 If you think of the consumption-based economy, people are laboring incredibly hard to make all this shit that is destroying the planet that clutters up people's hopes, right? I mean so everything about this is broken. So if we can migrate our economy away from the consumption of things towards spending quality time with one another and in many ways going back to things that we have evolved to enjoy doing, singing, dancing, cooking, performing, caring for one another, caring for the nature. There are no shortage of things that we can do fruitfully and productively with our time and I firmly believe that we will all be you know healthier, happier and wealthier. Tessa Clark is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Sustainable Innovators Magazine. Tessa is the co-founder and CEO of Olio along with Sasha Celestial One who is the COO, a free app tackling the problem of food waste by connecting neighbors with each other and volunteers with local business so that surplus food can be given away, not thrown away. Olio has grown to five million users in just over five years and its impact has widely and 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. Prior to Olio, Tessa had a 15-year corporate career as a digital managing director in the media, retail and financial services sector and 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 sustainable world and about profit with a purpose as the next business paradigm. Welcome to the show, Tessa, nice to have you. Thank you, great to be here. So I want to start right out. You received that wonderful recognition from the United Nations. We just wrapped up the COP26 in Glasgow. First of all, congratulations, but second of all, did anything come out of it for you and what are your thoughts and opinions? We could probably do a whole episode on thoughts and opinions about COP26 but I'll stay focused and answer your first question which is sort of what came out of it for us at Olio. I think sort of two big wins were the methane pledge which had over 100 countries signing up to that to reduce methane emissions by 30%. Food waste and actually waste more broadly, all that sort of stuff rotting in landfill is a really significant source of methane. So we're very hopeful that with this new focus on methane, it will then lead people to look at the waste that we have that's actually endemic across our businesses and our lifestyles. So that's a definite win. I mean, it didn't go far enough. I think the science says that we're supposed to be reducing methane emissions by 45% but as with most things COP, I think it was sort of some wins and some disappointments. The other area that is a significant win was the deforestation pledge. Again, if we look at why we are deforestation land, a big driver of that is our food system and our food requirements and globally, we throw away a third of all the food we produce. A land mass larger than China is used every single year to grow food that's never eaten. So I'm hopeful that with this long overdue focus on deforestation, again, we will sort of follow back to the sources and try and address our unconscionable food waste problem. But COP, there was not as many food events or food discussions as we would have hoped. Seeing how this last year was the pre-summit and the summit, the UN Food Systems Summit, with the focus since 2020 around food and our food systems and how we reform them, how we fix a lot of the issues in them. So I personally was really expecting to see and hear more at the COP about what were the results and what's going to happen and how it's implemented. And it seemed like the majority of that was pushed off until COP 27 in Egypt and for the next COP in 2022. But there were some food events. There were side events at Nourish-Scotland Pavilion, which is the Salvation Army Hub, is where Danielle Nirenberg from Food Tank had her side events with a lot of great food experts. And then a couple smaller events within the Blue Zone from the Worldwide Fund and the Eat Foundation and things like that. I want to know a couple of things in that respect. So you had some representation from Olio at the COP 26. One, I want to hear about that. And the second I want to hear about did the uses of your app now that there are 30,000 plus, 40,000 plus people who were kind of gathered in Glasgow. Is there a big usage of your app in that town where people using that app? I know the prices in the food was horrific there and also the prices of accommodations. So two things. So one, what did you do in the COP? What was your representation? And two, did you see the usage of your app go up? And probably the last question, how do you feel about the lack of food in the COP? Yeah, well, I'll start with the last bit. I was extremely disappointed, frustrated and sort of maddened about the fact that there should have been a whole day dedicated to our food systems. Because if you look at the sources of greenhouse gas emissions by sector, the food system end to end is the largest single source of GHGs. So for me, it was just massively remiss that we weren't having that conversation. And it also ties in with the fact, you know, the sort of twin problem that we have of how are we actually going to feed the planet? Because we have another 2.2 billion people joining us by 2050. And according to the FAO, we're supposed to be, or in order to feed us all, we need to increase global food production by 50%. So that is a really, really thorny challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions dramatically whilst equally scaling up food production. And when we also look at sort of migration and some of the really, really terrible impacts of the climate crisis, so many of them are linked to food and agriculture and people being kind of displaced from the land because of droughts and flooding and things like that. So I was genuinely perplexed. I could not understand and unfortunately I couldn't help but think what sort of devious powers are at work here to have resulted in the emission of food? So I don't have an answer to that, but I did, I was sort of not at COP, but during the time when COP was being held, I was on a panel with a food expert from the United Nations who shared with me some data that I'd been looking for for a very long time, which was around the amount of subsidies that go to the global food system. And he shared that it was $540 billion of subsidies goes to the industrialized food system and they have calculated that 470 billion of those are directly contributing to the climate crisis, to inequality and all sorts of terrible negative externalities. And so again, I want us to be having these sorts of conversations. We are starting to have the conversation about fossil fuel subsidies. We need to be having exactly the same conversations in exactly the same timeframe about food subsidies and how we can really innovate and change our food system so that it works for people and works for the planet. So that's sort of how I feel about the lack of food being on the agenda at COP26. In terms of our presence at COP26 