Founders: Olio CEO Tessa Clarke's fight against food waste

**Leanna Byrne** (0:03)
Welcome to Founders from Business Daily and the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne. Today we're meeting Tessa Clarke, the entrepreneur behind Olio, the app helping millions of people share food and household items instead of throwing them away. What started with six sweet potatoes, a cabbage and a few pots of yogurt has grown into a global movement, tackling waste and over consumption.
Tessa Clarke, welcome to Founders. It's a pleasure.

**Tessa Clarke** (0:30)
Thank you very much for having me.

**Leanna Byrne** (0:31)
Tessa, you are one of those founders whose idea sounds incredibly simple once you've heard it. A decade ago, after struggling to find someone to take perfectly good food that would otherwise have gone in the bin, you asked a simple question, why isn't there an app for that? And that question became Olio. That's a platform that has helped millions of people share food and household items that might otherwise have been wasted. And since then, the United Nations has recognized Olio as a scalable solution to climate change, and you've won the Verve Cleco Bold Woman Award. Well, let's go back to the very start. You grew up in a dairy farm in North Yorkshire. So what did that teach you about food that most people don't understand?

**Tessa Clarke** (1:13)
The first thing it thought me was just how much hard work goes into producing the food that we all eat every day.
And it was really brought home to me. It was the summer, I think I might have been maybe 10 or 11, and my parents had decided to experiment with organic farming, and they'd taken a nine acre field, and we were having to, myself and my two brothers, weed that whole field by ourselves. And that was when we just developed a really, really keen appreciation for the value of food. So in my family, food waste has always been pretty criminal.

**Leanna Byrne** (1:43)
Was there any entrepreneurs in your family? Was there anybody who taught you about money?

**Tessa Clarke** (1:48)
Up until very recently, I have thought that no, I didn't have any entrepreneurs in my family, and I didn't have any sort of business role models. But now I reflect back on sort of what I've done through building Olio. I realized that actually farming is the ultimate entrepreneurial career, and you've got to balance the finance side of things, the animals, the business. And I do now think retrospectively that that was a really great entrepreneurial grounding. I just didn't realize it at the time.

**Leanna Byrne** (2:14)
I'd like to go back to what you studied and what you went into in university and those first corporate jobs, because I think sometimes people find that quite interesting, what you did before you got into entrepreneurship.

**Tessa Clarke** (2:26)
I studied social and political sciences at Cambridge University, which was a slightly random subject. I did English history and economics at A-level, and I enjoyed all of them, but I didn't love any of them enough to spend the next three years of my life really buckling down and focusing on it. And a fantastic teacher said, well, there's this course at Cambridge, it's called social and political sciences, and it essentially had lots of ologies in it. So it was anthropology and sociology and psychology and philosophy.
And I didn't know what most of those things were, but something intuitively about it really appealed to me.

**Leanna Byrne** (3:02)
And so you went from studying that to then going into a job in the city. Was that a strange leap or did you get a graduate program? How did that work?

**Tessa Clarke** (3:12)
So I was very fortunate to get a job offer to work for Boston Consulting Group, which is one of the big strategy consulting firms. And that really appealed to me because actually I was one of those children who never knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. And strategy consulting felt to me like a great first job for someone who didn't know what they wanted to do, because I would get to experience lots of different industries. I didn't just want to consult and just be focused on the strategy side of things. And so after three years in consulting, I took the leap and I moved into industry, starting off first of all working for a company that was called eMap, which at the time was a FTSE 100 media company with hundreds of magazines, radio stations and also digital products and events.

**Leanna Byrne** (3:57)
And you went back to study at some point as well, didn't you?

**Tessa Clarke** (4:00)
So when I was in my late 20s, I went to Stanford University in California to study for my MBA.