Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, this is Umidash Dari and Natasha McElhone. Today we talked to Tessa Clark. She's the co-founder and CEO of Olio, the anti-waste app, tackling the climate crisis by solving the problem of waste in our homes and local communities. Olio does this by connecting people with their neighbors so that they can give away, rather than throw away, their spare food and their household items. It is powered by volunteers who collect unsold food from local businesses such as Tesco, sainsbury, asda and Holland Barrett and redistribute it to the community via the Olio app. Its impact has been widely recognized, most notably by the United Nations, who highlighted Olio as a beacon for the world, and by VivaTech, who awarded Olio Next European Unicorn. Olio is also a proud B Corp and Tessa is an ambassador for the Better Business Act.

Speaker 2: 1:06

Prior to Olio, tessa had a 15-year corporate career as a digital managing director in the media, retail and financial services sectors. She met her co-founder, sasha, whilst they were studying for their MBAs at Stanford University. Tessa is passionate about the sharing economy as a solution for a sustainable world and about profit with purpose as the next business paradigm. Tessa's TED talk about the power of sharing has been watched over 1 million times and in 2023, she was awarded the Verve Clicquot Bold Woman Award, the longest running award for female business leaders. Bold Woman Award the longest running award for female business leaders.

Speaker 1: 1:45

Today we will talk about the fact that we throw away 30% of our food.

Speaker 2: 1:50

And the majority of this is in our homes.

Speaker 1: 1:53

The truth about plastic bottles.

Speaker 2: 1:55

Reframing charity as sharing Ugly apples. Earth overshoot day Connecting with your neighbours. The truth about use-by and sell-by dates. And the circular economy.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Let's get wasted. Hi, this is Omid.

Speaker 2: 2:15

Ashtari and Natasha McElhone and with us today we have.

Speaker 3: 2:19

Tessa Clark Hi, tessa, hello, good to have you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 2:24

We will talk about waste and sharing today.

Speaker 3: 2:27

My two favourite topics.

Speaker 1: 2:29

Great. So why don't we start by talking about the state of food consumption and waste? There are enormous amounts of food that get wasted every year. Talk us through the size of this problem.

Speaker 3: 2:39

Yeah. So food waste is often being described as the world's dumbest problem, and I would definitely, given that we all need food to eat and survive. So, globally, over a third of all the food we produce each year gets thrown away, which is worth over a trillion US dollars. Alongside that, we have 800 million people who go to bed hungry each night, and they could be fed on just a quarter of the food that we waste in the western world. And then the environmental impact of food waste is honestly really, really shocking, and I think it's one of the big sort of untold stories when we're talking about the climate crisis.

Speaker 3: 3:16

So if it were to be a country, food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the usa and china, and it's food waste isn't just a carbon problem, it's also kind of a resource problem more broadly.

Speaker 3: 3:29

So if you look at our water consumption, a quarter of humanity's fresh water that we consume each year is used to grow food that's never eaten, and, as we all know, demand for water in many places of the world is wildly outstripping.

Speaker 3: 3:45

As we all know, demand for water in many places of the world is wildly outstripping supply, so the fact that we are wasting so much, not just the food, but all the resources that go into it is absolutely bonkers. And then, as we look to the future, we've got another roughly 2 billion people projected to join the planet by 2050. And, according to the FAO, in order to feed us all, we need to increase food production by over 50%, and today we honestly don't know how we're going to achieve that. So at the moment, we live in a world which is awash with food, which is perhaps why we're so careless with it and waste so much of it. But within most of our lifetimes, we are potentially moving into a future in which there isn't actually enough food for all of us. So that really means that, not just from an environmental perspective, but from a social and survival perspective, we've really got to tackle this problem of food waste.

Speaker 1: 4:34

I want to definitely double click sorry if I may, on the 30%, because I think when I read this number it just feels mind boggling and absurd. I didn't know how to put it into context for myself, so when I was looking it up, it basically comes down to 650 kilocal per day. That is is basically thrown away by every human being on the planet, which is 10 eggs. So if you take 10, every person is throwing away 10 eggs per day that's a lot of egg waste.

Speaker 3: 5:06

That's crazy.

Speaker 2: 5:07

I mean, I know eggs are not necessarily everybody's cup of tea.

Speaker 1: 5:10

But 10 eggs, no 10 eggs, chicken eggs, yeah um and in terms of the landmass that uh is wasted yeah, so it's a landmass larger than china yeah, india and canada put together Every single year to grow food that's never eaten.

Speaker 3: 5:26

And that is land that has probably been deforested, soil that's been degraded, indigenous populations displaced, species driven to extinction. So just in that landmass use it is incredibly wasteful.

Speaker 1: 5:42

And the water. Just because we have the Paris Olympics, it's a hundred million olympic size pools of water that we pour away every freaking year. Yeah, it's, yeah, I mean these numbers. It says you say 30 and that sounds absurd to begin with, but when you break it down, also on the individual level, it's just absolutely baffling. And I, I don't know, I wasn't aware of that until I started looking into this problem.

Speaker 2: 6:05

So when you say there's this excess food that's being wasted and yet we're heading towards a time where there's going to be food scarcity, is this a distribution problem? What is this? Yes and no.

Speaker 3: 6:18

So when we talk about food waste, we should actually be talking about food loss and waste. So food loss is what happens higher up the supply chain, so at the farm gate and through production, and waste is generally what happens at retail and in the homes what consumers do.

Speaker 3: 6:34

Yeah and if you look at, where is this food waste actually taking place on a global scale? This is very simplistic but broadly I don't like the language but quote unquote developing countries tend to have more of their food uh sort of loss taking place higher up the supply chain, so it's at the kind of farm gate and the storage and refrigeration refrigeration and much less waste at the household and retail level.

Speaker 3: 7:06

And then in quote-unquote developed countries it's the inverse the vast majority of food waste actually takes place in the home, and that is something that is extremely counterintuitive to most people. So if I stop 100 people on the streets and say in the uk and say where do you think most food waste takes place? Is it in the home, is it in retail stores, is it restaurants, is it manufacturing? Is it on the farm gate, nine out of ten people will tell you it must be the supermarket.

Speaker 2: 7:35

Perhaps some people say restaurants, and that just couldn't be further from the truth that means we can do something about it because it's very exciting in our houses absolutely so.

Speaker 3: 7:44

If we, if we look at the UK, so, like the rest of the world, we throw away roughly a third of our food here in the UK, and half of that food waste is taking place in the home Actually, only roughly 10% is taking place at stores and in restaurants, and then the remainder is up the supply chain, and so that's really, really exciting, because a problem that can feel overwhelming oh my goodness, we waste a third of the food we produce here in the UK.

