Portfolio overview

Olio

Olio is a sharing app for local communities, making it easy to give away the things you don’t need to someone else who would value them. When they first started out, they fought food waste. Today, they fight any thing going to waste. From food to furniture and clothing to books, Olio is the feel-good way to declutter.

Hate waste? Love Olio

Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, while 800 million people go to bed hungry every night. It takes a land mass larger than China to grow the food each year that is ultimately never eaten with dramatic negative impact– land that is deforested, species that are driven to extinction, soil that is degraded – all to produce food that we just throw away. Moreover, food that is never eaten accounts for 25% of all fresh water consumption globally. And when food waste goes to landfill it decomposes without access to oxygen and creates methane, which is a 23x more polluting greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Every which way you look at it, food waste is a major culprit in destroying our planet.

For Olio we track the following impact targets:

➡️: Tonnes of food saved (33%)
➡️: Total confirmed exchanges (33%)
➡️: Monthly active users (33%)

SDG Alignment

Small actions can lead to big change

Olio believes that small actions, every day, can lead to big change. Collectively – one rescued cupcake, carrot or bottle of lotion at a time – we can build a more sustainable future where our most precious resources are shared, not thrown away. The ambition of Olio is that by 2030 we can halve the food waste in people’s homes and the local community.

Scaling Internationally

Olio hits two impact themes of Rubio as it targets to make the food supply chain more circular whilst increasing social cohesion in neighbourhoods. In Olio, Rubio has found incredibly mission-driven female entrepreneurs, a passionate team and impactful co-investors. It is impressive how Olio has been able to attract both impact driven co-investing funds (Mustard Seed, Norrsken, Quadia) as well as commercially oriented VC’s (Octopus Ventures, Accel) across different countries in Europe.