itself, I actually decided not to attend. And I received lots of invitations to attend lots of wonderful events there. But I took the decision that actually my time is best use, taking action and not talking and doing everything that I can within my power to dramatically accelerate sort of the growth of olio. And in particular, sort of right now, we've just raised a big round of financing. We really are in that sort of growth phase. And so thankfully was able to delegate to one of our founding team members, a wonderful lady called Anne Charlotte who attended in place of Sasha and myself. And she was there for the full two weeks. And I think she's only just starting to recuperate now. And I think she's worn out with several pairs of shoes, sort of pounding the pavements, having lots of conversations. We're still to have a proper debrief actually about sort of everything that she covered off there and all the opportunities. But I don't believe that there will be any sort of quick wins coming out of COP26 for us at Olio. No. But I do think that COP26 is just another ingredient in this perfect storm that is starting to gather, which is really galvanizing businesses. In particular, who I see are kind of moving fastest in this way to want to really engage with us at Olio because we have a solution which enables businesses to have zero food waste locations. And I think just the whole momentum and media coverage of COP26 is very, very helpful for us when we're having these biz dev conversations. Absolutely. Love that. That's great. I totally understand your representative at COP. I was there, I think, total of 15, 16 days and it was exhausting. Yeah. You probably need a year vacation just to get over it. It's early mornings, late evenings, a lot of back and forth. There's tons of side events and there's so many blue zone, green zone side events in places throughout the city. So it was very intensive. I've been the COP since COP17, so I'm kind of used to that. But this one was different than any others, not only because of the pandemic, but because of the complexity and also the number of corporate sponsorships, so to say, who really wanted to make sure they had their presence shown at COP and showing that they're doubling down on climate. Where the nations failed us, that's where corporates really picked up the ball and made some big pledges and commitments. I believe at the end, we're around 2.3 degrees of warming is what the nations and country, countries and negotiators got to, sorely disappointing, but that a lot of corporate and private funding NGOs was in upwards of 140 trillion US dollars and numbers that were being thrown out, whether it's greenwashing or true commitments, we're still left to see. I'm so glad to hear that you got this funding and you've decided to really focus on building the business. Congratulations. But when you take a step back and you look at this overview perspective, it's interesting because normally in economic downturn in a pandemic, craziness, whether it's inauguration, Brexit or any of the other crazy things going on in the world, Black Lives Matters, Asian racism, climate conferences and things. How in the heck are we finding all this money to really forward food? And it tells me that it's an essential service. It's vital. It's broken. It needs to be fixed. And it's the basic of resources. So I've seen it not just with you but many in the food sector that have the right innovations or have the right models to get us on the right side of history through this food transformation, this food systems reformation into a better system. We're really supported and made sure we had those. And those organizations out there that had bad practices, non-social distancing, we've heard the stories whether it's in meat companies in the US or chicken companies in the US or in Germany, how those industries and especially gastronomy and migrant farm workers really suffered extremely during this time. And so it was good, bad, and ugly on both sides. And that was the last question I asked. So how did specifically your app usage and all the gastronomies and I guess the fast food and the other customers, businesses and schools that are involved in your app and the volunteers, did you see that go up? Was that a better solution or a model for times of crisis, times of issues with social distancing and food issues and impossible waste? I want to get a little bit more insight to that. And also if you could say, oh yeah, because we have this different way of thinking about food and about food waste and a model and the sharing app and those things, that's actually a better model during times of need and resilience. Maybe there are some learning lessons that you saw and I want to hear those stories. I want to give them to my listeners as well. So if you could tell us about that. For sure. So why don't I just start off just by explaining to your listeners what Olio is because I'm aware that many people won't know what we are or how the app works. So we exist to tackle the problem of food waste in the home and local community and we do that by connecting people with their neighbors so that you can give stuff away instead of throwing it away. So how it works is you'll just snap a photo of your spare food. I should say we also have a non-food section as well. We share other household items, but we'll just stay focused on food for now. So you snap a photo of your spare food and you add it to the app. Neighbours living nearby get an alert, they can then browse the listings, request what they want and pop round and pick it up. And it's really important to stress that Olio is all about hyperlopal. It's about connecting neighbours sort of in real life. So that exchange of the food that takes place on the doorstep. Everything that is added to the Olio app is given away for free. And there are generally sort of two sources of the food coming onto the app. So in roughly half the cases, it's people giving stuff away from their own homes. So perhaps unwanted food gifts that they don't want or stuff that's been lurking in the back of the cupboard for a while or maybe they're going away for the weekend or they've overcated for a party. There's sort of no shorter reasons why we have too much food in our homes. So in roughly half the instances we're sharing that surplus. And then in roughly the other half, we have now 35,000 trained volunteers and these are people who we match up with their local business. And so on their allotted time and day they will pop out of their home across the road. They will go to their local business which could be a supermarket or a quick service restaurant or a corporate canteen or something like that. They will pick up all of the unsold food from that location. They will then take it home. They will add it to the app within minutes, their neighbours are requesting it minutes later the neighbours are popping around to pick it up. And that takes that food from having been considered sort of quote unquote a waste stream in the store to instead within one to two hours fully redistributed