Speaker 2: 8:11

Or it has nothing to do with me. It's worth billions of pounds sterling.

Speaker 3: 8:15

It's millions of tons. What on earth can I do about it? Actually, it's a really empowering message. Half of all food waste takes place in the home. A typical UK family of four people is throwing away a thousand pounds sterling worth of food that could have been eaten every single year, so that's something we can all absolutely do something about.

Speaker 1: 8:36

Yeah, that's crazy. And just to go back on the CO2 impact as well, you said it's the third largest CO2 contribution, after America and China if it were a country.

Speaker 3: 8:47

Correct and another way of framing the CO2 emissions from food waste. So food waste is responsible globally for approximately 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions. That is roughly five times the emissions that come from the aviation industry. Five times the emissions that come from the aviation industry and it is larger than the total emissions from the fashion industry.

Speaker 3: 9:10

So food waste alone is 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Again, I find that quite exciting because actually solving the problem of food waste is going to be far easier than the energy transition, for example, and collectively we haven't yet started to tackle the problem of food waste in earnest.

Speaker 1: 9:27

Yeah, I'd love to talk about that a little bit later in the pod, why this is not such a big topic in the zeitgeist. But let's so. Co2 emissions here we're saying the third largest contribution. Let's break that down. So a lot of it is actually that you have to essentially destroy forests, one right to create crop land and then those crops need to be transported to a place that creates CO2 emissions.

Speaker 3: 9:54

And all the food. So you have to deforest the land.

Speaker 3: 9:57

You then have to apply all the fertilizers onto the land, which is very CO2 heavy, on to the land, which is very CO2 heavy. All the machinery that is used as part of the agricultural process, all of the refrigeration, shipping, manufacturing, plastic packaging all of that is incredibly carbon intensive and that is why, if you look at where do the carbon emissions take place in a typical item of food, actually 90% of those emissions take place before it hits your home. So a lot of people will say, oh, I compost my food. That's fantastic, I've solved this food waste problem and, yes, composting is fantastic. If you aren't already, please, please, please, compost your food in the home. But actually the emissions that take place after the food has become waste from your home is only about 10% of the total emissions 90%, roughly, of the emissions take place before it comes into your home.

Speaker 3: 10:50

So the reality is, food is meant to be eaten by human beings. It's not meant to be burnt for energy. It's not meant to be composted. It certainly isn't meant to be thrown in landfill, where it gives off methane, which is 25 times more deadly than CO2 so are we producing too much food?

Speaker 3: 11:09

well, I mean, yes, so there is a. As omid was saying, there is a calorific surplus currently, but that food isn't getting to people, obviously because we've got 800 million people who are struggling to access enough food, and even in a country like the UK and this is something that's been really shocking for me to learn through our journey on Oleo you know, I really didn't understand the extent to which we have pretty widespread food poverty here in the UK, a supposedly developed country. We have roughly nine or 10 million people in the UK living in food poverty, of which 4 million are children. So there definitely is a challenge with access and distribution to food.

Speaker 1: 11:53

Yes, Can we define food poverty? I looked this up. The Department for Work and Pensions says that there's low food security, means that the household reduces the quality, variety and desirability of their diets. And then there's very low food security, which means that household members sometimes disrupt their eating patterns or reduce their food intake because they lack money or other resources for food.

Speaker 3: 12:15

So skipping meals, yeah, essentially so. There are lots of different variations. It is lots of different, I guess, definitions, but they all broadly sit in that category of struggling to access enough food of the right quality and many instances skipping meals. Generally or frequently, it is female members of the household skipping meals so that they can ensure that their children are able to eat.

Speaker 1: 12:43

And this food insecurity problem has increased over time as well, as far as I can understand. I don't know if you have any sense of the trend of this.

Speaker 3: 12:52

So food insecurity has certainly increased quite dramatically over the nine or so years that we have been operating in this space and it's a really, really complicated problem to solve. It can be somewhat simplistic to think that we're going to take all this food waste and give it to all these hungry people and we can tie a nice, neat bow around it and say problem solved, we've solved two problems. The root cause of food insecurity is about access to food. It's about not having living wages.

Speaker 3: 13:30

There's lots of cultural dynamics that are taking place and giving people random handouts of parcels of food waste isn't going to address the underlying issue. So when you speak to people in the food poverty space, they can get quite frustrated that people want to think that they can solve the problem of food poverty space. They can get quite frustrated that people want to think that they can solve the problem of food poverty by just giving all the food waste to the hungry people. I think the other thing that's really important for us all to understand is that the size of the food waste problem actually dwarfs the size of the food poverty problem. Either just aren't enough hungry people to eat all the food waste that we've got, so thinking that hungry people eating the surplus food is going to solve the food waste problem is extremely misleading as well. So both the food waste campaigners and the food poverty campaigners are really quite uncomfortable with that simplistic narrative of we can solve the two problems with food waste.

Speaker 2: 14:23

Well, and also the.

Speaker 2: 14:25

I mean, I guess the upside and, as you say, that the contradiction or counterintuitive thing is, the drive will be if anyone's hungry because it's such a human basic need, as you said, and it's such, it's so emotive is well, let's make more food, let's produce more food, let's make sure there's, whereas of course you've just said there's too much food and yet it's just not getting and being distributed well enough, which brings us back to oleo anyway, and uh the thing that I thought was quite baffling to me is that actually in the last year, from 21, 22 to 22, 23, there's a four percent increase in food insecurity in one year, and this is mainly down to inflation, and so inflation hits the bottom of society much harder, because there was a 20 I think it's a 21 increase in food cost all of a sudden for staple foods right and for people who have lower income this will hit them disproportionately, and we're going to see a lot more of that as we see more wars breaking out right as we see the impact of the climate crisis happening, there's more and more crop failures right and so simple economics of supply and demand mean that the price you know, food in many cases is going to continue to be under quite a lot of inflationary pressure, and a lot of the food inflation that we saw recently was triggered by the war in Ukraine, the supply chain crises that came off the back of that.

Speaker 1: 15:56

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:57

And this is something that you're addressing directly and alleviating through your app.

Speaker 3: 16:03

I would say it's a by-product of what we do at Oleo. So our mission at Oleo is to solve the problem of waste more broadly and food waste specifically within our homes and local communities, and we're doing that to try and solve that environmental challenge of food waste. But what we have inevitably discovered is that a lot of people are using Oleo to access free food that is really helping supplement the food intake and helping alleviate budgetary challenges for their family.

