The food sharing app has just struck deals with Pret A Manger and Costa Coffee, and raised £31m in its latest funding round. Last September, Olio announced a partnership with UK supermarket giant Tesco, which has seen the number of food items listed on the app each month soar from 300,000 or so to over 1.6 million.

Olio now has 5 million users worldwide, half of which started using the app during the pandemic with 80% of these based in the UK. On average, it takes just 20 minutes to shift an item of unwanted food on the app.

Following the past year of rapid growth in the UK, Olio has now set its sights on growing its global presence by using the funds raised with a focus on ten key markets in Latin America, northern Europe and Asia.

The start-up’s co-founder Tessa Clarke said: “As we’ve been scaling across the UK with Tesco, it’s been a fire starter in each local community as that store came on board” adding, “the boom in fast grocery start-ups has created a rapidly growing market for us too because we’re able to scale out alongside them.” Olio now works with Zapp and is in active discussions with Gorillas, Getir and Weezy. The company doesn’t currently work with an agency and will no doubt be looking for a new creative and media partner to help grow its users base and increase its advertising budget from the £300,000 it spent in the UK in the last 12 months.