into the homes of the local community. So everything on the early app is neighbour to neighbour in real life on the doorstep, half coming from their own homes, half having come a few minutes earlier from a local business. And during Covid when the first lockdown was announced here in the UK we had a really sort of rocky 24 hours or so when it was deeply unclear whether a neighbour to neighbour food sharing app could continue to exist during a global pandemic. And Sasha, my co-founder and I we listened very closely to our community who told us actually in no uncertain terms that we had a responsibility to keep operating during the pandemic. And then we worked with our food safety lawyer and our environmental health officer who also agreed that we had to keep operating and advised on the changes that we we should make to the model. And the key things that we did was kind of put messaging absolutely everywhere through the app about how to share safely and in compliance with the government's Covid guidelines. And the main thing that people had to do was move to a no contact pick up. So you just leave the item outside a few moments before the person who was due to collect it would arrive. And for about the first of two weeks, I think the whole sort of nation was pretty traumatised. And we saw a decline in sharing by about 20%. But then from that moment onwards, we saw hockey stick growth in sharing on Olio. And so through last year, we grew 5x, which is absolutely mind blowing. And I think there are a number of reasons for that. So the first one is, you know, if you can kind of drag your mind back to the early days, I don't know about you guys in the States, but certainly over here, we saw photographs of empty supermarket shelves. And I think that reminded many people on just a very visceral level, how important food is, you know, many people, millions of people for the first time felt fear about access to food. And immediately overnight, the percentage of people saying that they valued food just leapt up. And similarly, the percentage of people who were wasting food dropped right down. So we finally sort of seem to collectively recognise that food is quite literally our life source. And it is valuable. So that obviously contributed to people wanting to give food away, rather than throw it away. I think also during the pandemic and in times of crisis, it's very natural and instinctive as human beings to seek safety in your local community. And yet for many people, they don't know anyone in their local community. And the Olio app provided a really convenient and safe way to be able to connect with the local community. And people wanted to both help their local community because we were being told here in the UK to sort of stay home and save lives. And that was the best way we could help. But for a lot of people, just staying at home did not feel like enough. And they quickly recognise that a really easy way to have a massive impact and to contribute to their local community was to give away stuff that they didn't want or need in their home to people living nearby who needed it. So we had that kind of outpouring of community sort of bonding, I guess, if you like. The other thing sort of on a very practical level, people were locked at home and they started doing a ton of decluttering. So it's kind of massive Marie condo sort of a sort of phase swept across the country and people were just really, really busy decluttering. And then the final thing I think I'd say is that COVID sort of gave many of us collectively sort of the great pause where we stopped and we reflected and many things that we had sort of taken as gospel we suddenly realised could be challenged weren't necessarily true. And things about our lives and how we led our lives that we thought were essential to us, we realised actually weren't that essential at all. And in parallel to that, we had all sorts of really adverse weather events happening as well. And in particular, they were sort of happening to people who perhaps hadn't experienced the impacts of the climate until then. And they had sort of mentally parked the climate as being something for children or grandchildren and something that was affecting different people on different continents. And suddenly it felt like it was sort of knocking down on people's doors. And so a lot of people started to reevaluate their lives and to think about well actually what can I do to make a difference. I'm kind of I'm now a the debate about whether the climate crisis is or isn't real felt like it stopped. And people were then starting to switch gears to kind of I'm a bit terrified and bit overwhelmed. What can I do how do I start. And so as a result of all of those factors it creates a bit of a perfect storm for Olio. I also know in you touched upon this briefly that you can add other than non than food items to the app. Did you see items like you know for planting and gardening and for cooking. I thought you're about to ask me about toilet roll. No, no that's in America that's in America. You know utensils and things to improve your cooking because I'm sure before the pandemic or before so much time spent at home a lot of people were probably eating out more probably doing other types of fast food than now was was on shaky grounds because of the pandemic and because of the social distancing. So now they they probably didn't even have the tools. I remember I wanted to go get some new things from IKEA. IKEA was closed. You couldn't go there social distancing there were things like that. And so this have been perfect time. Did you see any uptake on things like that. Yes. So we did see lots of new behaviors happening. So we saw an awful lot of people sort of reconnecting with their their hobbies and their passions and their crafts and cooking and baking. And we moved sort of quite quickly down we launched a new section in the app called made which connects neighbors to buy and sell homemade food and handmade crafts because people would well we saw there were lots of things happening. So some people were just wanting to have that sort of creative outlet. And you know if you're a baker there's only so many cupcakes and loads of bread you can eat yourself. And similarly for people who are crafting perhaps they just wanted to generate a little bit of incremental income to either cover the costs of their hobby and or to develop sort of a secondary income stream for them. And so we had you know within a couple of months over 15,000 people join us in that section of the app to sell their homemade food and handmade crafts. We also saw a lot of people kind of taking up gardening for the first time and that didn't necessarily mean gardening in a garden it was all the way through to people were sort of gardening indoors, gardening on balconies. And so the forum section of the Olio app was very active with people sharing knowledge and tips and tricks about how to do that. And we also saw lots of people giving away sort of seedlings and you know fresh fruit and produce and stuff that they they had grown