users simply snap a photo of their spare and add it to the app. Neighbours who live nearby receive customised alerts and can request anything that takes their fancy. Most items are offered for free, though users can also request a donation to charity for their listings.
Food shared could be food nearing its sell-by date from local stores, spare home-grown vegetables, bread from the local baker, or the groceries in your fridge when you go away, move home or go on a diet.
You can also share non-food items such as furniture, clothes, toys, household and beauty products.
With Merton’s forthcoming Food Poverty Action Plan, where residents will be encouraged to reduce their food waste, we feel OLIO will play an important role in helping to reduce household food waste, whilst encouraging neighbours to get to know each other and foster a sense of community in the process.
On a global level, OLIO has been used in over 41 countries and over 300,000 items have been successfully shared between neighbours. OLIO has a flourishing volunteer network – over 12,000 people have reached out to the organisation requesting to become volunteers and save and redistribute food in their communities via OLIO.
Tessa Cook, co-founder of OLIO, commented: “We at OLIO can’t wait to expand our app within X, an area with such a passion for food waste reduction already established. ͞With Merton’s dynamic community and existing food waste efforts, it feels a perfect match for OLIO”
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