How our underwriter rescued 4,627 food items from landfill
10/03/2021
Here, James Thornhill, Market Underwriter at Zurich Municipal, talks about how he redistributes food in his local area from supermarkets and food outlets to reduce food waste instead of it going to landfill through the Olio App. Last month food heroes like James saved 2.2 million portions of food going into the bin, 437,000 kilograms of food waste and 1.9 million kilograms of CO2.
What is the Olio app and how does it work?
The Olio app helps to reduce food waste by redistributing food which goes unsold in supermarkets and food outlets. I was made aware of the Olio app on Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert website a couple of years ago. Olio started off as an app for sharing food. It’s not a charity, it’s a way that stores such as Tesco, Pret A Manager, Sainsbury's, Co-operative... offload the stock they’ve got left at the end of the day that they can’t sell. Its everything from bread, pastries, fruit, veg to a wide selection of ready made sandwiches.
People who collect the food from the stores are called ‘Food Waste Heroes’. I am the Squad Captain of my team. I go and pick up the items from the store at the end of the day, take a photo of the food item,upload it onto the Olio app and let people know that they can come to my house to pick it up. As a collector we get to keep up to 10% of the items that we get. This is a great benefit to me and my family and we also get items and try them that we wouldn’t normally buy.

How do you redistribute the free food?
We pick up the food from Pret a Manger at about 5pm, then we get it on to the app at 6pm. The Olio app sends a notification to everyone who’s got the app on their phone to tell them there is free food locally available, and if they’d like to claim it they can. Generally everything is collected from my house by 8pm.
How often do you go to the stores to collect food?
I go to the stores twice a week to collect the unsold items. In the Pret a Manger store we've got two collections, one on Tuesdays and another one on Saturdays. And then, we’ve got four collections in my local Tesco that I help with.
Charities have priority as they are giving out food to people who really need it as the Olio app is open to anyone. It was especially helpful through the pandemic, especially with some people having large families, so the app really helped them out.
How can people get involved?
Its super easy to collect free food, download the app, when you see something you want, you just request it and then collect it for free from someone’s house, its all contactless. Saves food going to landfill and helps redistribute unwanted food which would otherwise just go to waste.
How many items have you distributed?
According to my app, so far in all the time I've been doing it, I've distributed 4,672 meals in over 1000 days that I’ve been helping and have saved just over £1500 in food value.
What are you doing at home to be more sustainable?
We try to reuse as much as we can. For example, we keep bread bags to put things in, such as raw chicken. Also, we pass different things such as books around the family and friends rather than throwing them way. We want to make sure that everything we don’t need anymore gets reused. The other thing we try to do is recycle whenever it’s possible, even if it means washing something so it can be recycled, for example, we wash out plastic bags so they can be reused by those collecting the food and we find as many businesses as we can to recycle items, especially where charities are involved, bulk buy products and split down and use items initially that can be reused rather than used and thrown away, for example food containers rather than cling film or kitchen foil.
Download the app to see if you can help reduce food waste near where you live