during that period of time which was really really lovely. And I think again it helped people reconnect with food and the value of food because you've only got to grow a few carrots yourself to suddenly have a brand new appreciation of how hard it is to to grow food. And again people enjoy that community connection on the doorstep as well an opportunity to meet someone in the community. I really think that this is such a beautiful community builder hyper local you know in the food system some of it even though it's a global thing it's our global food systems reformation that we need to reform the economies are really local they're farm to fork their smallholder farmers are local communities buying local goods it's not where we're shipping potatoes from one area thousands of miles across the world but also shipping in potatoes from thousands of miles in to kind of do this crazy commodity swap and yeah makes no sense at all does it makes no sense at all that these these local futures and the stability of local communities is so so vital in this aspect have you seen a lot of finger pointing or pushing or complaints around the fact that big producers those who are doing commoditizing of food or shipping foods around the world or this big high processed products that they're saying it's really the consumers issue of the food waste of the food of the waste problem period it's their problem it's not ours and the way we produce and the way we ship and transport it's actually the consumer at the last mile that's doing the wasting that's that's big and how do you feel about that can you tell us a little bit yeah so it's quite a complicated area actually so if we look at sort of the food waste kind of value chain hate the phrase but kind of end to end you know where where does it take place so that this is UK data but it is very typical of any sort of quote unquote developed country so so broadly sort of in the emerging markets the majority of food waste takes place at the production stage and there's very little at the consumption end and in the developed markets it's the opposite way round so if you look at food waste in the UK half of all food waste takes place in the home so a typical British family is throwing away 20 percent of their weekly shop that is 700 pounds sterling per family per year and collectively adds up to 14 billion pounds sterling of perfectly good food being thrown away every year and not just perfectly good food all of the resources that went into producing that food but also the hard work that you use to generate the money that you spent on that food that you then sent off to landfill where it gives off methane and heats up the planet and so half of all food waste takes place in the home and in contrast only 2 percent of all food waste takes place at a retail store level now that is massively massively counter-intuitive to people whenever we talk about the food waste problem the first place their mind goes is to the supermarket store and I spent a lot of time scratching my head trying to think how is it us in our homes are half the problem and stores are only 2 percent and I have realised that it's just a numbers game in the UK there's 28 million households throwing away 20 percent of the weekly shop in contrast you've got you know 10 or 15 000 retail outlets throwing away half a percentage point and so that is why we're half the problem and they are just 2 percent and then there's about 10 percent which takes place in what we could be described as sort of hospitality and leisure I think it's about 13 percent also in manufacturing and then there's just under a third that takes place on the farm gate so the biggest is us in the home and the second biggest is the farm gate and the other bits have been pretty sort of streamlined so far although of course there's further improvements that can always be made and yes the supermarkets and the large industrial players are very very very responsible for the waste that takes place at the farm gate and that is broadly because of their buying behaviours and practices and their exceptionally stringent cosmetic standards which can result in a situation where it is not economic for a farmer to harvest a crop if more than a certain percentage of it does not meet the supermarket's requirements it's more cost effective than just to plow it in so that's actually bonkers and clearly we've got to sort of we've got to address that problem but interestingly we actually get quite frustrated that there hasn't been more conversation about the problem of food waste in the home and I think the reason for that is actually a lot of the businesses that we speak to they're very nervous about talking about food waste in the home until they have got their own house in order I think they recognize that actually they can't preach at their customers until they've sorted out food waste themselves and that's frustrating because half of all food waste is taking place in the home you know and I've shared the data around a typical UK family a typical American family is throwing away $2,000 of food every single year so I really really really want us to start talking about that part of the problem and the reason being that one is the biggest part of the problem but also it's something that actually we can take action on immediately tomorrow like we don't have to wait for governments to be exceptionally slow to pass some weak regulation we don't have to wait for years and years for businesses to change their processes we can start literally tomorrow and we can take into our own hands responsibility for solving a massive part of that problem and that's what Olio aims to do we aim to make it simple safe fast and fun for everybody to give stuff away instead of throw it away. Absolutely love that I've had a lot of guests over the years on the show who are authors of books around food waste and just took a quick sampling off my bookshelf I don't know if you guys have published a publication or if you do more on the blog or form that you know silo is more for the restaurant and gastronomy it's a love silo this is a wonderful book I absolutely love it equally wonderful restaurant that they've got as well yeah the restaurant is beautiful it's so wonderful waste-free kitchen by Dana Gunders says a super book with with tips for the the end consumer how to organize your fridge how to reduce food waste how to make leftovers all sorts of all sorts of things like that and then and then we kind of get into the bigger thing that you're dealing with as well fixation is how do we fix or make other products that we can pass on how do we control food banks and pantries and treat them in a different way and Robert Eggers begging for change from the world's central kitchen and the DC the DC kitchen that they have for people who are homeless or on the street who need food so there's there's a lot of interesting books out there with this subject trying to give us the education and the knowledge you're now providing with your app a tool right in the hand um I guess what are the limitations it's