Speaker 2: 16:35

So, yes, people are using Oleo to help feed their family Not everybody, but some people absolutely are but some people absolutely are I remember you saying to me when I first met you that people are using this app in a sort of equal quid pro quo. It's a circular economy, if you like. Where, if I'm environmentally conscious and I want to make a difference rather than going and shopping for food, if there's something that hasn't been taken that's on the app, well, I'll eat that instead, because why let a household throw the app? Well, I'll eat that instead, because why let a household throw something away that I can eat? So there's a sort of a classlessness, yeah absolutely so.

Speaker 3: 17:13

Oleo is all about community, not charity. We learned really, really early on that people who are struggling with food insecurity really do not want the stigma associated with that, and of the roughly 10 million or so families who are living in or people who are living in food poverty in the UK, only one to two million are seeking support and services through food banks. And the beauty of Olio is that we have people from all walks of life using Olio, picking up that food. So I'm surprised and thrilled by the number of you know investment bankers I have met who tell me happily about all the food they've picked up from Olio. And that's the beauty of it.

Speaker 2: 17:59

Olio is all about modern, sustainable, community-oriented living is all about modern, sustainable, community-oriented living. So the message and I know it's on your app, which is this is a citizen's project to avoid ecological collapse. That just seems such a brilliantly relevant message to all members of society, whatever your income is and whatever your ability to purchase is.

Speaker 3: 18:22

Yeah, the reality is we have more than enough stuff in our societies, whether it be food or household items. The problem is it's trapped in lots of separate individual homes, and what Olio is doing is we're using mobile technology to reconnect those households. So, so food waste is a very especially in the home is a very, very modern phenomenon. It's something that has really emerged over the last 50 years or so, why, prior to that, food sharing was widespread. It's hardwired into us as human beings to dislike throwing away food, our life source, and to really enjoy sharing food, because that is how our species has evolved to be one of the most successful species on the planet today, because we've shared our most precious resource, so it feels great to share. We don't share today because we live in these tiny little boxes, completely disconnected from our local community. We have no one to share our food with, and so what we're trying to do is to reconnect people with that local community so they do now have someone they can give that spare food to.

Speaker 2: 19:27

So it's normalised's normalized, yeah, um, you know, in terms of the cultural shift that I think you're helping to make for people who are suffering food poverty, how do you get that group to not feel shame?

Speaker 3: 19:43

yeah well, so here's a really surprising thing when most people hear about Olio so an app that connects people with their neighbours so they can give away, run, throw away their spare food and other household items most people assume that we'll have a shortage of demand. They assume that there won't be enough people who will be prepared to pick up free food from a neighbour's house, and that couldn't be further from the truth. Our number one challenge is encouraging people to take that 10 seconds, which is all it takes, to share their surplus food, to give it away, to add it to the app, and so a typical food listing added to the app is requested, generally within less than 30 minutes, and often it will have multiple requests. So we are constantly trying to sort of unlock supply, as we describe it, and one of the things that we've figured out in our journey is that initially, when we launched Olio because we as founders were really, really motivated to try and help solve the climate crisis by solving the problem of food waste we talked in our messaging and marketing a lot about about planet and the planet-saving impact of not throwing away your food, and we had a kind of a messaging hierarchy of three Ps and we led with the planet and then next we would talk about people so the impact you could have on your community and then, honestly, we didn't really talk about the personal.

Speaker 3: 21:06

And what we've learned since we've been operating is that actually the most effective way to get people engaged with Olio is to flip that messaging hierarchy in its head and now we lead with the personal and the personal is all about. It feels good to share. Olio really is something that you've got to. You've got to use it, to believe it, and you get an incredible. I don't know whether it's dopamine or serotonin, but you get one of those hits when you're on the doorstep and you're giving something away that you don't want or need to someone else who is so happy to take that off your hand. So now we lead with the person that feels good to share. We then talk about the people. The impact that you can have on your local community and the planet is just the planetary messaging is almost this kind of fairy dust that we just sprinkle over the top by itself, doesn't it?

Speaker 2: 21:53

Yeah, it doesn't surprise me the supply being the issue, and not because we don't want to share or give away our stuff or feel good about that. But I can say I sometimes look at the things that I'm going to put on and think no, it's just not good enough.

Speaker 3: 22:11

I'm really embarrassed.

Speaker 2: 22:13

But with food things, particularly this idea of like, well, what happens if, yeah, it says sell by tomorrow, so today it's still good, but is that enough of a gap? Is that enough of a window? Is it insulting?

Speaker 3: 22:28

of a gap. Is that enough of a window? Is it insulting? We have a name for this. We call it the middle class problem. Yeah, um, which is that? And that is so common? People look at something because I don't want it. It's really easy to assume that no one will want it and and I've had this as sort of a founder of the act I will have I think surely no one will want this, and I think no, Tessa, just give it a go, put it up there. Other people can decide if they want it or not, and always without fail that thing that I thought surely no one will want, this snapped up in minutes. So the marketplace works really, really effectively and the vast majority of things that are put on the app are picked up and two points actually.

Speaker 1: 23:09

One is personal experience. The other thing that holds people back from doing this is the hassle. Oh man, I have to coordinate with a stranger to come to my place and pick this stuff up. It's so much easier than one thing.

Speaker 1: 23:20

So actually, people like it's so easy for me it's been literally like five minutes of back and forth messaging and then somebody shows up and pick something up. But to go back to a point that you made, Natasha, if I go to markets I see ugly apples. If I go to Waitrose and I go to Whole Foods, I don't see ugly apples, or Tesco or any other place. So I don't think we're there where you're saying. It's like oh, people are very happy with, or maybe supermarkets are not there because they are probably rejecting a bunch of ugly food because we don't want it and that must be like a bunch of waste as well, right?

Speaker 3: 23:53

It is so roughly. In the UK, roughly a third just under of food waste is taking place at the farm gate, and a massive driver of that is the cosmetic specifications that the supermarkets apply to the farmers. Driver of that is the cosmetic specifications that the supermarkets apply to the farmers, and if only a third of your crop meets that specification, it's not worth your while to harvest that, and so the whole field will just get plowed over and that comes back to us.

Speaker 3: 24:20

so you know in cost, you mean no, well, it comes back to us in cost. It comes back to us environmental cost, but it but in terms of why this is happening, the reason why the supermarkets are applying those specifications is because of us.

Speaker 3: 24:31

So whenever I can, if I see that ugly apple, that lonely banana, I'm on like a single woman rescue mission and I feel so great and we can all encourage ourselves to start doing that. Because supermarkets respond to data and we are the people who are providing the data. We change the data they get. They will change their behaviours. If we don't change what we're doing, they're not going to change what they're doing.

