Profit with purpose is more than a buzzword for Tessa Clarke’s fast-growing food recycling business Olio — and Ambition A.M.’s latest founder profile takes a look at why.
Tessa Clarke can still remember how she spent her summer vacation when she was 10 years old – weeding and converting a nine-acre field into an organic farm in North Yorkshire with her two brothers.
The work ethic seems to have paid off, because the now proud (and evidently bred-to-be) entrepreneur tells me these childhood ambitions were what led her on a mission to fight the global food waste crisis.
Clarke, now 47, founded food and household sharing app Olio in 2015 after she grew frustrated with having nowhere to distribute her abundance of uneaten food while moving house.
Some 9.4m tonnes of food is thrown away each year in the UK alone, with 8.4m people still living in food poverty, and the farmer’s daughter still couldn’t find any one place that allowed her to share her surplus food with those who need it.
I knew there was an app for everything and I genuinely couldn’t believe there wasn’t an app where I could share my surplus food.
Tessa Clarke
Now, nearly a decade later, Olio – which connects users and businesses looking to share their excess food at the end of each day – has shared a total of 164m portions of food and 11m household items with almost 8m users and 100,000 volunteers.
Some 75 per cent of ‘Olio-ers’ have also said the app has helped improve their financial well-being, with 66 per cent noticing an improvement in mental health.
“In order to understand Olio, you have to understand where I was born and raised,” Clarke says.
“I had a childhood that was characterised, honestly, by just an awful lot of very hard physical manual labour on the farm with my two younger brothers,” she adds, with a smile.
“When you have that sort of experience in your family and your upbringing, you learn that food is precious.”
Profit, people, planet – which one comes first?
Olio works by connecting users with others in a community who wish to share their uneaten food and by partnering with businesses looking to distribute leftover products at the end of each day.
“The volunteers on their allotted time and day will go to that business location, they’ll collect all of their unsold or unserved food, they will take it home, they will add it to the Olio app and then their neighbours will request the food and pop around to their home and pick it up,” Clarke says.
“We provide a service to businesses, which essentially enables them to ensure that their surplus food is redistributed, not thrown away, and they pay us for that service.”
It seems fairly straightforward, but scaling a purpose-led business model isn’t always an easy feat – and Clarke is quick to say it’s actually a rather lengthy process.
Sometimes, selling a product with a purpose is more difficult than just selling a product itself.
Clarke, however, says it all comes down to how the purpose is portrayed to meet the varying needs of users.
“One of the key things that we have learned is that whilst we as founders and the team are extremely motivated by solving the climate crisis, actually what seems to be motivating business decision makers and regular people more than the climate crisis is the positive impact that Olio can have on the local community,” she says.
“So we’ve kind of changed our messaging hierarchy, because to a certain extent, I don’t care why you use it – I don’t care what your motive is – I just want you to use it so that those items are shared.”
How to build with purpose from the start
If you’re a founder who’s gone through the rigorous B-Corp application process – the certification awarded to purpose-led companies meeting high standards of social and environmental performance – you may know that the achievement takes some time and resources.
Clarke, who tells me Olio had just achieved B-Corp status in 2022, says she had to uncover new ways to show her company’s purpose from the start.
“I would dearly love every company in the world to become a B-Corp, but the reality is we haven’t got time for that to happen,” she says.
The alternatives in question, Clarke adds, could be as simple as adding “B-Corp language” into your articles of association early on or signing up for campaigns like the Better Business Act – a campaign which looks to redefine the role of company directors within the 2006 Companies Act to include a shared responsibility of purpose with profit.
“How can we short-circuit this? How can we get to the results that we want by essentially reorienting business [and] giving business a new Northstar?” she asks.
“Having worked in business for over 20 years, I’ve seen what happens when you change the definition of success for a team when you change a team’s Northstar metric.”
CV
Name: Tessa Clarke
Company: Olio
Founded: 2015
Staff: 70
Title: Co-founder and CEO
Age: 47
Born: Scarborough, North Yorkshire
Lives: Near Chippenham, Wiltshire
Studied: Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University; MBA at Stanford
Talents: I’m so bad at navigation it’s a talent – I can get lost anywhere!
Motto: Life is too short to be miserable
Most known for: Being on a mission to help solve the climate crisis. And always showing up with oodles of passion and energy.
First ambition: To leave the family farm, because as a kid growing up on a farm wasn’t cool. Now of course there’s nowhere I love more!
Favourite book: The book that’s had the most profound impact on me in the last decade has been The Lean Startup – as I’ve used those principles not only to launch and scale Olio, but I’ve also applied them to my personal life too, and so am constantly experimenting.
Best piece of advice: So many! Feel the fear and do it anyway. Or perhaps… On the entrepreneurial roller coaster things are never as good, or as bad, as they seem.