just not available everywhere or is it available everywhere how does it build up and and where is it going and give us give us your vision now that you've got some money you're building things up what's the plan what's the vision what can we expect for more tools and and change in the future of food waste and how we interact with things yeah so olio is available to be used absolutely everywhere in the world and it has been used in 61 countries so far successfully so that's not just people adding stuff to the app it's people adding stuff to the app someone else requesting it and popping around and picking it up and we have whilst we as a team we to date have had very limited resources and we've been predominantly focused on the UK we did spend some time building out our ambassador program so we now have over 50 000 ambassadors these are people from all over the world who are passionate about our mission they want to be able to use olio in their local community and they want to help us spread the word and so we give them a ton of kind of digital content for them to be able to share online and then they can also order or download physical marketing materials as well so kind of old school posters and letters and flyers things for them to put up in their local community and we also give them access to presentations and speaker notes and formats for sort of hosting community events because we very quickly recognize that you know Sasha and I couldn't possibly go to every town in the UK let alone sort of worldwide and so what we needed to do to help olio grow as fast as possible was to empower other people and give them all the tools that required to to get things sort of kick started in terms of the progress we've made i'm incredibly proud of the fact that it was a couple of weeks ago we passed sort of a milestone of our five millionth person joining us we have had roughly 35 million portions of food successfully given away via the platform and three million non-food items the environmental impact of that has been equivalent to taking over 100 million car miles off the road and we have also saved five billion litres of water because obviously food production is incredibly water intensive so super proud of the progress we've made to date but also it's very frustrated that we haven't grown faster and and gone further because you know that's the impact we're having now and we're having probably 0.001 percent of our full potential and already we've got some pretty mind-boggling large impact data points there so we really do want to grow as quickly as possible our very sort of publicly stated ambition we hope that if you state it publicly often enough then it then it will happen is that we want a billion olioas by 2030 and the reason for that is is really really straightforward if humanities stand any chance whatsoever of living in a 1.5 degree warmed world we cannot continue to waste the world's resources in in the way that we are and and a couple of I guess concepts to back that statement up the first one your audience I'm sure might be familiar with this but project drawdown which is a collaborative piece of work of several hundred of the world's leading climate change scientists said enough to doom and gloom about the climate crisis let's stack rank of top 100 solutions and in position number one is reducing food waste which comes above electric cars above solar power and above a plant-based diet you know so food waste really really really is one of the biggest problems that we have got to solve sort of yesterday and then the second concept which really reinforces the importance of our work and why we've got to get to that sort of scale of a billion people is the concept of earth overshoot day and earth overshoot day is the day in the year in which humanity has used all the resources that the earth can replenish in a year was first measured in the late 60s and earth overshoot day was the 31st December so humanity used in a year what the earth could replenish in a year we were living in equilibrium with the planet happy days fast forward to this year earth overshoot day was the 29th of july and so what that means is that every single thing that every single one of us seven and a half billion people are consuming after the 29th of july is net net depletive to the planet which you know i've got kids who are seven and nine even they can figure out that that is not a sustainable state of affairs and so we want to get a billion people on olio because we have got to completely reinvent how we live and consume so at the moment we live in this very wasteful linear extractive model of consumption where we rip resource at the planet thousands of miles away send them on a very long supply chain we use them for you know five or 10 percent of their life toss them into landfill and we rinse wash and repeat and what we've got to do is move to a new model of consumption which is one that is hyper local that is sustainable that's really got kind of reuse and repair embedded in it and so we want the default model of consumption to be when you want something the first place you go is you think well what already exists in my local community so you can take for free what your neighbors do not want you can borrow so we recently launched borrowing in the apps you can lend and borrow everyday household items you can borrow what your neighbors are not currently using because by the way a typical american home has 300 000 things in it so take what you you know your neighbors don't want for free borrow what they're not using right now and then when you do buy something buy something that's been made locally and with love and that and that's the made section of the app so we are still very very early days in that journey you know there's a long way to go from five million people to a billion people but we hope and believe that now finally is the right time you know I think we were very early we could see where the world needs to go and it feels like now the world is also starting to see kind of where we need to go that's beautiful I had my Dr. Matthias Fakronago from ecological footprint from Earth Overshoot Day on my show podcast we're good friends and have known each other for a long time that's been a calculation we've used for well over 35 years started originally with the limits to growth book in 1972 and we've been talking about that Earth Overshoot Day the day of our deficit but we're not using it in the right way we're calculating our ecological footprint and how much we're in deficit you know and that we've all heard as you mentioned if we all live like americans we'd need five planets worth of resources resources we only have one planet and so that's why we're in this deficit and that we're using more per person than we have available but there's a flip side to that whole earth overshoot day calculations based on a global replicable hectare that actually we could use as a better economic model to get out of this to live within the planetary boundaries in our means and so I love that you address that and you're