Updating our volunteer roles at Olio

From April 2023 onwards, we’re making some important changes to our volunteering roles. We’re removing a couple of our existing positions, and have explained why below.

Why we’ve decided to retire our Squad Starter role

As Olio grows, we’re trying to focus on doing fewer things, better.

Right now, the majority of businesses referred by Squad Starters are small independents, which need to be managed on an individual account basis. As we don’t have a proper self-service option for these smaller businesses yet, and our Account Management team is still small, we're removing the role for now.

That way, we can then focus on helping the Olio team sign up more big businesses like Tesco - which, because of their scale, can really help us up our impact. We can also focus on supporting our brilliant Food Waste Hero volunteers.

Why we’re retiring our Home Hero, Digital Ambassador, and Community Hero roles

We wanted a clearer, more streamlined way to group all our existing ambassador roles, that was easier to understand for anyone new to Olio’s mission to fight waste.

So, from next month, we’ll just have one Olio Ambassador role. These changes will be reflected on Olio’s brand new website, which will be launching soon.

We’ll share more information on our ambassador role in the coming weeks 🎉.

I still want to do my bit to support Olio. When can I sign up for the new Ambassador role?

As soon as Olio’s new website goes live, you can sign up for our brand new Ambassador role. This will be at the start of April.

I have a business I'd like to refer to Olio. What should I do?

We’re no longer accepting referrals for single site local businesses (coffee shops, cafes, pubs and restaurants), supermarket branches or convenience stores. Instead, you could encourage the business to download Olio and add any surplus food to the app directly! 😊

If your workplace has a canteen that you’d like to refer to Olio, or if you know of a contract caterer in your area that often has food waste, we’d still love to hear from you! You can email us with the details at catering@olioex.com.

If I can't refer a local business to Olio's Food Waste Heroes Programme, can I organise collections from there myself?

Whilst Olio is stepping back from signing up smaller, single-site businesses, we understand that some members of our community will still want to help fight food waste at businesses in their local area.

If you do want to organise independent collections at a business near you, we would recommend that you register as an Olio Food Waste Hero if you haven't already.

It's important that you complete our core induction models to learn basic food safety guidelines. We also strongly recommend that you register with your local council as a food business as you will be legally responsible for the safety of the food you redistribute. In the UK, you can register for free here (it takes only 10 mins).

I’m currently collecting from a small business set up by a Squad Starter, what’s happening with the collection slots?

These collections from smaller, single site businesses will continue as normal for now. We’ll be reviewing all the sites that have been set up by Squad Starters on a store-by-store basis over the next few weeks. Any next steps will be communicated to the relevant FWH collecting from those sites.

We’re doing our best to find the right solution that will work for FWHs, food businesses and the Olio team. We appreciate there’s a lot of time and effort that has gone into these collections and we want to strike the right balance of saving as much food as possible whilst ensuring food safety compliance and not oversubscribing our small team in supporting these sites.