Speaker 2: 24:56

More and more. What I'm hearing is we can have a massive impact on this. Yes, we can. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 25:03

Even in ways that are not so obvious. Oli relies on a lot of volunteers other than the people who are basically putting the food up on the supply side. There are tens of thousands, I think, of volunteers that are running this company with you, so to say. Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 3: 25:25

Yeah, so in the very early days of Oli, we were a food sharing app, but sadly we didn't have much food coming onto the platform because we found that our early adopters hated food waste. Therefore, they didn't generate any, so they had nothing to give away. And we had spoken to some local cafes and restaurants and bakeries about them using the Olu app at the end of the day, to put their unsold food onto the app and that would drive people into their store to, you know, upsell etc. And they didn't use the app because they were too busy with their day-to-day operations to be messing around messaging with neighbours. So we were a food sharing app with no food, which I'm sure you'll agree is pretty useless. And so how we solved that conundrum was we said, well, why don't we take these people who have no food waste and lots of time and match them with the businesses that have lots of food waste and no time? And that was the genesis of what is today our Food Waste Heroes program.

Speaker 3: 26:09

We have over 120,000 volunteers. These are people that we have recruited through the app from our community. We train them on our food safety management system. We do that all online and then, once you're trained Food Waste Hero, you can claim a collection slot, and a collection slot is an opportunity to go to a business or organization near you, pick up all of their unsold or unserved food, take it home and add it to the app and within minutes your neighbors are requesting it and popping around and picking it up.

Speaker 3: 26:38

So we are redistributing surplus food at the end of the day, from 2,700 Tesco stores, roughly 1,400 Sainsbury's stores, asda, several hundred corporate canteens, school canteens, hospital canteens, tv and film production shoots. So anywhere where there's food going unsold or unserved, our network of volunteers will spring into action, collect that food and redistribute it to people in the local community. So there is no logistics, there are no trucks required, there's no refrigeration required, there's no quota or chits saying that only the needy can have this food. It's just a real-time hyper-local food redistribution network, powered by people and technology People getting their steps in.

Speaker 2: 27:22

And it can just be a one-off basis that you volunteer on, or you can do it weekly, like the Tesco opposite me is one of the hubs that has a collection, so it's super accessible.

Speaker 3: 27:32

Absolutely so. When we first started the volunteering program, it was a weekly commitment.

Speaker 3: 27:38

I will take the Tuesday 8.30 slot at the Tesco in wherever Since then. We have now evolved the model so you can claim one-off collection slots. You can give it a try and see how it works. And what we hear just time and time and time again from volunteers is, honestly, it's kind of. For some of them it's really changed their lives. It's given them a sense of purpose and engagement and commitment and embedding into their local community. They've made lifelong friendships and it just feels really amazing.

Speaker 3: 28:09

You're like kind of Father Christmas in your local community handing out all this free food.

Speaker 3: 28:13

What's not to love about it? And then you've also got the squad. We put our volunteers, who are all supporting a particular business location, into an in-app squad chat so they can support one another, cover for one another, et cetera. So, yeah, it is really incredibly inspiring to think that tonight, tens and thousands of people who I've never met are going to be leaving their homes all across the country, going to a business and picking up all their unsold food and making sure that food is eaten, not thrown away.

Speaker 1: 28:40

That's amazing. How hard was it to get businesses on side with this work.

Speaker 3: 28:44

Very hard indeed. So we had to start with just a couple of corner stores in a couple of postcodes in north london, you know. And that was just down to just these brilliantly visionary experimental corner store owners who were like, why not, let's give this a try? We made it work with them. Then the first brand name that started working with us was planet organic.

Speaker 1: 29:06

I remember at the time that was such a major win they had seven stores.

Speaker 3: 29:10

Then after that it was Pret a Manger with a hundred stores, which was really, really exciting. And then the really the big sort of transformational moment for us was when we started working with Tesco and their 2,700 stores, and that took us three and a half years of conversations with them. So persistence is definitely required in this game and even now, honestly, it's been a long hard slog, because the reality is that businesses in the UK they're throwing away 2 billion meals worth of perfectly good food every single year. We've got 10 million people living in food poverty, and all of this food waste for businesses is taking place behind closed doors and so they're not at the moment under much pressure to do much about it. So someone like Tesco is not doing it because they have to. They're doing it because they really are pioneering leaders in this space and the rest of the industry is following them, but not as quickly as we would like.

Speaker 2: 30:08

Yeah, but this is also a tribute to your powers of persuasion and your determination.

Speaker 3: 30:15

Refusal to give up.

Speaker 2: 30:16

Yeah, but to address something that's seemingly so easy to fix. It's a distribution problem.

Speaker 3: 30:22

It really is. I often sort of imagine if you were someone to come down to the UK from Mars. What Olio is doing is just patently common sense. There is nothing wild about it, nothing revolutionary about it, it's just bleedingly obvious. But trying to re-engineer society and businesses to change their mindset is a long hard slog. But we're looking forward to regulation coming in this space. There are a number of countries around the world now which have run consultations, including in the UK, looking to mandate that businesses will have to publish publicly their food waste data.

Speaker 1: 31:00

And the minute that happens, that's going to be game-changing. What department is this in?

Speaker 3: 31:04

In the UK it's the DEFRA. Defra department is looking at that, so that will be transformative. But where we found that we are able to move really, really quickly is with corporate canteens, because that's often just one, two or three business locations and rather than a three-year sales cycle, that's often three weeks from conversation to us actually being able to launch that service and redistribute the surplus food from from that canteen yeah, what I love about this is that it's as you were already alluding, it's a change of story around this as well and going from the notion of this is a charitable thing to actually know.

Speaker 1: 31:43

This is a community thing. We are all part of this. This, this is a citizen's effort, and when you say sharing is the first thing you actually tell people about and that feels good.

Speaker 3: 31:52

That's a different.

Speaker 1: 31:53

That's reframing the story around all this.

Speaker 3: 32:01

Absolutely so. We're reframing from charity to community at the end user level, and then also as an organization, we're really trying to play our part in reframing what business is all about, because I get incredibly frustrated when people hear about.

Speaker 3: 32:13

Olio, they immediately assume that we must be a charity, because we've got this really warped paradigm in our head, which is that if you are doing good, you're almost certainly a charity, but probably subscale, and if you're growing like the clappers, then you are almost certainly a business with all sorts of negative externalities. And at Olio we firmly believe that the new business paradigm is going to be a third path, which is profit with purpose. What on earth should be the point of businesses if they are not having a positive impact on all of us? Or profit without destruction.

Speaker 3: 32:44

Yes that would be nice. Constructive profit yes, that would be nice.

Speaker 2: 32:46

Constructive profit that would be nice, yeah I'd love to know the spread of olio. You're embarking on upscaling this in other countries where the food waste is even worse than it is here, so I'd love to hear about that. But something that I want to ask and I'm always saying to my kids ignore sell-by dates. Obviously the answer back is do you want me to get food poisoning? And there's.