providing the tools through through Olio to to kind of use the sharing economy to help out hyper local with your neighbors get to know people but also things that are just sitting around whether you know it's something that you could borrow or something freshly made by your great neighbor who's a great baker or a artisan product maker that you'd say wow boy that's fabulous I didn't know that it's it's really exciting to see the progress and where you're going your your plan and roadmap for the future I've got about six more questions there's only two that are really hard for you that I'm gonna ask you but they also have to do without future vision that's the burning question WTF and it's not the swear word although we've probably been saying at these last couple years with the pandemic and and what we've experienced but it's what's the futures and maybe a different way to formulate that so it's a little bit more understandable maybe for you as what does a world that works for everyone look like for you yeah so I think my thoughts on this are very much work in progress and I need to spend more time actually really having a concrete answer about what the future world looks like because I've spent a lot of time immersed in what is broken with the current world and I absolutely believe that a lack of imagination is holding many of us back at well the vast majority of people and they'll point to examples of success of the current system look how many people have been lived after poverty look at this look at that but that doesn't mean say that we can't do a lot lot better and so I the big conversation that is not being had by nearly enough people and it feels to me a bit like a sort of the emperor's wearing no clothes moment is the fact that our whole economic system is very very broken because it is based on this concept of endless GDP growth in a resource constrained planet and we have got to move away from a consumption based economy so what does that look like I you know if you think of the consumption based economy people are laboring incredibly hard to make all this shit that is destroying the planet that clutters up people's hopes right I mean so everything about this is broken so if we can migrate our economy away from the consumption of things towards spending quality time with one another and in many ways going back to things that we have evolved to enjoy doing singing dancing cooking performing caring for one another caring for the nature there are no shortage of things that we can do fruitfully and productively with our time and I firmly believe that we will all be you know healthier happier and wealthier as a result of that new type of future I think we need to be work we don't need to work nearly as much as as we are and actually I listened to a podcast of just the other day which was talking about the introduction of time and how the industrialists started to recognize that time was money and then started to kind of steal our time and actually you know we have never worked as hard as we are and we seem to be unhappier than we've ever been as well whilst being materially richer and I'm hopeful that the pandemic actually gave people a little bit of a glimpse of life where they jumped off of that treadmill of consumption and recognized that actually what was most precious was spending time with loved ones was connecting with nature was perhaps cooking or baking and I firmly firmly firmly believe that we can live in a world which is sustainable and really really importantly is much more equitable because I am maddened and infuriated by the lack of equity in our in our world and there's sort of the top 10 percent really really kind of prosper and have a one quite wonderful life or very materially rich life that is the detriment to absolutely everybody else and yeah it's just it's just not sustainable absolutely not sustainable the the items that you touched upon and the way you formulated I've never heard anybody answer that question like that before and so I thank you and I want want you to know that everybody answers it differently but but you hit the nail on the head a lot of us don't have that vision of what the future is and when we're asked the question it's sometimes the first time we've thought about it or had the time to stop and say what is it where were we going and if you don't have a formulation or the ability to do that then that's guaranteed where you're going to be in the future because someone else or the or the universe is going to fill that void and make sure that's that's where you'll be but if you have a vision of what you'd like or what you hope that image would look like in the future and some of the things you said as well then we can work towards it we can engineer towards it we can create apps for it we can architect and design and create even if it's movie magic until we get there we can do something to hopefully achieve that that future but if we don't have a plan a path or even a vision of what it could look and feel like then it's most like it going to be dystopian or what or sir putans delivered for us 100% so we are you know human beings I think with many of these things you've got to kind of really go deep on understanding behavioral psychology and human beings how we evolved and all that kind of stuff and the fact of the matter is that we and it's been proven time and time again we are risk averse as a species and we fear loss and so at the moment the whole climate movement the whole sustainability movement in people's mind is associated with loss a loss of their current way of life and that is frightening and people don't like change and so it's no great surprise that people aren't galvanizing to change and what we have really got to do is fill that vacuum imagination with a powerful and inspiring vision of the future which I absolutely believe is available to us all and I think a key component of creating that future we've ended up in this really kind of pretty fucked up excuse my french dystopian world that we're in now because we have had a complete lack of diversity of thought and and actually so small sidetrack on that one but I can remember sort of running I sort of run a lot and listen to podcasts a lot and I can remember just really trying to think to myself sort of why are we in this mess and there's a technique that we use in the digital world and perhaps in many other worlds as well which is called the five wise which is if you just ask why five times you get to the root causes to why something happened and I did this on this this run sort of asked myself about you know why is the climate crisis come about and at the very bottom and the end of that process I got to was a lack of diversity of voices in positions of power and I firmly believe that if we had had an equal representation of women an equal representation of people of color people from distant socioeconomic backgrounds introverts versus extroverts all that kind of stuff we would not have ended up with this sort of incredibly destructive economic system that we're in and I think that I