Thame is lucky enough to have an Olio food waste hero, Allie. Allie is one of many now using the app Olio to help reduce food waste and supply us with free food. We can all help others by reusing, recycling, sharing and claiming free items on the Olio app.
What is Olio?
Olio is a website and app that you can use to give away and collect items for free, this includes furniture, items, products, any unwanted food or food you won’t be able to use in time, so long as they are within their use by date. Their app is available to download on most devices via the Google Play store and Apple App Store.
You can upload and give away food items, non-food items and they have also introduced a borrow tab where you can lend and borrow items locally, and a wanted tab if there is anything in particular you could do with.
Olio has created badges you can earn with points, ranking people by how much they use the app and do certain tasks, this is a cute little incentive to encourage you to use the app and give away your unwanted items.
About food waste heroes
Olio also has food waste heroes (FWH). Food heroes travel to nearby supermarkets to collect any unwanted food that would otherwise be thrown away. It is illegal for stores to share food after it has expired, this is for health and safety reasons. Use by dates are only usually on fresh, chilled and perishable food items. These stores have signed up to the Olio zero food waste business programme and have dedicated time slots for heroes to collect from.
Once the food has been collected from the supermarket, the food waste hero then lists the food on Olio for others to request.
Often the items need to be collected that evening before their use by date.
Some collections are done face to face, others you can collect from your hero with no contact – you go to your location, make sure you take a bag if you need one, collect your item from the cooler, remove it from the bag and pop the bag back once you’ve taken your items.
Olio has a feature where you can list your item for a certain amount of days, so you can make sure your uploaded items never go past the use by date and people won’t be able to request them. If you do spot a listing with an item that is no longer in date, please make sure it is the use by date and not best before, if this is the case, you can select the little flag in the top right of the listing and report it, so that Olio can remove the item.
The best before date however is usually on tinned, dried and frozen foods, which is just an advisory as to when the food is probably at its best, these are usually fine to consume if they look okay, after the date listed. Olio does however ask that anyone sharing refrigerated food items that have a best before date, only make them available for collection up until 24 hours after the date shown.
Olio and Thame
Our local Olio food waste hero in Thame is Allie Rucker. Allie very kindly travels to our nearby Tesco and collects the surplus unsold food that would usually otherwise go to waste. Allie believes that “good food should be eaten, not binned”. Allie would like to save waste as well as help out her local community. Unfortunately, she won’t know what the items are or how much of them will be available until she has collected, sometimes there are hundreds of items, other times just a handful. They are most often fruit, salads, sandwiches, bread, pastries, pizzas, vegetables, hummus and wraps.
You can set your Olio notifications to let you know when new items have been added in your area, to make sure you are aware when it first gets uploaded. Allie is very good at listing the use by dates and best before dates, so please make sure you can collect in the time needed before the item expires (Before midnight of the use by date and before 24 hours of the best before date) Most of her listed items are uploaded around 21:00 on Friday nights for collection before 23:59, but Allie occasionally does extra collections throughout the week, so it is worth checking the app.
What ISN’T ALLOWED TO BE SHARED on Olio?
Most items are accepted on the app, except you cannot upload/share fake or counterfeit goods, coupons, vouchers, animals or controlled substances.
For more information about what you can and can’t share, please check HERE.
We hope you enjoy the app and find it useful. Anything we can do to save items from going to waste is a bonus in our eyes.
Just remember to upload items with a good description, for ease of finding them a new home (dates, sizes, conditions etc.) The location will automatically be marked on the map for you, so you can see roughly where the items are located.
Happy decluttering!
This post was originally posted Feb 7th 2022 and was reviewed and updated with new information including the removal of outdated information Jan 1st 2023.