Speaker 3: 33:12

I have discovered you know, sort of most families, you know or in a couple, they will argue about finances. Another hot topic amongst couples is food and food waste and food dates. So there's always someone in the relationship who's very cavalier I ignore all dates, I just use my senses. And there's someone else saying no, I'm going to be poisoned and die if we eat this, even one day after the date. That's exactly what happens in our house. Yes, furious and intergenerational debates as well.

Speaker 3: 33:40

So here in the UK there are two types of dates. One is the best before date and the other is the use by date. So there isn't a sell by date anymore and we don't talk about expiry date. So there's just two dates best before and use by date. So the use by date is the date beyond which the manufacturer has decided that it is no longer safe for that food to be consumed. So that is the food safety date and we would never advocate people eating food after it's used by date Although I would point people to the fact so we could never advocate people eating food after it's used by date.

Speaker 1: 34:29

However, people should be aware that the used by date is a business decision, um a generous business decision, I will leave.

Speaker 3: 34:31

I will leave you and your, your listeners, to think about in whose interest it is that we buy food, don't consume it and go buy some more right but the use by date is the health and safety date and you are not allowed to give food away via oleo after it's used by date.

Speaker 3: 34:46

Okay, so that that is the one sort of sacrosanct rule that we have for our platform. The best before date really is just a date, that is, the manufacturer thinks that it is optimal to eat the food before that date for an aesthetics or composition or texture perspective. But many, many, many foods can be eaten for weeks, months or even years after their best before date. And we have a real challenge in this country that a really large portion of people get confused over dates. They see a date and they think I must throw that food away, but increasingly the dates that you are seeing are best before dates.

Speaker 1: 35:25

Is there any attempt to change the rigor with which these dates are applied?

Speaker 3: 35:31

Yes.

Speaker 2: 35:32

And is it different in different countries?

Speaker 3: 35:34

Yes, it's different, so different countries will use different language, and they will also have slightly different approaches. But certainly here in the UK retailers have been doing a really good job of removing use-by-dates from lots of products that they just do not need to be on. So I can remember yogurts always being my classic.

Speaker 3: 36:02

I would be eating a yogurt because I would use my senses and I could see that that was perfectly fine a month after it's use-by-dates and it just kind of blew my mind. And it just kind of blew my mind and businesses are increasingly taking those use-by dates off lots of fresh fruit and some dairy products, which is a great move.

Speaker 3: 36:16

Personally, I would like there to be just one date, which is the use-by date, and actually just remove best-before dates, because that's where the real confusion emerges, yeah, there should just be one date on only food that needs it, and that should be the health and safety date, which is the use by and that should be liberal rather than conservative, possibly, or somewhere in between the two.

Speaker 3: 36:37

What I would argue for is that that business decision should be made public yes, exactly, so that there could be some scrutiny as to how have you selected this date, on the basis of what laboratory tests you've taken, and I think that if there was public scrutiny of how those dates were selected, I think we would see them being.

Speaker 2: 36:55

So is that a government? So is this. How do we, how would you get that legislation?

Speaker 3: 37:02

There are lots of active conversations taking place within the food and drink industry are lots of active conversations taking place within the food and drink industry? So there's an organization called rap and um, there's an initiative called courthold 2030, which is an industry-wide voluntary initiative which has most of the major supermarkets and food retailers all signed up, plus lots of manufacturers, and there are active conversations being facilitated by rap there around. What should the approach to date labelling be? And that's then intersex with DEFRA.

Speaker 2: 37:32

And I just think that would be such an amazing action.

Speaker 3: 37:34

Just that simple thing could change so much because I know that's in my house. That's where most of the waste happens, because I can't put it on audio, because of the date.

Speaker 2: 37:43

The kids won't eat it because it's about changing the story, right. I mean, this is part of changing the story I'm just a mad person who's playing fast and loose with their health no, I'm just like.

Speaker 1: 37:53

I think smell and smell and look are what I need.

Speaker 3: 37:56

I don't care about the we do just need to make sure that people understand what a best before date is, and that does not mean throw it away. You throw it away after that date.

Speaker 1: 38:08

Let's get into Natasha's second question about international expansion.

Speaker 3: 38:12

Yes, so to date actually last month we passed a major milestone. We've had 8 million people join earlier.

Speaker 1: 38:19

Yay, congratulations.

Speaker 3: 38:20

Thank you. A long way to go still, but and whilst the vast majority of those people are in the UK, actually we have had items successfully shared in over 60 countries around the world and this growth to date has happened very organically. So we have over 50 000 ambassadors. These are people who are passionate about the oleo mission and they recognize that for oleo to work near them, they need to get their neighbors onto oleo. So we give our ambassadors digital information that they can share with their digital networks, and also they can download posters and letters and flyers or we will mail them to them so they can spread the word about OLEO in their local communities.

Speaker 3: 38:58

And we've got a really active community in Singapore, for example. There's about 150,000 people there using OLEO. Singapore, for example, there's about 150,000 people there using Oleo. We've got really active communities in Chile, colombia, argentina, mexico and pockets in lots of other countries around the world, and we are, you know, food waste is a global problem, and so we're very much looking forward to doubling down and expanding our international footprint, going into those markets where we see most organic traction taking place. And the app can be used at the moment in English and Spanish, so our real focus is on English and Spanish speaking markets.

Speaker 1: 39:34

When I think about waste, I think about the UAE.

Speaker 2: 39:37

Yes.

Speaker 1: 39:38

I didn't want to bring up Dubai because I wasn't sure how far on you were in that journey.

Speaker 3: 39:42

We have been having conversations about the UAE, okay.

Speaker 2: 39:47

And one last thing and we can always cut this, and I know it's not olio's problem how things are packaged. But I'm also interested in I know there was some legislation around packaging and wasteful packaging where. Where are we at with that?

Speaker 3: 40:02

well, I'm not an expert on packaging, but what I do seem to recall learning a few years ago is that I think it was roughly, and you might have to check this afterwards but that roughly 40% of our single use plastic that is thrown away, the vast majority of which is wrapped in plastic packaging. If we want to tackle our plastic problem, then actually solving the food waste problem can also go a long way to helping that. Now there are. It is a complicated area because some plastic packaging prevents that food from going off as quickly. And actually just to put the environmental impact of food waste and plastic into context with one another the environmental impact of throwing away a kilogram of food waste, so let's imagine your food waste caddy. So how many plastic bottles being put into landfill? Do you think that that is equivalent to no idea? Give me a guess Anything. Pick a number.

Speaker 1: 41:12

Hundreds of millions.