think I used to think about this climate crisis just in very very sort of environmental terms and I've now realized that it's all about social justice as well and we're only going to solve those two problems have to be connected to to solve both of them and I think this vision of the future needs to have truly diverse voices working together to create it and I think we've got a lot to learn you know the the white western patriarchy has an awful lot to learn from other cultures around the world about what that's that future could look like love it so you might know I'm a sustainable development goal advocate all 17 of the I spotted your badge yeah are are tied to agriculture seafood food and beverage industry they're 11 of them intrinsically so you're with olio you're addressing minimum 11 if not all of them because they're all tied together and they're as a system and they're all tied to food a lot of people ask and they say they've never won they've never heard of the sustainable development goals or if they have heard of them they're like oh great I like number one it's red my favorite color no poverty that's that's the one I'm working on and I tell them you know that's great but it's virtually impossible to cherry pick an sdg and just work on one or two and not touch on the others because they're tied together as a system the reason I bring it up is it is kind of this roadmap or vision for the future for December 2030 and for the UN I wrote the sustainable development goal manifesto so to give people a vision of what it would feel like in December 2030 to be there so exactly what you just spoke about and that we need to have these visions and what what your hopes of this this future are we're women I'll got eight years left to go till December 2030 or and a month I guess if we want to say it's nine years left how do you feel about the sustainable development goals we talked about the cop 26 in the beginning do you think that we still have time to put our feet on the exponential roadmap to see us hit that exponential curve to to achieve the goals by 2030 so I love the sustainable development goals I think they are extremely clear I think they're visually striking and they have created a language that many many many businesses have adopted and the reality is that actually businesses can be I think sort of some of the strongest sort of agents of change given that unfortunately government seemed to be well just hopelessly inept and corrupt and tied up with lots of lobbying money and and lacking vision and lacking true leadership so and I've been really really pleasantly heartened to see just how many businesses have adopted the sustainable development goals and I think more and more will continue to do so I'm less concerned about individuals necessarily understanding about them and because I think they can be hard to relate to kind of your everyday life in your everyday actions do we have enough time I'm sort of I'm sort of very schizophrenic on this if I'm very if I'm very honest with you every time I kind of go deep on the climate science I end up just crying my eyes out and being gripped with fear in the in the bottom of my heart and and I study sort of social and political sciences and so I'm naturally quite a systems thinker and I understand very clearly what sort of hitting a negative tipping point becomes comes like and that sort of domino effect and I understand just how fragile civilization really is and so I can feel really physically very nauseous I don't allow myself to stay in that space for very long because it's just unbearable and I'm naturally an optimist and I will sort of die trying and that kind of personality and and so that's what Sasha myself and everyone at Olio we have just committed ourselves we're like we will get to a billion Olio has come hell or high water by 2030 something that gives me hope is the inverse of that tipping point so in the technology world that sort of hockey stick curve is a well-travelled curve that sort of exponential growth and I am quietly hopeful that as I've mentioned this several times that phrase that kind of that perfect storm but I do feel like the perfect storm is gathering and once we hit a tipping point and again we think a lot about tipping points in Olio say once I get enough people in a community using the app I hit a tipping point and suddenly boom it ripples through everybody very very quickly so it's excruciatingly hard to get to your first x and then it then it flies and I am quietly hopeful that we are going to start seeing kind of the tipping point of action because then suddenly the laggards kind of go oh shit you know no one wants to get left behind and suddenly people like there's enough people there's a critical mass no one wants to be on the wrong side of history so and in particular what I really liked about COP26 was the transfer of finance you know when trillions of dollars start moving that just has such a powerful cascading effect so I am hopeful but equally I am recognizing because someone asked me on my team the other day said please can you kind of summarize do you think whether COP26 has been a success or a failure and it really kind of I spent last weekend really thinking about that and I recognize that actually even to consider whether COP26 is a success or a failure is a luxury that comes from a position of privilege we have to recognize that all of the cops to date have been disastrous failures with emissions continuing to go barreling upwards and millions and millions and millions of people are losing their lives and their livelihoods and suffering inexorably right now and I think we have to be quite careful that when we talk about stuff kind of will we get there in time for 2030 that seems to me to be positioned in couch from a position of privilege from the people in the west world who are like will my life remain broadly undisturbed by 2030 and so I think we just have to be a little bit careful about these sorts of discussions I love that I have three more questions for you and they're all really for my listeners if there was one or two messages that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life what would it be your message wow no pressure there change everybody's lives is listening I think the concept I would want everybody to take away is that what you do does count you do matter it is so easy for all of us to sort of discount ourselves and that's how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place so I like to say it was billions of small actions that got us into this crisis in the first place and so by the same logic billions of small actions can help get us out and I'll give kind of two examples to kind of back that up so the first one back to kind of food waste it can be very easy to kind of chuck two brown bananas in the bin and think well you know it's just two brown bananas it's just me what difference that really make again kind of using UK data there's 28 million other households who are also thinking it's just two brown bananas this week and that's how we get start