Food gets thrown away from restaurants, homes, catering companies, and any other place with a kitchen. Most of this food gets thrown away when it is still edible, and could provide nutrition to someone who is hungry. Just like Airbnb makes use of excess living capacity, OLIO was started to connect excess food with people who want to eat that food.

There are numerous challenges with this idea. How do you control quality and ensure the food is safe? How do you make money as a business? How do you solve the chicken and egg problem, and make sure that you get hungry users and people with food to give away at the same time?

Lloyd Watkin is a software engineer at OLIO, and he joins today’s episode to describe how the platform works, how it is built, and how the company plans to scale their large base of volunteers. It’s a fascinating set of operational and engineering issues.

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