Unreasonable
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She Built the World’s Largest Food-Sharing App

In this episode, Daniel Epstein sits down with Tessa Clarke, the co-founder and CEO of Olio, the number one food sharing app on earth. Tessa joined the Unreasonable Fellowship in 2018 through the Unreasonable Impact program, run in partnership with Barclays. Olio connects people with their neighbors so spare food and household items get given away rather than thrown away. Ten million people have joined, items have been shared in 63 countries, and 150 million meals' worth of food has been safely redistributed, alongside 16 million household items. Every night, thousands of Olio's 100,000 food safety trained volunteers collect unsold food from businesses like Tesco and Sainsbury's and share it out through their own homes within hours. Two thirds of the community say they have made brand new friends through the app, and a third party framework recently valued Olio's lifetime social impact at 1.1 billion pounds. Tessa traces the whole arc: a childhood as the family workforce on an isolated farm in the northeast of England, the 17 year corporate career that left her sick and tired of being uninspired by herself, the moving day that sparked the idea, and building the company with co-founder Saasha Celestial-One while both were on maternity leave. She is unsparing about fundraising as a female founded business, honest about the compromises that kept Olio alive, and clear about what comes next: break-even, corporate events, and hyperlocal rails of redistribution for the whole world.