New release: OLIO’s food waste mission is scaling up

OLIO, the startup that’s leading the food sharing revolution, has released a brand new version of their food waste busting app this month.

As our very first startup investment, we’ve worked with OLIO right from taking their first steps in idea validation back in 2015. So when they completed their incredible $6M Series A funding round last year, we were privileged to have them back as clients to assist in updating the latest version of the app.

A lot has changed since 2015 however, and the OLIO team is now full of its own expertise with 16 of its own passionate staff – including four developers.

Scaling up

Now with OLIO a booming success and the business firmly in the stages of scaling up, co-founders Tessa and Sassha felt confident that the time was right to upgrade the app to a more modern technology. Our job was to work with them to refresh the app’s branding, upgrade the back-end technology from Ionic to React Native and improve the overall user experience – particularly for its Android users.

Tessa Clarke, OLIO’s co-founder (pictured left) tells us: “I’m extremely excited that we’ve made the transition from Ionic V1 to React Native. Ionic was becoming less supported and this was causing us a growing number of issues with various plug-ins not working, which was starting to impact our release cycle and user experience.

“I’m also very excited by the fact that the app is much more performant, we’ve got better testing in place, and we’ve given it a light design refresh too, so it looks much more modern and accessible.”

For Simpleweb, it was especially great to work with OLIO’s tech team. We really enjoy co-developing and collaborating with development teams in our startup community to share skills and knowledge across businesses.

Ambitious targets

Now the app is ready to take on food waste on a much bigger scale, the OLIO team is set to make bigger and better things happen across the globe.

Tessa explains: “It’s taken us approximately 5 months to make the transition to React Native, during which time we had a complete feature freeze, which was challenging for Saasha and I as typical impatient founders.

“Now that the transition has been made, we can pick back up again with a feature roadmap, which is going to be absolutely critical to enable us to hit our ambitious targets.”

To help them on their journey, OLIO has recently been accepted onto the prestigious TechNation Upscale programme which will enable the team to access not only world class content and case studies, but also to learn directly from an incredibly impressive peer group who are facing similar challenges and opportunities.

Tessa adds: “This year for OLIO is all about driving increased user engagement and growth ahead of going to market for our Series B raise next year, so the clock is definitely ticking.”

Give OLIO a go yourself via the OLIO web app or by downloading the mobile app for free via the iTunes store (iPhone) or the Google Play store (Android).