Reducing Food Waste With Olio Partnership
Following a short pilot across our six secondary schools – which saw just under 200 meals redistributed amongst numerous local families, we are delighted to continue our partnership with Olio, the UK’s number one local sharing app. We are the first educational caterer to join Olio’s impressive roster of corporate partners taking a stand against food waste, which builds on our plans to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of our operations. We are set to implement the Olio scheme into the remaining nine primary schools by the end of this academic year, working closely with headteachers, school staff and dedicated onsite chef teams to support the Food Waste Heroes volunteers’ collections.
Olio users in areas surrounding our academies in will be able to find healthy and nutritious meals leftover from school lunches and get them for free, via an easy and convenient pick-up process made possible by Olio’s network of trained Food Waste Hero volunteers. The Food Waste Heroes collect surplus food, take it home and upload it to the Olio app, ready to be collected by those living nearby. The scheme will ensure any surplus food from school meals will be redistributed, rather than wasted.
Charity Main, COO, said: “We are passionate about the difference that high quality education can make to all young people, their families and their communities. We know that a part of that high-quality experience is being an active and connected member of our community. This partnership with Impact Food Group and Olio builds on the work we are doing even further and allows us to ensure that any of our resources do not go to waste and can be redistributed in the community for the good of our planet, while supporting local families.”
Bryan Lygate, Group Operations Director at Innovate Food Services said: “We are excited to be working in partnership with Olio and Anglian Learning to ensure any food that can be is distributed within the local community to help as many families as possible. We are extremely proud of how Olio enables us to help tackle food waste, protect the plant and help families.”
Tessa Clarke, co-founder, and CEO of Olio said: “We’re delighted to announce this new partnership with Anglian Learning, especially at a time when the severity of the cost-of-living (and climate) crisis is becoming clear to us all. We know our community of Olio users will be thrilled to have access to delicious food from local schools that would otherwise have gone to waste, and we look forward to building on the great work Anglian Learning is doing across East Anglia.”
Launched in 2015 with the sole purpose of tackling food waste, Olio now has more than 8 million users worldwide, and a UK network of over 77,000 Food Waste Heroes. Alongside Innovate Food Services, Olio also has major waste reduction partnerships with caterers like Compass Group, Restaurants Associates, Chartwells and Eurest. They also work with nation-wide organisations like Tesco, One Stop, Iceland, and Pret a Manger.
Pupils of Bassingbourn Vilage College help with food handover.
Ziggy Hedges Oren, Food Waste Hero collects from Bottisham Village College.
