Mums on a mission

This female-founded app is tackling waste by rehoming unwanted items of any kind – from Bratz to bananas

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Published: March 12, 2025
This Article was written by: Katie Hill - My Green Pod
app, circular economy, community, food waste, sharing, tech, waste, women

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This article first appeared in our International Women’s Day issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 04 March. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox

Olio, the female-founded sharing app for local communities, was created in 2015 by Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One.

It began life as an app to fight food waste, but today Olio helps to tackle waste in a broader sense: it connects users with the people who would value things that they no longer need.

As self-declared ‘mums on a mission’, Tessa and Saasha set out with a clear, shared purpose; their commitment to tackling waste means they’re now in a position to look back on a successful 10 years as champions of female founded businesses.

Dreaming big

Tessa grew up on a dairy farm in Yorkshire, where there was always work to be done.

‘Feeding cows, mucking out stalls, moving stock – late into the evening, 365 days a year’, she remembers. ‘That’s the level of graft it takes to produce the food we eat – and that’s why I believe so strongly that food should be eaten, not thrown away.’

For Tessa, the lightbulb moment came when she was moving house. ‘We’d tried to get through everything in the fridge, but we still had six sweet potatoes, a whole white cabbage and a few pots of yoghurt’, she remembers. ‘I set off knocking on doors around the neighbourhood, newborn and toddler in tow, thinking this is crazy. There must be an easier way to share surplus food.’ And so the concept for Olio was born.

A few months later Tessa shared her vision with Saasha, whose eyes lit up. ’I’m passionate about the food industry’, Saasha shares. ‘As a teenager I launched dozens of my own little businesses, and I always dreamed of becoming a real entrepreneur. When Tessa told me about her genius idea for a food sharing app, I knew I wanted to be a part of it. It took us an hour to choose the name and make our plan. We dream big and move fast at Olio.’

‘We knew we had to make it happen’, Tessa adds. ‘We had to do something about the fact that one-third of food produced globally is wasted – and half of that happens in the home.’

The WhatsApp group

For the prototype, Tessa and Saasha started small. 12 people from a single neighbourhood were put in a WhatsApp chat and invited to offer out any food that would otherwise have gone unused.

At first nothing happened – then suddenly, someone posted half a bag of shallots. Those shallots became a catalyst for a flurry of posts.

It seemed that once people started sharing they just couldn’t stop. In the feedback group two weeks later, the response was unanimous: ‘You have to build this app’.

Today, millions of people use Olio to share not just food, but anything around the house that isn’t getting the use or love it deserves – from kitchen items to kids’ clothes, dog toys, wellies and dolls.

‘I learned early on that one person’s trash is truly another’s treasure’, Saasha says. ‘I’m the daughter of Iowa hippy entrepreneurs – hence the unusual last name. We were a big, relatively poor family and I spent much of my childhood following my mom around on salvage missions. We rescued what others had discarded – wood from abandoned houses, plants left in dumpsters, aluminium soda cans (worth 5¢ a pop!). Waste wasn’t an option.’

The Olio app is based on the philosophy that Saasha grew up with: something that’s useless to you could be exactly what a neighbour down the road has been searching for.

And it very often is: the app that originally served a few postcodes in North London now has 8 million global users.

Creating a movement

Olio represents the belief that we all have the power to do something small to bring about meaningful change for our communities and the planet.

That’s why Olio isn’t just an app fighting waste – it’s a movement for optimism.

It’s beautiful to think it all began with one mum’s refusal to throw away a cabbage, some yoghurt and a bunch of sweet potatoes.

Following their experience founding Olio, Tessa and Saasha are now helping to boost the visibility of women entrepreneurs as passionate advocates for female-founded businesses.

Tessa and Saasha have raised nearly $50m for Olio during two rounds of funding and won numerous awards for their work; Tessa was named Veuve Clicquot’s Bold Woman of the Year in 2023. We can’t wait to see what’s next for this great team.