getting to these sort of eye watering numbers and similarly sort of linked to this I would encourage everybody to think of every single pound that you spend as a vote and you are either voting for the status quo or you can take that money and move it and vote for change so you know every time you buy something in a plastic bottle you are basically saying I am totally cool with the fact that a million plastic bottles are sold every single minute in the world and the lion's share of them are ending up in the ocean and in landfill every time you buy a plastic bottle you are saying I endorse this or you can take your money and you move it and you buy something different or sustainable or you'll reuse something and again a lot of people think but what difference do I make it's only me no no no every single time you move your money you are sending data points up to businesses and they scrutinize their sales data which within an inch of its life and the minute they start seeing 100 people move a thousand people move 10,000 people 100,000 people move that is then what triggers them to start investing in new sustainable products and product ranges and bringing sustainability to the mass market to the people for whom it can be too difficult right now and so I would hazard a guess that probably the vast majority of your users you know there are millions hundreds of millions of people in the world who I think have a moral responsibility to start moving their money today and there are many people who cannot do this for a whole variety of reasons but you have a moral responsibility to start taking that action and it is amazing you will feel healthier wealthier and happier when you start leading a more sustainable life definitely yeah when you when you give the banana example I always think smoothies banana bacon I don't know if you've ever had a banana bacon no if we happen to banana bread people here you know yeah that's my favorite banana nut bread I love it yeah and to make banana bread you need brown bananas right and so that's just a perfect example of something that you don't want there is your neighbor looking at a green bunch of bananas thinking oh I wish I had some brown bananas yeah there's one one man's trash is another man's treasure or something you know how that's so it's really it's interesting how how we can flip that view what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start I'm smiling um so many things one that springs to mind is that there's no such thing as a silver bullet I think that sort of as certainly as entrepreneurs but actually probably if I dial it up to humanity I think we're often in this quest of this silver bullet this pill this magical thing that will kind of solve everything and um for Sasha and I I think we spent the first several years thinking every next product release every next feature every next marketing campaign every next partnership was going to be the silver bullet that would transform the growth trajectory of olio and the reality is there's no such thing as a silver bullet there is just a shit ton of lead bullets that you just have to keep hailing at it but they start sort of layering up and then you hit a tipping point and then and then the magic happens and that is why you know and I think that applies equally to the sustainability movement there is no panacea there is no single silver bullet we all need to step up be counted make the change be the change that that we can and I do believe that then collectively we'll hit a tipping point that's a thank you so much for letting us all inside of your ideas that's all my questions I have for you but I would like to give you this last little section if there's something you didn't get a mention or tell us about projects or things coming up now would be your chance before we say goodbye I think the one thing I'd love to touch on because I'm sure during this conversation a number of your listeners have thought about this is the twin sort of topics of food poverty and hunger and food waste because it is very very easy but I think this is dangerously simplistic to say let's take all of this food waste and give it to all of these hungry people and we'll solve these two problems time up in a nice neat bow and we can all live happily ever after and and that is very very dangerous thinking for a couple of reasons so first of all if you look at the problem of food waste there is nowhere near enough hungry people to eat all the food waste that we generate so we have to get absolutely everybody involved and so that's why we work very very hard to position olio as a mainstream app this is just about modern sustainable common sense everyday living it is not about sort of giving food to the needy now of course there are people using olio who are struggling who are having a tough time but what they love about it is precisely the fact that there is no stigma associated with it they don't have to go to their doctor or get a quota or a chit or anything like that they're just can use it just like everybody else so in the food waste world we get quite frustrated when people seem to think that feeding hungry people is a solution to food waste because it's not and equally if you speak to people who are in the food poverty world they are just as frustrated because the solution to food poverty is not random handouts of food waste it is a proper living wage it's access to proper mental health services proper social security all sorts of other things like that so i'll just encourage everybody to try and sort of not conflate those two issues in their minds and also to really understand i think for too long we have put the whole burden and load of doing good onto charity so you know we might not have made this explicit but olio is a business and often people are confused because they assume that if you're doing something good you must be a charity and if you're scaling and growing really fast then you're probably a business but having goodness knows what sort of negative externalities and i think that we are stuck in that kind of really outdated dichotomy which is not helping any of us and we've got to have this third pathway which is profit with purpose so we've got to be able to have the positive impact at the scale of businesses and we've got to be able to be sustainable like businesses but have kind of the heart and soul of the of the charitable model so yes i think that's really really kind of important message and we mustn't sort of overlook the power of profit with purpose and we mustn't overlook the power of community love that well one of my guests robert eggers i showed you his book begging for change she has a nice saying it says there are no profits without nonprofits and those two really go in it in hand it doesn't need to be charitable it can be a business model that that really works and that's what we're seeing all over boy it's been wonderful thank you very much i wish you all the success in your next build and i hope we can speak very soon again our past will cross in the future thank you so much thank you bye bye