A savvy 19-year-old student has cut her food shop bill to just £5 a month by collecting her neighbours’ food waste – and is even dining on fancy meals. On a tight budget after she started studying politics at the University of Manchester in September 2021, Daisy Berrington was looking for ways to save money.
And by downloading an app called Olio, where people list food items they are thinking of throwing away for others in the community to collect for free, in October 2021, she has slashed her food bills that once cost her £30 a month. She said: “I’ve managed to get my shopping down to as little as £5 a month.
“I’ve found that, combined with the things already in my cupboard and other things I’d collected, that it is more than enough to live off. Now I only really buy the stuff that doesn’t come up on the app as much, like eggs, yoghurts or ketchup.”
Explaining how the app works, she said: “You just sign up and food and non-food items will be listed near you. If you see anything you like, you just send a message to the person offering it in the app saying, ‘Can I have this please?’ and then they give you a date and time to pick the items up.
“I then cycle over to their house and collect the items. I say thank you, and that’s it. It’s as simple as that.”
Daisy has collected “lots and lots of food” like Greggs vegan sausage rolls, pineapples and vegetables. She said: “There’s such a wide variety of food so every day is a surprise, really. If there’s anything remotely expensive, I think it’s so nice of people to list it on the app.
“I’ve even got more expensive fruit like cherries, as well as gluten-free items, pancakes and good cuts of meat. I think I definitely eat better than most students since using Olio – I get a lot of vegetables off there so I’m never short of things like that.”
Daisy enjoys rustling up meals using the ingredients she collects, saying: “I’ve always enjoyed cooking, my parents always encouraged me. When I lived at home, me and my sister would cook meals once a week for the family."
She added: “Moving out, combined with Olio, pushed me to improve my cooking though, I’m a lot better than I was a few years ago.”
Never quite knowing what food finds the app might have in store for her has made Daisy try out all sorts of new dishes. “It’s challenged me to use ingredients that I wouldn’t usually buy. I made an asparagus bake yesterday, and I made a creamy vegetable shortcrust pie earlier in the year, which I’ve never done before.”
Daisy gets most of her basic ingredients from Olio, too, saying: “I can always get pasta and veg which are always good to cook with. There’s always bread on there too, so I cook a lot with that, like homemade garlic bread.”
That normally leaves her buying oat milk and herbs as well as tins, such as lentils, beans and chickpeas. She said of the legumes she buys: “You can’t usually get them on the app, but I get them because they are high in protein and don’t break the bank.”
The savvy student has picked up more than food from Olio though – with some people giving away unwanted clothes, toiletries and even household items, like a dish-drying rack she uses in the flat she shares with seven others.
Daisy said: “There’s really everything you can imagine there. I think the best items I’ve ever got were matching front and back baskets for my bike, which I had been looking for for a while.
“And I once got a genuine vintage 1940s dress for free, just because it had a button missing, and that surprised me, especially because it fits me really well.”
However, Daisy explained that she feels “a mixture of emotions” when seeing the amount of food listed on the app. She said: “I’m really glad it’s not going to waste and it’s on the app.
“But, sometimes when I go to pick it up, I just think this is an obscene amount of food that, if it wasn’t for Olio, it would be going to waste. It’s quite depressing. Olio fills me with a bit of hope knowing that it will minimise food waste and save water – it’s quite reassuring.”
Explaining how the app saves water, Daisy said: “By saving food, you also save the water that was used to grow and process that food.”
The app estimates how much you have saved, based on the average personal food item requiring 196 litres of water. She added: “I’ve saved 148,000 litres of water since I’ve been using it.”
When it comes to food waste, Daisy thinks one of the biggest causes is a widespread lack of knowledge about the difference between best-before dates and use-by dates on products. And she added: “There needs to be more education on how to keep food fresher for longer because a lot of people don’t realise you can freeze most things as well.”
After she had been using the app for three months, Daisy decided to become a ‘food waste hero’ for Olio, where she works with a Tesco in Manchester and collects any wasted food at the end of the day.
She said: “It’s usually at about 9pm, and they give me everything that is going out of date. I get to keep up to 10% and choose what I need, which is great. I then list the rest on the app and people will request it and they’ll pick it up.”
Collecting food waste around Manchester four times a week has also led the university student to meet new people in her neighbourhood. She said: “I’ve been able to meet people in the community and have some really interesting conversations.
“This one lady is quite old and gets the bus to come to see me and she’s always so sweet. I walk her back to the bus stop and she always has some amazing stories to tell.”
She added: “Another lady even kept some of my stuff in her garage over the summer when I had to move out of my student halls, and when I collect it this week we’re going to have some tea and cake together to catch up. It’s so nice to meet people that you wouldn’t have normally met.”