Speaker 2: 41:14

Ten, okay, oh, you mean on an individual basis yes, oh sorry.

Speaker 1: 41:19

I thought on a global basis. No, no, no.

Speaker 3: 41:22

So the carbon emissions from one kilogram of food waste is equivalent to the carbon emissions from landfilling. How many plastic bottles? So you've gone for 10.

Speaker 1: 41:29

I'd say five, five Okay.

Speaker 3: 41:32

So it's 25,000.

Speaker 1: 41:33

25,000 for one kilogram Of food waste.

Speaker 3: 41:36

Yeah, so one kilogram of food waste gives off the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as landfilling 25,000 plastic bottles, 500 milliliter plastic bottles, as landfilling 25,000 plastic bottles 500 millilitre plastic bottles. So again, if you were to ask a lot of people about where's the environmental problem plastic food waste people will nine times out of 10 say plastic. But actually, in terms of the carbon, you know, the greenhouse gas emissions, food waste absolutely dwarfs the emissions from the equivalent weight of plastic.

Speaker 2: 42:28

No-transcript or going to make a blackcurrant pie instead.

Speaker 1: 42:35

Generally again, this is a story problem and people not understanding the cost of things that show up magically on their doorstep and go into their fridge. Because, it wasn't picked up around the corner. This is a supply chain that's very long to other countries with waste, with forests being cut down, with everything. There's a high cost of all the stuff that ends up in your fridge and you only think about the thing that you're throwing away. You don't think about calories as well as CO2 emissions. That came before.

Speaker 3: 43:03

Yeah, and the same applies with every item in our home.

Speaker 1: 43:06

So Oleo is not just about. Exactly, I wanted to get there.

Speaker 3: 43:10

So Oleo started off as an app trying to tackle the problem of food waste in our homes, but very quickly we found that our community started adding household items to the app. So I've got a bottle of Vanish or I've got a showerhead that I'm not using, whatever it might be, and in the early days I was on the backend system deleting those items, quite quickly realised that this was wildly unscalable. And then also, well, where would you give away a three quarters used bottle of Vanish? And we realised that we hate waste of any variety. So we now enable people to give away any household items that they would like. So this could be books, clothes, toiletries, cosmetics, toys, packing equipment, kitchen appliances, stuff that you don't want, you don't need, you can't be bothered to ship it halfway across the country. You just want to press a button. Automagically a happy, smiling neighbor shows up and takes it off your hands, and so people find earlier really used helpful for when they're decluttering kids in particular.

Speaker 3: 44:10

They grow up quite quickly what was yesterday's favorite toy is no longer today's favorite toy. Same with the clothes when people are moving home, for example, and it's just a really quick and easy way to declutter from your stuff. And we have just as big a waste problem in our homes for non-food items as we do for food items. And that waste is not just stuff that's going in the bin, it's also just the things that are unused. So if we look at stuff that's going in the bin, households globally throw away 2 billion tons of waste every single year. A typical British household is throwing away over a ton of waste every year, so UK households generating over 30 tons of waste.

Speaker 1: 44:55

Wow.

Speaker 3: 44:55

So much of that stuff is stuff that could have been used by someone else, and then when we go to the stuff that isn't being thrown in the bin yet, it's just gathering dust in our homes and unused that you've say you've got the borrow mechanism as well, which?

Speaker 2: 45:10

I think is so good, because how often really do you use a drill or I speak for myself very- rarely I'd so much rather borrow that bloody thing than have it take up a massive shelf in my cupboard absolutely creating another consumption, a moment where you have to buy it, yeah, so I've got lots of things that I have put onto the app that I make available for people who live near me to borrow if they would like, and I can decide who can see that listing or who can request to borrow that listing.

Speaker 3: 45:39

So I can say, well, it can only be people with over a four-star rating, it can only be people who've successfully shared with over five ole, five oleos, it can only be people who live within a certain distance of me. So you can really restrict who will borrow those things my most popular actually. I've got two items that I've lent out multiple times.

Speaker 1: 45:54

One is my pasta machine you know, this is a fantastic intention.

Speaker 3: 45:58

That is sat in my kitchen cupboards. A couple of times a year I sort of haul it out when the harass me, but the rest of the time it's sat there doing nothing. It makes me so happy when other local families are borrowing it and they're making pasta together. And then another one I've got a really large thermos flask, like a really, really big one, and that was used three or four weekends ago maybe five, by someone who. There was a group of people going to bristol pride festival and they wanted to have hot drinks for everybody. Um, so yeah, the borough section is lovely and there are several thousand items on there already. Um, I see, kind of borough really is a bit of a sleeper position. It will inevitably grow over time um, but yeah, it's absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 3: 46:43

It's really sort of encouraging that.

Speaker 2: 46:45

But it's that thing like at christmas you've suddenly got double triple the number of people you might ever have for the rest of the year. And how do you get all that crockery and all that stuff? And exactly.

Speaker 3: 46:56

And then when we look at, we've on the non-food section, so you can give away your surplus food non-food, sorry. You can give away your surplus household items. You can sell your surplus household items to your neighbours or you can lend them out.

Speaker 2: 47:09

And wanted as well. And then there's a wanted section as well.

Speaker 3: 47:13

One of the largest, the most active categories for household items is actually clothing. So roughly a quarter of all the items that are being given away are items of clothing. And again, clothing is something that we have just got to work so hard to address the excessive consumption and waste problem that we have. So the british fashion council fairly recently released some data showing that we have enough clothes on the planet to clothe us all for the next hundred years. So we could close down every single clothing manufacturing site tomorrow and we have enough clothes to last us for 100 years. And Oxfam has some data which shows that the average British person owns 53 items of unworn clothing.

Speaker 3: 47:58

So, we're just really encouraging people to liberate your clothing from your wardrobe and put it out there, sell it, give it away, but definitely don't have it kind of cluttering up your space and it feels really good when you declutter.

Speaker 1: 48:13

Yeah just live more lightly. Yeah, I just moved apartments and, uh, used oleo for the first time, I have to admit, and for non-food and um. I found the personal experience that I had was really interesting because I met people from different age groups, from different social cultural backgrounds, from different classes, and you don't mingle with those type of people otherwise correct.

Speaker 1: 48:39

Yeah, and get you out of your bubble it gets you out of your bubble, the same way public transport does. So I I found that was actually a really great thing and I started talking to those people and they're actually my neighbors, right. So one guy actually drove in 90 minutes to pick up a rug and a laptop, but the other people were all my neighbors and you know it's. It's interesting to find out that somebody just lives next door now that has my lampshade right, is using it, or my balcony chairs, as you said. I can attest to that it really does feel good to give these things away and know that they get another lease of life.

