Leading health and wellness retailer Holland & Barrett has partnered with Olio, the innovative food-sharing app, to make a positive difference to the environment and communities.
The new partnership supports Holland and Barrett to quickly and safely redistribute spare, good-to-eat food, including surplus from its delicious new range of “food that loves you back” to people living nearby, lending a vital helping hand to local families who might be struggling and facing bare cupboards.
Olio makes this possible by pairing each Holland and Barrett store with one of their 90,000 food-safety trained volunteers, many of whom will live just around the corner from Holland and Barrett stores. Those volunteers visit stores at the end of each day and collect any spare food that’s nearing its use-by date (but still perfectly edible). They take that food home, snap a picture of it and add it to Olio’s app, so that people nearby can request and collect it.
Also collected from Holland and Barrett through the scheme are ambient food products, including nuts and fruit, drinks and sports bars and powders. As well as being an impactful way to support local communities, saving food from the bin each day through Olio will positively impact the environmental footprint of Holland and Barrett’s stores. For each 1kg of food that ends up in landfill, 4.3128kg of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. So, by introducing Olio alongside their new chilled food offering, Holland and Barrett have made a proactive move to prevent any unnecessary waste.
Since the partnership began earlier this year, Holland and Barrett and Olio have already rescued nearly 20,000kgs of food, through which, they’ve been able to provide 45,000 meals to UK communities. They’ve also prevented 82,000kgs of Co2 from entering the atmosphere - which equates to cancelling out roughly 500 return flights from London to New York.
Saasha Celestial-One, COO and Co-Founder of Olio, said: “We’re delighted that a respected brand in the health and wellness sector like Holland and Barrett has made such a powerful commitment to fighting food waste and feeding communities. We know our app users across the UK will be delighted to see their healthy and nutritious food coming onto the platform. This move from Holland and Barrett takes us one step closer to a food waste free retail sector in the UK - here’s hoping many more retailers will follow suit."
Anthony Houghton, Chief Operating Officer at Holland and Barrett, said: “We’re dedicated to creating a healthier and more sustainable world, and this partnership is a significant step towards that. Our new chilled food offering has been incredibly popular with our customers already, and we’re very pleased to share surplus stock with Olio to make sure that it’s reaching those who are most in need.”
This new partnership follows Holland & Barrett’s recent launch of 300 new food own brand lines in September this year. The market leading range of healthy snacks and hundreds of food cupboard items marked the biggest transformation of its food category to date.