OLIO: The App That Helps Reduce Food Waste

TEO SHAO NING (CELEST) reviews OLIO, a mobile application that allows people to share and receive both unwanted food and non-food items.

Every day, tons of perfectly good food is thrown away by households in Singapore. According to The Straits Times in 2020, the total amount of money wasted through food waste from households amounts to $342 million dollars annually.

As a cash-frugal, food-loving Singaporean, this figure shocked me. Hence, I set out to look for initiatives targeting this issue.

OLIO’s user interface allows for users to filter food and non-food items, and provides a neat, concise navigation of the various listings. Photo: OLIO

Introducing OLIO, a mobile application that allows users to give and receive unwanted food and non-food items for free.

Founded by Ms Tessa Clarke and Ms Saasha Celestial-One in 2015, OLIO operates in 59 countries, and according to Ms Clarke, boasts 83,000 users in Singapore alone. She says: “Singaporeans have been exceptionally receptive and Singapore is one of our most active communities outside of the UK with thousands of items being shared every week.”

To explore OLIO’s capabilities in reducing food waste in Singapore, I embarked on an experiment in which I tried sourcing all my food from OLIO for a week.

OLIO is relatively simple to use. Users can set filters for the distance radius of listings that they wish to see. The approximate location for the collection of the items are also displayed on the listing itself. Navigating through OLIO was easy due to how well-organised it is. Requesting items was straightforward and hassle-free; I just had to let givers know the timing that I could pick up the items and wait for them to confirm the pick-up and send their address.

Over the week, I collected all sorts of food items, including bread, milk, cheesecake, curry chicken, noodles and packaged snacks. I visited 11 different addresses, ranging from the familiar corridors of Housing and Development Board flats to the glamorous hallway of an Orchard condominium.

In a single day, I managed to pick up this variety of food items from four separate addresses, including bread, packaged snacks, milk, nuts and cheesecake. Photo: SHAO NING (CELEST)

Most pick-ups were contactless. The food would be left labelled plastic bags outside the givers’ units for me to collect, making collection timings much more flexible, and reducing the need for face-to-face interaction.

I collected a box of fried bee hoon (vermicelli noodles) from Ms Sarah Lim, who started giving food away on OLIO after she learnt that her mother, who owns a food stall business, would throw away unsold leftovers. She says: “I was shocked because I'm very against food wastage and the food she threw could have been used to feed people who really need it.”

The big box of delicious fried bee hoon provided me with dinner for three days.

If not for OLIO, Ms Lim’s mother’s bee hoon would be thrown away if they are unsold by the end of the day. Photo: SHAO NING (CELEST)

On another day, I picked up granola, biscuits and instant noodles from Ms Alexendria Ann Teh, who admits that before using OLIO, she would throw away food that was not to her liking due to not knowing who would accept them. “[The food] usually ended up in the bin. Right now, I see OLIO as a platform for sharing and minimising wastage.”

While my experience using OLIO was mainly positive, Ms Lynnette Terh, who uses both OLIO and a private WhatsApp group chat to give away food, shares her negative encounters with other OLIO users. Once, she had multiple collections to be done in a day and left the food outside her unit in basins labelled with the names of each user to collect respectively. However, one user took all the food from another user’s basin too, resulting in an unpleasant confrontation when that other user came by to collect her items. Ms Terh expresses her dislike of the openness of OLIO and states her preference for using her private WhatsApp group chat to distribute food. She says: “OLIO is an open market. You get all sorts of people.”

Overall, I would definitely continue to use OLIO regularly as it is a great application that benefits both givers and receivers of unwanted food, enabling for the reduction of food waste, and providing those in need with free meals. However, OLIO alone is not a cure-all for Singapore’s food waste problem.

Regarding this, Ms Lim shares: “I think it's quite sad that a lot of people take food for granted. Maybe they don’t know of apps like this whereby they can donate to people who need it or maybe they're just too unbothered about it. Overall I think more can be done but it's difficult to change one's attitude and mindset.”