Speaker 3: 49:14

Yeah, and 40% of our community say that they have made friends through the app, which is absolutely incredible because, in addition to all the other crises we've got, we've also got a loneliness epidemic going on, and it's really really touching to hear people share their stories of these lifelong friendships that they have made that are now really kind of transforming their lives and their wellbeing and their happiness. So 40% of our community have made friends. Two thirds of our community say that sharing has improved their mental health.

Speaker 3: 49:45

And three quarters say that it has improved their mental health and three quarters say that it's improved their financial well-being.

Speaker 2: 49:48

So, as is often the case with environmental products and services, there's an enormous social impact that you're having alongside that to me none of this is surprising, because so much of how we're living and our consumer culture just creates a deficit in every other way.

Speaker 3: 50:09

Yeah. So we say at Oleo that the current model of consumption is linear, extractive, wasteful, impersonal, inhuman and very expensive. However you measure, expense on every metric is expensive.

Speaker 2: 50:26

It's misaligned with nature. It's completely misaligned.

Speaker 3: 50:29

And the model that we need to move to is this much more circular model of consumption, which is about using the resources that we already have. That's circular, that's inclusive, it's human, it's personal, it's really cost effective, feels great, it's great for the planet and, by the way, that model of consumption is the model of consumption that took humanity through hundreds of thousands of years.

Speaker 1: 50:53

Those are nature's cycles anyway, right, yeah, exactly, look at the seasons.

Speaker 3: 50:55

So what is really peculiar is not the circular economy, the sharing economy.

Speaker 1: 51:00

What's really peculiar is the linear economy that we're currently living in, is it? We've lived in the other one for so long? Yeah, is the linear economy that we're currently living in.

Speaker 3: 51:06

Do you want to mention Overshoot Day? Yes, I say I would love to mention Earth Overshoot Day. I don't really mean that. Yeah, so Earth Overshoot Day is honestly one of the most mind-blowing concepts I've ever come across, and it is the day in the year in which humanity has used all the resources that the earth can replenish in a year. It was first measured in the late sixties, and back in the late sixties Earth Overshoot day was at the end of december. So what that means is humanity used in a year what the earth could replenish in a year. So we were in the late 60s, sort of living broadly and sustainably with the planet. If you fast forward to this year, 2024, we've just passed earth overshoot day. It was the first of august, so what that means is that every single thing that every single one of us 8 billion people are now consuming in the second half of this year is net, net depletive of the planet.

Speaker 1: 51:55

Of the commons.

Speaker 3: 51:56

Yeah, and it absolutely doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that that is just profoundly unsustainable. And I was actually listening to a podcast this morning with a biologist talking about actually kind of the concept of overshoot. And we talk about that in biology and about in other species, where a species is overshooting the ability for its environment to sustainably support it. That has now happened to us. Collectively, we have overshot the ability for planet earth to sustain us all and yet we are continuing in complete ignorance of this matter. And it is we're kind of, if anything, accelerating our pace of consumption, which is accelerating the pace with which we exceed the nine planetary boundaries.

Speaker 2: 52:48

And you started in business. So tell us why you think consumption and capitalism and consumerism is still top of the pyramid.

Speaker 3: 53:00

Big question.

Speaker 2: 53:03

Given all that we know.

Speaker 3: 53:04

Yeah, I think the word capitalism capitalism don't know how many letters it's got, I should probably count it up hasn't got many letters in it.

Speaker 3: 53:10

it's one word and I think we have to be quite careful about sort of dismissing all of capitalism I think we have to say, the current form of capitalism and and actually I often think that perhaps one of the longest legacies of communism is the fact that we have not sufficient because we don't want to be communist we have insufficiently interrogated capitalism. We've just given capitalism a free ride, and that really is a very dangerous thing to do. So the current form of capitalism unfortunately has this concept of infinite growth baked into it. Has this concept of infinite growth baked into it, and, in particular, our North Star metric for all of our economies is GDP and GDP growth, and the guy who invented GDP very famously said if there's one thing you must not do, please do not use this as the only metric for how you measure your economies and your societies. We did not heed his advice.

Speaker 3: 54:07

And every single government. Their number one priority is to drive GDP growth. That then filters down sort of through the business world, and so if I were to change anything to try and get us not just at the climate crisis, but the biodiversity crisis and the resource depletion crisis, because we cannot be clearer Solving the carbon crisis alone is going to do nothing. We will still go extinct. So we've got to solve the resource depletion, the biodiversity crisis, and for me, kind of the single most powerful lever to doing that is to change humanity's North Star metric to remove it from being infinite GDP growth on a finite planet to something that's much more oriented around well-being of both humans and planets. And then you've got to align the incentives with that new target.

Speaker 3: 54:56

And I see that as a business, when you have, let's say, your sales team or even the company as a whole, when you change the target and you change the incentives to make sure they now match the new target, behavior changes, yeah, on a dime from friday to monday, and we need to do that collectively. So so that that for me, is absolutely key. And also, what I have realized is that what can be very frustrating, I've now increasingly got closer to people who are working in government and, and I've long sort of thought, well, if only we can persuade the government, government can change things. And I speak to all the people in government and I've realized that they're just as trapped as we are. We're all trapped in this system, and there's a lot of conversation at the moment going on about AI and this fear of this sort of supercomputer that's going to take over, like there is already a superorganism that has taken over. It's called the market economy. That we are all living in and we're all enslaved to.

Speaker 3: 55:51

The CEO of Shell feels just as powerless as any of us, and the prime minister of our country feels just as powerless as any of us. So I think we've really. I think our economists, our philosophers, our social scientists have a lot of work to do to map out a different future, changing the story. Change the story, um. And then there's the other thing that we've got to do is also the finance system, um. So again, the finance system. Which kind of money fuels the whole whole lot?

Speaker 3: 56:22

again, it has infinite growth baked into how it currently works, because we've got debt which needs interest repaying yeah and money essentially is an option to buy a product or a service in the future, and a product or service requires physical resources from our planet and our monetary system is completely untethered from the planet's finite resources.

Speaker 1: 56:46

The actual assets.

Speaker 3: 56:47

The actual assets so we've got an inherent conflict going on. Now this is way above my pay grade, but it's super clear to me that we've got to really, really kind of rethink our finance system. And then the next click down is so what do businesses do? And I think the single most powerful lever that I've seen, that I can get really excited by, that I think can make a difference in the timeframes that we have is to change the definition of success for businesses. So in the UK there's something called the Better Business Act and about two and a half thousand businesses have signed up to a really really small change I think it's 10 or 12 words to Section 172 of the Companies Act, because at the moment the Companies Act defines success for a business the responsibility, the fiduciary responsibility, to essentially maximising shareholder returns.

