We waste £13bn worth of food each year in the UK, with 71% of that being wasted at home. At the same time, use of food banks has boomed. Is Olio the answer?

I am walking with a woman named Kerry, whom I have just met, to her car. She is in her mid-30s and has a tinge of attitude. When we reach her car, she opens the boot. Inside are hundreds of industrial-sized tubs of hummus, enough to power Brighton for a week.

I met Kerry online, not via some kind of hummus-appreciation society messageboard, but on Olio, an app that is attempting to end food waste at home by letting people upload details of the food they would otherwise chuck out, so that others living nearby can take it off their hands. I am trying out the app for a few weeks to see if it can reduce my own waste to zero (and to see if I can get some freebies).

For members willing to take things to the next level, like Kerry, they also have a “food waste heroes” programme, where volunteers offer to pick things up from cafes and shops and list this food on the site. After picking up these hummus tubs from a supplier that had no use for them, Kerry is now spending one of the hottest days of the year shepherding people to and from her car. She was disappointed when I said said I could only take four – “Are you sure your friends and family wouldn’t want some?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Olio in action. Photograph: Annabel Staff

Most hot-button environmental issues have to go on a journey, from being pipe dreams discussed in the furthest reaches of the Glastonbury green fields to a central plank of government policy. Climate change, non-GM food, plastic pollution – they were all once dismissed as fringe politics, until the government and industry suddenly got on board. For food waste, it seems as though that moment is now. In the past six months, Tesco has reduced all edible food waste to zero, Co-op is trialling the sale of products that have passed their best before date and the EU has announced that, for the first time, it is forcing member states to report on how much food is wasted each year, with the goal to halve waste by 2030.

Launched in 2015, Olio feels part of this sea-change in our attitude to waste. The app was started by Tessa Cook and Saasha Celestial-One (the latter’s names come from her Iowa-hippy parents – although she rebelled by becoming an investment banker). Cook was previously managing director at Wonga, the controversial payday loans firm. She grew up on a farm in North Yorkshire, and says she got the idea after being left with a few sweet potatoes and a cabbage on the day she was moving back to the UK from Switzerland. It was not feasible to take them with her, but knowing how much work had gone into growing fresh produce she couldn’t bring herself to chuck them out. Like so many tech-inventors of the modern era, she thought: there should be an app for that.

It is clear, however, she wasn’t the only one facing this problem. Each year, the UK wastes about £13bn worth of food, in doing so creating 19m tonnes of needless greenhouse gases. At the same time, according to Oxfam, more than 2 million people in the UK are malnourished and a further 3 million are at risk of becoming so. The amount of food given out by Trussell Trust food banks has increased 318% in the past five years. And while EU and government diktats are a step in the right direction, the problem is that, unlike most environmental issues – where there really needs to be changes in the law at the supranational level – the worst food waste occurs in our homes. Tesco’s policies are all well and good, but retail waste only accounts for about 2% of all food waste, compared to 71% at home and a further 9% in the hospitality sector.

I have to admit I was part of the problem. When I first moved out of home, I chucked out food even if it seemed fine, because I couldn’t remember how long ago I bought it. I would get lots of ingredients for a complicated recipe, use a teaspoon of each and then leave them in the fridge till they went off – not knowing what else to do with the remainder.

When my partner, who works in food, first moved in, she was horrified. I was instructed that the kitchen had to change: uneaten bananas would be chopped up in the freezer for smoothies, leftover milk gets turned into labneh; even the rind of the parmesan will be frozen to later be chucked into a minestrone. The kitchen became entirely refocused. The first question when cooking is not “what do you want to eat?” but “what have we got to use up”.

Now I’m a fully paid-up member of the anti-food-waste brigade, Olio was an obvious thing to try out. After downloading the app, I immediately find plenty of listings, although a lot of them are more than 2km away, which seems quite a schlep to pick up a few carrots. There are a few single pastries, a half-eaten birthday cake and five leftover pieces of fried chicken. Mostly though, there’s just lots of white bread – packets and packets of half-eaten Kingsmill. I’m considering making a bread and butter pudding for the first time in my life but then I see the hummus stash pop up and my Olio journey begins.