Speaker 2: 57:42

And as long as we have that as the definition of success, then we're going to continue. All the other systems will be left behind, everything will be left behind. Then we're going to continue. All the other systems will be left behind, everything will be left behind.

Speaker 3: 57:45

And so if we change the definition of success for business and insert these words into the Companies Act, which says that actually, as a director, I've now got to give equal weight to people and planet as well as profit, that I think will be absolutely game changing.

Speaker 1: 57:57

That's a great list of things to do. Let's maybe wrap by talking about what individuals could do. We want to empower the listeners to address this problem, knowing that a lot of the problem is actually when it comes to food waste in the homes. So what is Tessa's top 10 tips?

Speaker 3: 58:15

And our stuff.

Speaker 1: 58:16

Yeah, and our stuff.

Speaker 3: 58:17

So it is really easy to feel very overwhelmed and very helpless and powerless in the face of all these crises that we have been discussing, and we just have to remind ourselves we've got a really simple philosophy at Oleo. You know billions of tiny actions that cause the climate crisis in the first place, so that, by the very same logic, billions of small actions can help get us out of it. And one of the challenges we face is that most people think but I don't count, I can't have an impact. That just couldn't be further from the truth, because you take an action and 10 people, a thousand people, a hundred thousand people, a million people. That's how action takes place, and I think the most important, the first step to do is to think of every pound you spend as a vote, and you can either vote for the status quo, which is taking us to a two to four degree warmed world, with all the horrific things that happened there, or I can take my pound and I can vote for a different type of future, and all of those.

Speaker 3: 59:09

By moving your money, you're then sending data back up to the businesses who respond to consumer demand and they then start to change the offers that are available for people. And a lot of people think, well, you know, I can't afford to do this, and a lot of people can't actually easily vote with their money, but there are millions and millions and millions of people in the UK and beyond who can vote with their money and if you can, you should. I believe you have a moral responsibility to do that because you're the early adopters. You'll send up the data, the businesses will respond and that will then make sustainable living accessible for everybody.

Speaker 2: 59:48

Um, so that would be a kind of a normal, because we're also reverting constantly to a pastime like shopping. It's some people's saturday pastime. That's what you go and do and that's how you gather and you see your friends and it's like a social thing. So how do we turn the needle? Yeah in the other direction and that's a really lovely like. Voting with your money is brilliant.

Speaker 3: 1:00:14

That's so good and another um and kind of getting even more granular perhaps. So I've been working hard. I think the most important thing also to recognize is that it's a journey. You're never going to be perfect and I get really frustrated when I hear the media in particular really haranguing people for being a hypocrite.

Speaker 3: 1:00:33

I am a hypocrite, I own it, I have a carbon footprint, I am a hypocrite, and if we hold up sort of perfection or nothing as the two options, then people will be paralyzed into inaction, which is what is happening now.

Speaker 2: 1:00:46

Yeah, so you either adopt or you don't. Yeah, so just take some action, doesn't?

Speaker 3: 1:00:50

matter what action you take, it's a small action and it all counts. And some person might go plant a tree. I'm never going to go plant a tree, but perhaps I can reduce my meat consumption. You know, different people can do different things.

Speaker 3: 1:01:02

One of my biggest unlocks that solved lots of problems that I was trying to kind of battle with in my family to live more sustainably was I completely changed how we cook.

Speaker 3: 1:01:14

So I used to work super hard during the day and then I had 30 minutes at the end of the day where I had to rustle together a meal for everybody and that inevitably ended up being some meat and some veg and some carbs, and I was really struggling to eat in a more plant-based way.

Speaker 3: 1:01:31

I was really struggling to afford organic food. I was really struggling to avoid all the packaging waste that comes with cooking in that sort of way, and the big unlock for me was transitioning to batch cooking. So I will spend roughly kind of four hours generally on a Sunday afternoon and I will do all of the cooking for the evening meals for the week, and I have invested in a whole ton of herbs and spices. But then I have the time I listen to podcasts, so I'm learning a lot and enjoying myself. I'm in the kitchen, surrounded by the family, the kids getting involved. It's now all plant-based because I get a zero waste um veg subscription box that's organic, so it does cost more, but I'm now not spending the money on the meat and the fish that I was um, and so that's really just I'm not throwing anything away.

Speaker 3: 1:02:17

And I'm not throwing anything away, it's fresh, yeah yeah, exactly, and and that sort of helped me eat plant based, it helped me have no food waste. It helped me get rid of the packaging waste of, helped me eat plant-based. It helped me have no food waste. It helped me get rid of the packaging waste. It helped me eat organic, and so I'm healthier, wealthier and happier as a result of doing that, and that, for me, is a message I'm really passionate about. It's so good, it's so simple.

Speaker 2: 1:02:39

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:02:39

And too often we look at sustainable living and we assume it must be about compromise. I've got to live in a cardboard box off grid also.

Speaker 2: 1:02:46

It's not fun and I must be boring and earnest and worthy, and maybe you don't want to be any of those things no, precisely, you don't have to be, don't have to be those things.

Speaker 3: 1:02:54

Um, so, and, and actually the way I've approached sustainable living is just I can't. When I first started the journey, I was genuinely overwhelmed. I was like a rabbit in headlights. I didn't know where. And I can remember thinking I want to try and reduce my waste consumption. I opened the fridge just ceiling to floor, just plastic crap everywhere. I went into that cupboard under the sink, yet more.

Speaker 3: 1:03:16

I then thought maybe the bathroom would be better. No, just toxic chemicals wrapped in plastic. And then I said well, do you know what? I'm just going to take, just one thing that I'm going to change at a time and I started off with my toothbrush I was like that can't be that hard, can it? You know, because every single toothbrush, by the way, that's ever been made still exists Billions and billions and billions of them. They will continue to exist for hundreds of years, so quite scary. So I was like I can start with my toothbrush. And then it actually became a challenge and some things I couldn't figure out for months, even years. How can I swap out this for a more sustainable thing? And then the satisfaction you get when you're like yes.

Speaker 3: 1:03:51

I've cracked it, I've nailed it, I've figured it out and, as I say, we've saved so much money. We're much healthier and happier as a family and we spend our time with friends and family rather than, as you say, I used to shop. I don't shop really anymore, certainly not in the conventional sense, and yeah, it's just really. It's a great way to live.

Speaker 1: 1:04:13

Nice. That's a very inspiring note to end on.

Speaker 2: 1:04:15

Thanks so much for taking the time, tessa, thank you so much and thank you for everything that you're doing, and everyone should sign up to Olio.

Speaker 1: 1:04:23

It will only improve your life.