Inspired by my early score, I try to find some things to list myself, although our waste-not-want-not regime doesn’t leave much going spare. Eventually I find a packet of unwanted Weetabix, left behind by a previous flatmate. I put it on the site and await a response.

One came within minutes – he said he could be over soon. The man who arrived told me that he had been using the app nearly everyday: he has a big family, none of whom are working much, and Olio can be a lifesaver. He says these days he doesn’t really leave the house unless it is to pick something up from Olio or go shopping. We talk about his struggles finding work, his depression, run-ins with the police and issues among his family. I realise it is probably the longest conversation I have had with a stranger from my area. After 80 minutes of chatting, he asked if I had any other food I could give him – I said I would have a look around and let him know. It’s an odd feeling: was I helping? Is it patronising? How could I ever let anyone else on the site pick something up from me now, when this man was in such need?

Olio’s online spiel is similar to a lot of companies that believe technology can change the world. Its positioning feels aspirational, with neighbours working together.

The initial trial for the app took place among 12 people in Crouch End; the first item to be shared was half a bag of shallots. But what quickly becomes apparent is that many of the people on Olio are using it as an alternative or supplementary food bank.

I put it to Cook that the app exists on two different levels: one for a well-meaning middle class, with food leftover from fashion shoots or Sunday dinner, and then people who are travelling a long way to pick up not very much food at all.

“What has been quite shocking for us to discover on this journey, is how many hungry people there are in this country,” Cook says. “I’ll be very honest, I had no idea and I think many people have no idea. Since working on Olio, I have learnt that 8.4 million people are living in food insecurity. We have found that around a third of our regular requestors are living in poverty. What I’ve heard from a lot of those people is that what they love about the app is that there is no stigma when they collect food.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Olio’s Celstial-One (left) and Tessa Cook. Photograph: Annabel Staff

Isn’t there something a little uncomfortable, though, about those with too much giving their scraps to those with too little? “We don’t like to think of it as the haves giving to the have-nots. Actually this is just part of modern everyday communities, it’s absolute madness that people are throwing away perfectly delicious food on the one hand, while living nearby are people who would like that food or perhaps even need that food.”

Over the next few weeks, I continue to use the app, mostly for non-food items. I give away a lampshade to one man called Ty and some toiletries to another called Ramneek – both twentysomething locals who say they have been on the app for a while, just doing their bit to reduce waste. I also pick up an old milk-bottle collector that I have repurposed into a shower caddy.

But most of the time I look on Olio, the pickings are relatively slim. Desirable items go very quickly and most are far away. I also decide that it is not right to pick up ready-to-eat food such as sandwiches and pastries, which make up a lot of the listings, when there are people using the app in serious need.

Olio claims to be the biggest food-sharing network in the world. More than 500,000 items have been shared in more than 40 countries. It is a pretty good start for an app that has only been going for a few years, but it feels like a drop in the ocean considering how much is wasted each day.

“You’re absolutely right,” says Cook. “But our ambition is an unashamedly bold one. We are doing 0.0001% of our full potential. We’re on 400,000 users today, we want to have at least 400 million users. That’s the goal.”

It is a bold ambition and they are a long way off, especially considering that they are far from the only organisation aiming to tackle this problem. FareShare, Wrap, Freegle, Food Cycle and The Felix Project are just some of the groups trying to help ease the food waste problem. Still, Olio can provide food that some charities wouldn’t bother with – lots of listings on the site are for a couple of potatoes or half a sandwich.

In recent weeks, plastics have been top of the agenda when it comes to new environmental policy, with the biggest food companies agreeing to end the use of non-recyclable packaging. This move should be taken as a sign of willingness to change – but food waste is arguably a more critical concern, because it is connected to so many modern afflictions: hunger, greenhouse gases, waste disposal and escalating food prices.

And this is where there is an opportunity. It is not really the interface that matters: it can be a charity, an app or just a WhatsApp group between five people in a village, but if people are able to shake off the stigma about passing on the food they don’t want, they might help to fix a bunch of the world’s problems at the same time.